Green and Cabbage-Looking

Your Cat - in his customary fascination with the current race for the coveted Seat Of Power in the forthcoming government - has been fascinated by the latest developments in the political climate of the lovely Kingdom of Northumbria.

Apart from the usual and traditional runners and riders - the Tree Faction, the Liberationists and the Redistributionists - there are newer political trends coming to the fore.

One of them is the Northumbrian Independence Faction, headed by the ale-swigging, charismatic and slick-talking man of the people, Nigwald the Forager, whose political group is gaining a great deal of attention by virtue of its professed concern at the burgeoning increase in the numbers of Bactrians, Phrygians, Moors, Huns, Cyrenians, Cappadocians and other exotic nationalities, whose dietary, religious and linguistic habits and traditions are at variance from the plain food, religion, manners and speech of the indigenous Northumbrians. His following is noticeably at its highest in those areas of the Kingdom located nearest to the ports, where shiploads of these foreign hordes disembark daily to find a comfortable living away from their ancestral lands. Owing to the popularity of the Northumbrian Independence Faction, the Tree, Liberationist and Redistributionist Factions and their hangers-on and camp-followers have mounted a vigorous campaign of opposition, since the Forager's followers are painting apocalyptic pictures of overcrowding and strife, and growing national groups in an increasing population compete among themselves for the services of the Northumbrian Herbalist Service and the benefits coffers. Since this doesn't mesh with their pink-and-fluffy view of brotherly harmony and biscuit, they feel under some measure of threat, and for this reason they do their utmost to paint them as a Faction of xenophobes.

However, the most surprising development is the advent of the Green Faction, led by a female citizen of the as yet undiscovered land of Antipodea called Nutty Bandit.

The Green faction - named after the legendary Green Man, a representation of the infernal Prince of Darkness - is a collection of disenchanted Redistributionists and other masticators of the hallucinogenic fungus whose principal ambition is to forbid the lighting of bonfires and the cutting down of trees in the interests of their Green goddess, Mother Earth.

These beansprout-chewing bongo players are prepared to make any sacrifices - of other people rather than themselves - in the interests of their fantasy-fuelled religion.

The Green Faction is gaining a large number of disaffected followers of the feckless Edward the Milliner, who - according to their twisted theology - is not doing enough to save the polar bears in the allegedly melting Arctic regions.

With such growing interest in this new and fanatical religion, it must be a great comport to their acolytes that their beloved leader doesn't even have a command of such pedestrian issues as facts and figures when questioned. The mushrooms are evidently doing their work...