The Night of the Shortage of Spoons

It all began on the now infamous Night of the Shortage of Spoons, that tragic night when the vast majority of the UK's transport cafés were left without any adequate tea-stirring utensils, thus bringing the whole country to the verge of chaos. Up until then, the UK had been run in its usual half-arsed way by the usual bunch of incompetents masquerading as one or other of the usual political parties. However, when one more-than-amply-chested photogenic young woman complained to a tabloid on a slow news day that, because of recent government social security cutbacks, she did not have enough cutlery to adequately provision her children, panic broke out.

Luckily, the various tabloids were on the look-out for a scandal they could inflate into something way beyond its actual importance, and because this young lady was more than willing to be interviewed with her top off, they were in luck.

In a matter of days, the government's inbuilt ability to shoot itself in both feet was ruthlessly exploited by a news media eager to fuck somebody over about something or other in order to tempt viewers and readers back in front of their advertisers, and – in the case of the BBC – because the leaders of that particular party had all been to the same posh school as the BBC staff who felt typical middle-class guilt about themselves and their moderate amounts of privilege, without having to really do anything about it.

Suddenly, seemingly overnight - as with all these media-generated panics – the whole of the UK seemed to run out of spoons. Not since some TV chef had claimed that some obscure culinary gadget was essential for anyone who wanted to take themselves seriously in the kitchen had the UK’s shops been inundated with people desperate for utensils.

Obviously, the media, once they saw their manufactured panic had taken hold, did their best to keep the pressure up on the already over-harassed populace by feverish reporting each and every spoon purchase-instigated frenzy, panic and stampede. Reporters breathlessly screamed into their mikes at shopping centres and High Streets across the country as new suppliers of spoons were found, only for rampaging hordes of desperate shoppers to pour into the area, frantically hunting for the spoons that would bring meaning to their lives.

Then, just as suddenly and for no discernable reason, the panic was over, leaving some of the slower moving media outlets with half-completed Spoonmania documentaries and features left to gather dust while the populace got itself worked up in a frenzy when someone almost moderately famous said something almost interesting on some social network or other, which immediately created yet another media feeding frenzy, until that too ended as suddenly as it began.