(1+1+1+1+1+1=25)

(Fire+Petrol= Eyebrows - 2)

(Heather Mills: ‘I’ve Had Worse Press Than A Paedophile’)

(Story)

(Oasis deny that ghost story is just cheap publicity for new album)

The ailing Cilla Black Network received some much needed support, today, when Conservative leader David Cameron said a future Tory government would make funds available to ensure the long term health of this most vital part of Britain’s coastal defence.

The Cillas have been a feature of the British coastline for over sixty years but many of them are in desperate need of repair. ‘Some of them have been singing none stop for five decades,’ said chief Cilla warden, Henry Piles. ‘They were due for a throat scraping in the 1980s but cutbacks meant we had to just give them a spot of rouge. With this promise of help, we should be able to get their their vocal cords back up to their peak performance of the 1960s when they repelled a Iranian fleet full of fanatical ayatollahs.’

Since it was installed in 1942, the network has been a source of grievance between the UK and French governments, with the British claiming that the Cillas stop illegal immigrants from landing on British beaches. The French claim that the network is the source of noise pollution along the French coast and is the cause of miscarriages in dairy cattle. What is certain is that wrangling will continue and residents on the Calais side of the English Channel can look forward to many more years of ‘Alfie’ and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’.

It’s a long way from his role in Jeeves & Wooster but Hugh Laurie is enjoying playing the villain in the newest James Bond film, Die Forever Tomorrow Or Perhaps Next Week. ‘I’m the man with seventeen nipples,’ he told The Spine from the Caribbean location where the movie’s explosive finale is currently being filmed. ‘That’s seventeen fully functioning nipples, mind you, none of that plastic rubbish. I could suckle a hoard of henchmen while in full stride firing bazookas and scantily clad models at my nemesis.’

For the sake of realism, Laurie has endured weeks of nipple surgery, having sixteen nipples implanted on his body. ‘That’s quite correct,’ he explained. ‘I had to have sixteen nipples implanted to give me the full tally of seventeen nipples. I’m one of the rare men born with only a single nipple. Now I have a surfeit of nipples, a veritable overload of mammary papilla, and each one is a part of me. I wouldn’t know what to do without my seventeen little touching buddies, as I now like to call them.’

Loosely based on the unpublished Ian Fleming short story of the same name, the film sees Bond fight off a colony of fundamentalist dental hygienists led by Laurie’s insane toothpaste magnate, Dr. Milovich Brush. Critics have already condemned the script, saying that Fleming never intended the story to be seen by the public and cite as evidence the author’s remark, ‘this is crap’, scribbled onto the bottom of the manuscript.

The film is due to open in January and will be available on DVD from that guy you know at your local pub shortly thereafter.

Stephen Fry writes exclusively for The Spine and explains why he has spent so much money buying a unique literary relic in the form of Ezra Pounds pickled testicles:

My good people and readers of The Spine, it is I: the man I know as me. And if you don’t mind me saying this: you are looking really quite scrumptious. And at the same time not only a bit or a little but really quite a lot of delectableness. Oh, yay is the word and squishy might be the adjective I’d place beside it. You are little dumplings of delight and I would take very great pleasure in taking each one of you between my incredulous fingers and giving you a tender little squeeze. Alas that I can’t and that I can’t: alas.

If there’s such a word and (I believe there is) I would say ‘twere’; ’twere a shame that the very thought imposed itself on my mind and, skittish though I still am at the fanfare of human delights you present to me, I find myself unable to think of anything other than the quality of ‘you’ that you possess and make you uniquely and so undeniably you, the people I see before me with these tired and slightly incredulous eyes.

So, you are wondering, are you not, about my purchase? As the poet said: why Stephen did you see fit to purchase Mr. Pound’s testicles? Well why indeed not? The testicles were to be had and to be the one that had them, I had to be. I put my money on the table, took the testicles in my hand, and a fine pair they are too. Of the variety known as ‘two’ and in shape the most orbular as can be imagined and I can imagine plenty. Pound was a poet of such refinement that only a man such as your good friend, the good Stephen, can understand his poetry. His Cantos I have tattooed on my right kneecap and the poetry of Mr. Eliot on my left. When I kneel, I pay homage, if that’s not too light and silly a word, to those men of the pen and I ask you, nay implore you, to consider: what more fitting a reason is there to keep a man’s nuts in jam jar?

You are, I can see, good, kind, and totally smashing people, and I wish you prolonged spells of insufferable naughtiness and quite quixotic quiescency and cupidity. Oh, be still my beating heart. Should ever twains be cross again, let them be our twains, my most twainsome friends.

Squiggles and snuffkins,

Your friend, lover, and devourer of men’s souls when the day of judgement comes,

Stephen.