November 28, 2007
Guru had a Eureka moment when he heard the news that the third of six 7,300-tonne destroyers has been launched at Govan shipyard in Glasgow.
According to reports in the UK’s most-read national newspaper – the always balanced and fair and ‘intellectually’ stimulating Sun – this state-of-the-art vessel is equipped with the most up-to-date anti-aircraft weaponry and top-secret ‘stealth’ technology.
However, the reason Yours Truly had to spend half an hour mopping up the bathroom floor was the jaw-dropping news that the ship’s radar ‘can track a cricket ball moving at up to three times the speed of sound, and has a range of hundreds of miles’, according to the Sun.
Being in a ‘Sun’ frame of mind, it occurred to Guru that there are far more practical uses of such a ship, or indeed for the whole fleet of six the Royal Navy has planned.
The Currant Bun regularly runs scare stories about the way the nation is being overrun by Johnny Foreigner and his illegal asylum seeker chums, constantly coming over here to take our jobs, with its attacks on the government largely being about the fact that ‘we don’t know how many there are here’ – in a kind of parody of first and second world war paranoid propaganda.
Well if this ‘stealth’ ship can track a cricket ball so accurately, Guru suggests the country’s new border police carry out simple implant surgery and insert… um… cricket balls in all new people entering the UK. Surgically challenging, admittedly, but a problem that our esteemed (and largely imported) army of surgeons can surely overcome.
The stealth ships could then feed back cricket ball location data to a GPS satellite system and the Home Office could then keep track.
Problem solved.
And if 50% of each cricket ball sold could go back into the game, the five-day epics enjoyed by one man and his dog up and down the country each summer could survive without anything so unpleasant as a 'crowd' turning up to watch.
Quite how the border enforcers and GPS systems would react each time a shipment of cricket balls arrives from Robinson Sports – the Indian company that supplies the red leather (and now, criminally, white leather) projectiles to the nation's seamers, spinners and fast bowlers, is anybody's guess.
