'It's not worth taking the decorations down now'

A significant minority of UK households still have their Christmas decorations up. With the start of Christmas occurring earlier and earlier, many British citizens are arguing that unless the decorations are taken down on Boxing Day at the latest it's hardly worth the effort of stripping them down, removing all the batteries, boxing them up, carrying them up to the attic and putting them in front of the boxes holding the Easter bunnies and the Halloween artifacts. 

'By the time I've taken them up I'll be moving all the boxes to gain access to the Easter tat,' said Bill today. 'Then before you know it the skeletons, plastic pumpkins and the tacky Halloween wreaths will need to be brought out, then - wham! it's August and the Christmas tree needs to be pushed back into use,' Bill added.  'So I leave the tree up all year round.  It frees up a load of space in the attic for other stuff like the sofa, armchairs and plants.  A bit of a win-win, really,' he said.

Queen Victoria's ghost asks ‘Where’s my f*cking Empire gone?

Mediums have described 'agitated' visits by the ghost of Queen Victoria, who is reportedly concerned about Britain’s declining fortunes.

‘She’s very moody’, one mystic told us. ‘At first she was impressed with my iPhone, but when she found out the company is American and the phone was made in China she went quiet and then started effing and jeffing. Thank God she isn’t a poltergeist’.

Another psychic reported a ‘stormy’ discussion with Queen Victoria after seeing a map of the world. ‘Her Majesty asked me, quote “why isn’t it red any more and where the f*ck did f*cking Burma go?” Then she went on about places I’ve never heard of, like Sudan and Rhodesia. It was horrible’.

Queen Victoria was never much fun to be around in life; if anything, death appears to have made her even grumpier. Still, at least she’s only mourning a lost Empire. George Washington’s ghost was on earlier, mourning the lost soul of America. Makes you think.

Have you been visited by a deceased monarch? Maybe Harold moaning about his eye? Or Charles the First, minus his head? If so, please keep it to yourself. Ditto for vegans: we don’t need to know.

Calculating bin day to be a post graduate qualification

With councils across the country making cuts to refuse collections across the board, it's making working out when the black bin is due to be put out difficult to anyone without a working knowledge of combinatorial mathematics.  Probability theory and Riemann diagrams help, especially when factoring in the green waste, which is on a different periodicity to the black bin, and glass, which alternates with paper, which occurs every other plastics collection.

Universities are running post graduate courses to their maths degrees, with the PGBB (Post Graduate studies in Black Bins) being the most popular, with the ABGVR (Advanced Black Green and Various Recycling) course in Council Refuse studies being a popular undergraduate option.

'Really, anyone who can work out what stuff to put in which bins correctly, to identify the various acceptable recyclable plastics and reject or set aside the specialist recycling should be able to ace either of these courses,' said Professor Jenkins of the Maths and Recycling department of York University.  'Plus, most councils now issue a four dimensional table clearly showing when to put the bins out anyway,' he added.