Dante's Handcart

It's got to be tough being Adam Crozier, glossy chief executive of the Royal Mail. Since the 17th century Royal dictate that every piece of first class mail should "receive first class treatment", he personally sorts through each of the 81 million items posted daily. Rumour has it that Crozier had the swarthy hands of a great ape surgically transplanted on to his supple wrists to better palpate the letters, small packets and parcels, in an illegal backroom operation in the Russian hinterlands. Now, the fecking Guardian takes the long arcing piss of fresh news in reporting that the UK government is preparing to crap up to £1.3bn into Crozier's grubby purse, a foetid effort to resurrect the leaking, palsied dullard that is our postal service.

With the Post Office business losing £111m a year and pension deficits of £5bn, Crozier and his cronies could do worse than to take a butchers at high-gloss tackshack Las Vegas. There, architects like Paul Steelman have spent the past 20 years developing the ideal cash current to keep leisure-suit-wearing gamble bunnies circulating and spending. As the barf trouts at Wired News are warbling, carefully dovetailed retail and casino zones have flipped the dollar spouts to max:

"most new Vegas Strip resorts earn more than half of revenue from nongambling activities: shops, theatres, restaurants and trade shows"

"All well and good", I hear you grumble like sodomised toads, "but how does this make a cock sot of difference?" Oh ye of little faith. What we foresight-mites at Dante's Handcart envision is a Post Office Entertainment multiplex. Picture your urine-stained grandmother, wheeling her hemorrhoids in to collect her pension and then, excitingly, bused on a travellator into a luncheon-lounge-cum-bar-cum-bubble-wrap-emporium. Slightly tipsy on sherry she peruses racks of novelty bargains and loss-leader spangletat, before being encouraged by showgirls and a man wielding a tiger to post said-items to friends and family using, you guessed it, the Royal Mail's own Parcel Force. It makes perfect sense and, frankly, if they don't do it then they deserve a punch in the snatch.