The Stolen Lake
Like much of the country, we have been spending more time than usual looking at the news. There is one name which has not yet been mentioned in the whole Murdoch/Brook/NOTW saga, and I think it’s time I blew the whistle. Ladies and gentlemen, it was the Tooth Fairy. I became aware of this shadowy éminence grise in public life when we were ornamenting a certain university in the Midlands. An erstwhile colleague was elected by a conclave of professors, very much behind closed doors, and this individual proved not merely a snotty prima donna but incompetent to boot. When the excrement definitively hit the extractor, in the course of three or four days that followed, the Professor (not then a professor) and I, between us, heard every single member of the appointing committee say ‘I didn’t vote for the b****d’. We compared notes. ‘Then who did?’ I said. ‘The Tooth Fairy?’ Since then, we have come to realise that the Tooth Fairy, when not busy with her pliers, is remarkably industrious. She tiptoes in when the little folk are all asleep, and clearly, in addition to bunging 50ps under pillows, she has a considerable capacity for removing large sums of money from Wapping-based bank accounts and bunging them to deserving individuals in, let us say, New Scotland Yard. But we have just gratefully realised that she has been selflessly busy here all summer. We have just been for a little walk and discovered that the level of the lake has risen by a foot. And no, it didn’t rain all night. Of course, extracting groundwater is quite, quite illegal, so it must have been the Tooth Fairy, making swimming baths for elves.