Police in Oakham have issued a stern warning to parents and young people after a spike in reports of individuals climbing onto the roofs of buildings across the town.
Saturday
Looking back over 2025, I remember with particular pleasure the November evening when the Well-Behaved Orphans insisted upon putting Nick Clegg’s principles into practice. Earlier in the year, Clegg had told everyone he had a right to take every writer’s and artist’s work without paying, so the WBOs decided, quite reasonably, that they must have a right to take Clegg’s work.
Thus it was that I found myself on the roof of a local branch of Featherstones with an expert on burglar alarms recommended by old associates of Violent Bonham Carter, one of the more spry WBOs and a length of rope. The aforementioned orphan was then lowered head first through a skylight so that she could retrieve the shop’s copies of Clegg’s magnum opus one by one.
In the interests of completeness, I must record that after her fellow orphans had tried reading them, they were all for returning the books the following evening.
WBOs?
ReplyDeleteWell-Behaved Orphans – the Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans is the charity dearest to the old boy's heart.
DeleteA couple of years ago I published a book chapter on Dickens and antisemitism, and managed to smuggle in the phrase "well-behaved orphans",