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By James Leavey
Just seen the results of yesterday's British local elections. Two council
seats have been won - the first in nine years - by the extreme
right-wing, British National Party, much to the horror of the rest of the country. As
if that wasn't bad enough, a 'monkey' has swung to power in the Hartlepool
mayoral election. Formerly better known as the local football team's
mascot, H'Angus Monkey, a.k.a. Stuart Drummell, clinched his new appointment
as Mayor with the aid of a local campaign pledge of free bananas to
schoolchildren.
H'Angus takes his name from a local legend dating from the Napoleonic Wars
when a ship was wrecked off the Hartlepool Coast. Local fisherman found the
ship's monkey dressed in a military-style uniform, and after interrogating
him, they hanged the poor animal as a suspected French spy. Let us hope
that they at least had the decency to offer him a last cigarette.
The good news is that Britain's anti-smoking politicians will have been greatly encouraged by H'Angus's success; it's only a matter of time before
they remove those human masks and reveal themselves for the monsters they
really are.
Then there's that story of a new menace behind an estimated million skirting
boards in Britain - a new breed of supermouse. In London alone, the mouse
population has increased by 14 per cent. What makes them stand out from
their less successful cousins is the fact that they are more resourceful and
more ruthless than ever. And they have stopped acting predictably, i.e.
they won't go into mouse-traps. Even worse, they're resistant to the usual
rodenticides.
Maybe it's time we bred a new race of super-smokers: intelligent, considerate, nicotine-friendly adults who refuse to fall for the 'you're
killing me with all that passive smoking' arguments, and are prepared to
fight for the right to smoke in public areas.
Meanwhile, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich
have found mice lacking a gene called CRH1 drank more alcohol after stressful experiences than normal animals. Maybe there's a CRH2 gene, for
people who smoke more after being publicly humiliated by total strangers.
Talking of stress, it's time for another slug of Glenmorangie, and the firing up of a Fox robusto.
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