The house has seen some of the most brutal battles of the divorce, with barrages of legal letters fired by both sides until their finances were reduced to rubble and both sides were bogged down in a quagmire of ill feeling and petty squabbles.

“When this thing started, I thought it would all be over by Christmas” said Joe, looking exhausted after spending six months living in the shed. “It all began over Franz Ferdinand. I accused her of not putting one of their CDs back in the right place in the rack, and she retaliated by complaining about my snoring. Things escalated from there and once the lawyers got involved it soon turned into a war of attrition. I gained access to the power tools, and then she made a lightning raid on the dinner service. Pretty soon we were at stalemate with both of us bunkered down in defensive positions over the bread machine and pension rights.”

For her part, Paula made some good initial gains over access rights to the house, but had to retreat when the light bulbs needed changing in the kitchen and the washing machine waste pipe became blocked. “I will admit to some initial weaknesses” said Paula “But since I met the plumber with the big moustache and ballcock I’ve been making advances on a few fronts.”

“For one day at least, it will be all quiet on the Western Front.” Quipped Joe from his shed.

With a Santa’s hat-tip to Jeni B

‘When the car keys disappeared it soon became clear that there was an effect here that had major ramifications for the world of physics,’ said Cox. ‘The keys had clearly undergone an inter-dimensional shift which had moved them through time, space, or one of the many other dimensions posited to exist, in such a way as to render them invisible to the human eye. Also, the car had been clamped and was clocking up £100 a day in storage charges, so it was vital we found an answer quick.’

Professor Stephen Hawking suggested that the Large Hadron Collider was developed to unravel just these sorts of fundamental mysteries about the universe. ‘Brian was banging his head against the wall looking for the elusive car part,’ said Professor Stephen Hawking. ‘It was doing no good, though, so we decided to bang particles together instead, but at massive speeds until he could recall where the car keys were. We also hoped that the LHC could answer other questions such as ‘Where are my glasses?’ and ‘Why did I come upstairs?’’

After years of experiments, the LHC, lying in a 27km tunnel running under the Franco-Swiss border, today finally located the missing keys in a 1.5m ridge running under the cushions on Cox’s sofa. ‘It turns out that one of the missing dimensions predicted by string theory is actually down the back of the sofa,’ explained Cox. ‘This is a major scientific advance, but a further blow to relativity. It seems the space down the back of the sofa is far greater than its outward measurements suggest, and it acts like a black hole sucking in all matter around it. I believe that if we search down the back of the world’s sofas we will find all the ships and aircraft that were believed lost in the Bermuda Triangle.’

Cox is now hoping to win the Nobel prize with his discovery in order to help pay off the massive fine that is due to get his car unclamped.

‘It was never an easy relationship with their mother, Princess Padme,’ explained Vader who had dressed as Batman to draw attention to his plight. ‘I was apprenticed as a Jedi on minimum wage, supposed to remain celibate, then she was suddenly promoted over my head to become Queen Amidala and a member of the Galactic Senate. It was the stress of it all that turned me to the Dark Side.’

‘But I was doing it all for her, and she just couldn’t see it,’ continued Vader. ‘If you read her divorce petition, it’s all ‘He changed, he killed the Sand People and the Jedi Younglings, he’s a Sith Lord, he tried to strangle me using the force, blah, blah, blah’. Nobody asked my side of the story. Plus, she had a very good lawyer.’

Soon after his pregnant wife fled the family planet and died shortly after giving birth to twins. The children were then taken into care by Jedi social services and were adopted by separate parents in different star systems. Vader then spent much of the next twenty years searching for his children, but to no avail.

‘If only I’d known Princess Leia was my daughter then I might not have had her tortured on the Death Star – or only a little bit anyway,’ he reflected. ‘But it’s hard for a father reunited with his children after so long. When I finally met my son I offered to set him up with a good job, a pension, health care, company Tie fighter, but he had a lot of anger issues. It’s just a shame I couldn’t channel it towards the Dark Side. I just lost it and cut off his hand, which may not have been the best response.’

