ALI BONGO AND THE WOODEN SPOON!

It came as no great surprise to Becky Trumper that President Ali Bongo's actual name was an actual anagram of Gabon and Oil.

Becky was, however, as yet unfamiliar with the more self-evident code name for the highly-successful Operation Tony Blair MP: I'm Tory Plan B, which vastly exceeded all great expectations, and which outstripped those even of I'm an Evil Tory Bigot , which unscrambled itself all over the Conservative front bench in the form of Virginia Hilda Brunette Maxwell Bottomley, Baroness of Nettle Soup and Genital Warts.

But give her time.

On the other hand,  to learn that, despite (i.e. precisely because of  ) its Crude Oil Production and its equally crude and corrupt anagrammatic president, and a per capita income level that most sub-Saharans could only dream of, a third of its population lived in poverty only took her a matter of seconds online, time she might well have misspent reading The Guardian's feature on whether to wear her skirt tucked in at the waist (i.e. the mushroom ) or whether to have it tucked in at the front, but hanging out at the back (i.e. the mullet ). As a fictive entity, however, her transcendental indifference to the fashionista wing of the movement was legendary.

"So, not as bad as the East End of Glasgow, Tower Hamlets or Liverpool 4 then," thought Ms Trumper, who, if not literally, ought to be taken at her word and certainly more seriously than, say, a Jeffery Bloody Archer.

ALI BONGO! The Human Anagram… Roll up! Roll up! Ladeezungenelmen… as Ali Bongo does exactly what it says on the tin!  Ex-Posh British Public School Boy President Controls Oil, Power, Money in a Small African Country Nobody Give a Toss About!...

"You couldn't make this shit up... Ali Bongo, I ask you! "

"Yes, Miss?" improvised Ali, coming over more faithful man servant, than tyrannical anagram.

Becky baulked at the misogyny, even though she admired the word play, as per. Yet she couldn’t mistake Ali Bongo's unmistakable standing and imposing pungence. She put it down to the brandy & cokes mixed with super strength skunk.

"Swear I’m never going to touch that cack again. Stuffed with bloody sugar and chemicals. It's a hard drug, I tell you…”

 "You talking to me?" improvised Ali, a second time. More Wooster School than Jeeves now.

 “And just who the hell are you meant to be? Robert Bloody De Niro?"

"You couldn't make this shit up..." repeated Becky, again to no-one in particular.

"But I believe you just did, Miss."

"Ms. Not Miss. Anyway, who asked you? It's my project. Butt out Bongo."

"As they say in Madagascar, the future is behind you, unseen. It's the past that is laid out before you. You Westerners, so neurotic..."

"Piss off, back to the future then. See if I care, you bl;oody tyrant."

"What's with the rogue semi-colon, Ms.?" asked the sublime interlocutor that she had never managed to believe in.

Just as she was about to notice him, another voice came into view.

"Skunky rants. Details can be missed, concentrating on the bigger picture. And vice versa. Bummer Becky."

"Who the hell're...? Robert De Niro."

"Bob, please. Look, it's the chemistry of hope thing and all that jazz. Be afraid of the truth because it's too complicated. You know how it is. I mean, I can't keep re-walking the mean streets for good..."

 "Might explain your latest movie, I suppose," ventured Becky Trumper, who notoriously avoided deference like a branch of the Capetian dynasty in 16th century Navarre.

"We're all looking for a way out, kid. Try the wooden spoon routine. The mook might fall for that ol' trick, ya never know. Anyways, outta here.”

“BTW Your kwoffee sucks."

And at that, the Hollywood legend was gone.

"Wooden spoon? BTW? Whatever can he mean?"

Becky, feigning mock ignorance for the benefit of the average reader, accessed the data in seconds on the interweb connected to her smart attitude via broadband dongle on the labial side of her Zalambdodont molar. Where else?

Ms Trumper's back catalogue was immediately inhabited by Laura Englestein's impressive study on Russian doctors' view of syphilis, social class and sexual behaviour 1890 - 1905, Morality and the Wooden Spoon.

Eating straight from dirty wooden spoons, licking toilet seats, sharing a cup or a number of casual hugs from sexually hungry Young Tory males... It was all there. You couldn't make this shit up.

With a renewed sense of purpose and a street plan, Becky turned right into Old Kent Road. There was no left turn allowed.

"Typical!" thought Becky, typically.

She was just in time to collect that Archer she'd been promised via the telephone...

 ("Two grand. Should set you up nicely in a new gaff. Get you on your feet and that..." said the telephone,)

...when Chance would have it she was destined to cough up nearly half on a tax demand, strange since as far as she  knew she'd always been PAYE, and this forced self-employed crap was all too much of a mularky, a bother and a pain in the culottes this side of Annihiliation, a 2014 novel by Jeff Vandermeer she hadn't had time to read, stuck as she was in the old Manopoly again.

As to how come a miniaturized modern automobile had just won third prize in a Beauty Contest he hadn't even entered, but which he could set off against tax, from his offshore account in Cluedo, under the name Rev. Green, she remained mystified.

Bloody patriarchy! Bloody capitalists! Bloody vagina!...

Men and menstruation. The two banes of her life; the two defining characteristics of life on Earth, apart from Jeffery Archer of course, and her sleepwalking thing. Revenge is a dish best served sweet. Cold was so over-rated. Fact was she'd stopped punching people in her sleep as her dodgy synapses had sorted themselves out into a fully formed character, freed of the shackles of caricature and authorial indifference, at last...

She no longer felt so out of place, neurologically.  

Logically, the fact that the new President was, in actuality, a 540 million-year-old carbon-based life-form wrenched from the bottom of the polluted oceans, that possessed but one discrete orangey orifice through which to ingest and excrete, had escaped nobody's attention. The bespoke CV he tailored on LinkedIn made no reference to his previous incarnation as a 1982 World Cup mascot.

To seek to scrape up the feral prose that the psychopathic, legless, syphilitic slug named on the front of the multinational bestselling, As The Crow Lies, (hilarious! wordplay) had left everywhere it had been, however, would be a different kind of faecal matter altogether.  Ici, as they never say in Madagascar, but frequently do in Gabon, on parle merde!

And so she decided the only way to deal with this right now was ... to not deal with it.