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The BSE Crisis

Duncan White

"Don't talk to me about BSE" screamed Garf, the veins standing out on his forehead. "It's got nothing to do with BSE, everything to do with EEC," he smirked knowingly and added another dash of Tabasco to his pina colada. I nodded feigning compus mentis, all the time struggling to get out of the medieval mantrap I'd been forced to affect, due to Garf's desire to feature me in the forthcoming update to ModelNet

"I mean this BSE thing is all a front, designed to keep us out of Switzerland, you know how crazy the Swiss get about chocolate! Well I'm damned if the Belgians think they're getting away with it." He belched loudly and sat down with a finality that I knew through years of association meant this topic was closed.

I couldn't let that happen, I'd just managed to get my left hand free, and wanted to get the rusty spiky thing out of my bum before he noticed. "The Belgians?" I ventured.

"Yes of course the bloody Belgians, have you tasted German chocolate? Of course you haven't. You know why? Because it's crap, the Swiss would never fall for that, far too shrewd, like ferrets!"

"What's all this got to do with BSE?" I'd just shifted the spiky thing, and if I could just get shot of the codpiece of doom, then I would be feeling a lot more comfortable.

"Everything, bollocks that's what it is. It's their bloody way of keeping us out. There were mad people over her long before anyone thought of BSE. What about Bedlam? Eh? We built a bloody empire on that, no problem with British beef then. Boiled beef and cabbage were the order of the day. Stop gawping!"

"I'm not, I was just trying to say something, that's all. You mean carrots, boiled beef and carrots, you said boiled beef and cabbage, that's a German dish."

Garf hates being corrected, and exacts terrible revenge on those that dare to do so, but so rare is it that anyone risks it, that a correction sends Garf into a rare apoplectic rage, the twitches and spasms of which last for a full five minutes. His rampant xenophobia directed particularly towards the Germans, was likely to double his attack, which gave me enough time to get free.

I wrested the cattle prod from his grasp, and gave him a good blast, but to no effect. About five minutes and about fifty thousand volts later, Garf had regained composure enough to continue, he had stopped twitching, and had gone from purple to red. His clothes were a bit singed from the strain on the national grid.

"OK, here's the truth. Ever since the fall of communism Switzerland has found herself isolated. For a country that's neutral is a country with no allies, all we've got to do is divvy it up with the Russians Americans and..." he spat for effect.

"The Europeans." He continued, "Everyone's happy, except of course for the bloody Swiss, but who gives a toss about them? They didn't give a toss about us during the war. Still, they're bloody cunning, cunning enough to know when the rest of us are planning an invasion. They all sleep with a gun under the pillow, bloody uncomfortable if you ask me, still, it makes them wary. So it all comes down to who can get the drop on them."

"Chocolate is their Achilles heel, to make chocolate you need milk. We had regiments of keenly trained British dairy cattle ready to seize Geneva, and because they're all over thirty months old, they've gone to the abattoir, and what are the Belgians doing? I'll tell you what the bloody Belgians are doing. They're getting ready to invade. This is the real story behind the BSE crisis!"