Despite the setbacks Vader is hopeful of regaining contact with his children. ‘I’m building this nice new Death Star just off Endor, somewhere they can stop by and visit, maybe stay over eventually and bring the grandchildren. Just don’t pass the address on to the Child Support Agency.’

Quaz (hat-tip to bonjonelson)

‘People look back on the Vietnam war and remember the great soundtrack but forget all the bad stuff’ he explained. ’One of the biggest problems faced by our forces today in Afghanistan and Libya is the low availability of good music.’ Dr Fox has admitted that recent defence cutbacks have forced the military to fall back on Jedward and other X-Factor winners while decommissioning bands like Madness (now used only for ceremonial duties) and New Order.

Ex US president George W Bush has also admitted that many of the problems in Iraq were caused by the poor quality of music available at the time. ‘Back in the 60s when I was avoiding going to Vietnam we had some fantastic music’ he said, ‘but I sent the troops into battle listening to Justin Timberlake, Beyonce and Christina Aguilera. That’s something that keeps me awake at night.’

‘Why did they have to go all the way to Mordor to throw The Ring into a volcano?’ asked seven-year-old James Penge. ‘They could have gone to another volcano, a closer one nowhere near Mordor. That would have been much easier.’

Within hours of James’s comment being posted on the internet, a crack team of literary scholars came to the conclusion that the more than one thousand pages of Tolkien’s trilogy could have been reduced to the length of a short story if only he had thought laterally.

‘When you look at the trilogy, the whole idea is like sending couple of dwarves with a live nuke on a walking tour of Taliban territory,’ admitted one previous fan. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘It’s really going very well, a great change for the better’ said works manager Dave Gubbins. ‘We haven’t had a pointless but expensive government directive or law for weeks now. Productivity is up since we have been able to get down to making things instead of holding training courses on how to use a ladder.’

Schools and other educational establishments are also reporting increases in time spent teaching pupils. ‘The goalposts haven’t moved for weeks now,’ said head teacher John Mayes. ‘If this deadlock can carry on then we will be able to have all pupils reading Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ by year 4.’

In the NHS, Surgeon William Hudson has reported that ‘We have been able to stick two fingers up to the bean counters and middle management, since most of them won’t be there this time next year. Instead of spending our time in meetings addressing stakeholder buy in and the customer experience, we have been doing operations and making people better. I expect to clear my list in the next couple of months. It’s a revolutionary approach. I’d never have believed it could work if I hadn’t seen it for myself but I’m finally doing what I trained all these years for’.

Senior politicians are said to be ‘uneasy’ with this new mood in the country. ‘Who knows where this could lead?’ said one high ranking politician. ‘If this stalemate continues for much longer then people may begin to believe that they can run their own lives!’

Voted by post

World leaders as diverse as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamid Karzai and Kim Jong-il were lining up today to endorse the UK general election as a shining example of the democratic process.

‘This is exactly how an election should be run,’ said the Iranian President. ‘We’ve all tried the locking-the-doors-at-ten trick, but sending voters away for a lack of ballot papers? I wish I’d thought of that one.’

Although Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was said to be disappointed at the lack of opposition supporters being beaten senseless by hired goons, he admitted to being generally happy with the level of corrupt postal voting. ‘And I tell you what,’ he continued. ‘I really like that idea about the guy getting the fewest votes staying on as leader.’

However, he soon realised it was all not all good news. ‘The first thing that people said when I told them ‘I am The Doctor’ was “Oh, aren’t you a bit young dear?”.’ he complained. ’Last week I tried to warn the UN Security Council that a comet that was about to hit the Earth, but they just told me ‘That’s interesting son, run along now and leave saving the planet to the grown-ups.’

He may yet have the last laugh however. ‘The next time the Cybermen turn up I might just pretend I was too busy on Facebook or texting to save the day.’