I recently had the misfortune to have to drive into Wigan. Anyone who drives through or around the centre of Wigan will immediately know why I say “misfortune”. The one-way system in Wigan is so bad it is conceivably possible to wear your tyres out before you find your way out again. The daft twists and turns all over the place down single-lane one-way minor roads means that it inevitably gets congested at almost any time of day at some point or other. In fact, there are probably a few people who’ve been going round and round in there for weeks without getting out. I did notice a few motorists with long beards …. clearly, this bizarre road system could not have been developed by any human mind. No matter how off-the-wall, twisted and misanthropic the relevant civil servant(s) might be this piece of planning is well beyond the scope of their fevered brain-cells. Mulder would certainly conclude it to be the work of aliens. No doubt “Wigan in Rush Hour” is a top rating sit-com in the Betelgeuse nebula with Mommy, Daddy and offsring waving their tentacles in delight at the mad antics of the strange human creatures going round and round in their little tin boxes. Hoots of gurgling laughter and Daddy alien falls backwards over the green sponge sofa as the earthlings in coloured boxes grind to a halt in front of another red light, then all go again, stop again, go again etc etc. Their imaginations are staggered by the fact that this happens EVERY DAY and they don’t do anything to change it! Of course, they are unaware that it is their close neighbours the Spoogels who actually designed this crazy road system. Spoogels have large strangely curling purple tubes rather than hair and this gave them the general plan for the Wigan road system. Of course, nowadays the original designers Kloondyk and Mogglitchn live of their royalties from the media shows and occasional after-slurping speeches (Spoogels only consume liquids).

The most disconcerting thing about all of this is that since Kloondyk and Mogglitchn have more or less retired, living as they do on their own private planet with their luxury Khiggits (that’s a kind of yacht) and the relevant council departments have not changed this crazy road system in all these years we can only come to the conclusion that the creatures we believe to be civil servants in our local authorities are in fact Spoogels. This of course does, in fact, explain quite a lot about Local Government in general and we can only wonder at how widespread this infiltration is. It might interest you to know that when a Spoogel smiles its mouth goes into a funny rectangular shape rather like a letterbox … which does rather bring to mind a certain wife of a certain member of parliament.