Games For A Laugh

As this Cat hears more about the unfolding plans for the Holy Roman Empire (which is as Roman as a Moor's tagine, as holy as Beelzebub - and as close to an empire as Guffmund the Brown's quips are to humour) Games, the more he's tempted to wonder for whose benefit this Great Dark Age Sporting Event exists. The soothsayers - as obsequiously reverential as ever - are holding out this travelling circus as The Great Morale Booster to the unwashed, knuckle-dragging hordes in these days of austerity, poverty, deprivation, hardship and biscuit. However, I hear it on good authority from my feline mate Lareow - the Rodent Czar and Eminence Grise behind the throne of Supreme Archfairy Dagwald Caedmeron - that the arrangements for this bean feast are quite bizarre.

For a start, the majority of seats at these Games are reserved for the esteemed special guests of the legions of business empires who've financed the show an a bid to raise public awareness of their rat-pie, magic mushroom, ale, sorcery, moneylending and goats' cheese interests. Special chariot lanes have been lovingly constructed in Yorvik to convey the Privileged to the Games as quickly as possible while the hapless and feckless majority trudge their way through the streets to their daily drudgery on Shanks' pony.

Furthermore, in these straitened times, where the cash-strapped Witangemot has been obliged to reduce expenditure by reducing the number of Costumed Thugs and the standing armies, it's been deemed necessary to employ thirteen million foreign soldiers and mercenaries, who will be tasked with the job of mingling with the crowds and eavesdropping on conversations, oppressing and terrifying any unsuspecting members of the public who grumble against the corporate riff-raff and inconvenience that these Glorious Games are destined to occasion. Anyone who is unfortunate enough to be caught is likely to be affectionately dismembered. This is held out in the name of Protection Against the Viking Threat, but somehow I can't imagine that any Edda-clutching religious Norsemen will be remotely inclined to attend with a view to running berserk and killing several hundred thousand Unfaithful Enemies of Odin. They - I'm sure - have more profitable and constructive things to do.

It's going to be a barrel of laughs, people. But as for me - I'll stick with the mice, if it's all the same to you..