Digestives and Rich Teas.

Folded:

• Modern Warfare 2: Price War (the supermarket battle royale)
• Salt (reads kinda cack; looks kinda Bourne)
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles (revisit this classic, particularly the sweary rental car bit, and understand why Steve Martin is going to make a hilarious host at next year’s Oscar’s)
• Dark nights (cosy…or cold, lonely and miserable. We’re going with cosy)
• The Greggs (time to reconsider that application form maybe?)

Creased:

• Queuing at midnight to buy Modern Warfare 2 (never has Shaun of the Dead been so vividly recreated in reality. Best to head home, we-thinks)
• “Too much of anything can you make you sick” (thank you, Cheryl, you finally get it)
• Spiced apple everything (candles, biscuits, shower gel, beer – you can tell it’s six weeks to Christmas)
• Dark mornings (when you need a light to find the bedroom door you know you should still be in bed)
• Ragging on Gordon Brown (okay so the guy made a mistake – several – but The Sun and co are being harsher than a bristle brush swab)

Death! Fear! Famine! Terror! Bono! Knives! Guns! They all make for happy and pleasant reading on the way in to work. All before you’re charged £1.80 for a piss weak cup of coffee in the local café.

If the thought of being stabbed to death isn’t great enough to reduce you to a nervous wreck who only watches Jeremy Kyle, we’ve got a new crisis. Apparently, all the banks in the world who rape us via bank charges have run out of money or something. Subsequently, everything is going to cost more and limit us to only seven Starbucks trips a day. With Gordon Brown taking the hit for messing up the country, there seems to have been no help or even a cuddle anywhere. Well that is until JK Rowling came along and donated £1,000,000 of her own money to help him out.

With a personal fortune of £560m stashed away under the mattress, JK Rowling has to do something with all that money. Not only has the Harry Potter brand enabled her to always pay her bill without checking, it’s also help spawn the careers of other people associated with the ever-growing franchise.

Daniel Radcliffe was cast as the spectacle-wearing nerd in the film adaptations. As he grew up, got more attractive to ladyfolk and hit puberty he shifted gears in to other acting ventures. While whipping your cock out and dancing around with horses sounds like some sort of specialist pornography, it was all apparently tastefully done in some sort of play. Next they’ll be saying that selling a zebra in a box constitutes art.

But not everything to do with Harry Potter is fluffy and cute. Steven Vander Ark decided to make an encyclopaedia of everything to do with Harry Potter. From detailing every character to listing magic potions and exam cheats, it was every geek’s wet dream. A whole Bible of knowledge about something that isn’t real. Sadly, JK Rowling decided that she didn’t want this to happen. Reigning down the blows like lightning bolts, she banned the release and made a few people cry. She plans to release her own version one day. Probably when she runs out of people to sue for vague reasons.

Because she hasn’t been in the news for a while, JK Rowling has decided to publicly give the Labour Party a cool £1,000,000 because their policies to look after children are apparently the best and make her happy and jumpy. Hooray! She loves the children, and told BBC News:

“I believe that poor and vulnerable families will fare much better under the Labour Party than they would under a Cameron-led Conservative Party. Gordon Brown has consistently prioritised and introduced measures that will save as many children as possible from a life lacking in opportunity or choice.”

Did you manage to digest all that? Nope neither could we. For a woman who could buy us bacon rolls everyday for eternity, it strikes us as slightly odd that she’s complaining about how poor we are and how that miserable Scottish bastard of a Prime Minister can solve it. Send us all a cheque for £10, that’ll do just fine. Granted, it may be abused down a pub or casino but free stuff is always welcome.

But are Gordon Brown and JK Rowling actually working on something else? Are all state school being planned to be turned in to magic academies? Will pupils be turned into an army of wizards who’ll be trained to kill via a quick flick of a magic wand? We don’t know, but it could spark off a worldwide surge of book/TV tie in schools. America will launch the A-Team academy and Germany will pledge to have all its citizens fully fledged in the art of how to kill a person with a sausage.

Clearly the man needs help to get his popularity shifting upwards again. And, having looked at the problem thoroughly, Gordon Brown found the only person on the face of the Earth who even came close to matching his requirements. Shakira.

No, really. Shakira. Shakira and Gordon Brown have been yammering away on the phone trying to thrash out a solution to third world education. We know, this news makes us want to rush out and vote for Gordon Brown immediately too, but let’s be smart here – if we play it cool enough, Brown won’t stop at Shakira. Finally, our dreams of seeing Eva Longoria as a Secretary Of State For Work And Pensions have got one step closer to reality!

Politicians and pop stars aren’t so different, really. Take Gordon Brown and Shakira for example – recently Brown’s been busy examining his stance on biofuel in the wake of the global fuel crisis, and Shakira has been wiggling her tits around independently of each other while singing a song about how she shags blokes real good. One and the same, one and the same.

Of course, there are subtle differences between the two of them as well – recent rumours of a three-way Shakira sex tape got the world more excited than it had ever been, while the thought of Gordon Brown filming himself having sex just makes people want to throw up, rub the thrown-up vomit into their eyes until they’re blind, set themselves on fire and run screaming into a dirty syringe factory chased by an angry bear.

Despite this, though, one of two things were always going to happen when Shakira and Gordon Brown got together. Either a) they’d discuss the need for increased aid and debt relief in third world countries to help implement a universal basic education system, or b) they’d have a red-hot sexalicious rumpity-pump bonking sesh with three buckets of honey and a midget David Cameron lookalike dressed in a rubber gimp suit.

Yeah, it was the first one. Shame. The Press Association reports:

Pop star Shakira, famous for songs such as Hips Don’t Lie, heaped praise on the PM, saying he is “very smart” and “brave” with “wonderful intentions”. The unlikely pair came together on a conference call to discuss education in the Third World, with the world’s media listening in. In the call, which also featured World Bank president Robert Zoellick, the PM and the singer spoke of their backing for the Global Campaign for Education which aims to have every child in the world in school by 2015.

In fact, Shakira is just the latest piece of celebrity totty who Gordon Brown has pretended to be interested in recently. Not so long ago he was doing the exact same thing with Angelina Jolie, which at least proves that Gordon Brown is dedicated to getting every child in the world in school so long as a pretty lady is explaining it for him.

And, who knows, Gordon Brown might even get a bump in the polls by associating himself so closely with Shakira. If so, we can all look forward to Brown pushing through the Jessica Simpson-initiated Look At My Hair It’s Real Shiny And Cute Like A Princess Or An Angel Act 2008 any day now.

Which, admittedly, is better than letting Bono anywhere near Downing Street. Honestly, that’d just be political suicide.

Read more:

Shakira heaps praise on ’smart’ PM – PA