News Headlines
One-In-1000 Year Events Now Happening Every Friday
A millennium is now happening every seven days, weather forecasters have confirmed.
Weeks have turned to seconds, months to minutes, and in another couple of days Britain is due to receive its average annual rainfall in the same time it takes a local news reporter to put their wellies on.
"Yipes," an Environment Agency spokeswoman quivered at a press conference this morning. "That ain't looking good."
Struggling to stay upright, she continued: "At least, I think I can say, with what little shred of confidence remains within our nervous-wreck of an organisation, that the flood defences we built to protect you from one-in-100 year events will keep you dry until Tuesday evening. So, erm, does anyone have any spare sandbags?"
In Cumbria, after receiving the highest 24-hour British rainfall totals in recorded history, residents are now preparing for the second-coming of Jesus Christ and an invasion by the Romans.
"This time," a villager told us, here at The Taxman, "we're going to attack from the East behind them hills, and use chainsaws to penetrate their armour. No way will we be conquered this time."
Forecasters at the Met Office are now hoping they may be able to reconfigure the parameters of time itself, to allow for the fact that one-in-1000 year weather events are now happening in the early hours of every Friday morning, and sometimes also on a Saturday at tea-time.
A spokesman shrugged: "There might be some kind of way that maybe we could just kind of like condense a millennial sort of timescale into seven-or-so days. Kind of.
"Whatever we do it's got to be easier than simply changing the measure by which we describe these freakish events, in light of the fact they're now so frickin' common. Surely, couldn't we just, like, accelerate the Earth's rotational spin? Or something?"
Meanwhile, the forecast for Cumbria next week is for rain, more rain, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake and an alien landing. The Taxman's resident meteorologist shrewdly observes: "I had no idea anyone was even living that far north. But now you mention it, yeah, they are pretty fucked."
However you want to measure the floods in Britain this week, however much trouble they have caused, the irony is that they couldn't have been better timed. Of all the days in a millennium upon which this "was likely" to have happened, 16 days prior to the most important meeting of humankind, in Copenhagen, was surely one of the best. Now, in the UK, we shouldn't need a reminder of what's at stake. In Bangladesh, in the Philippines, in Uganda, in El Salvador - they already know.
