2nd April 2013 - Sunderland

Roy and I have just returned from chairing a commission at Sunderland, northern England, to ratify the appointment of Paolo Di Canio as manager of the struggling premier league side. Chairing the meeting was Miguel Fuentes, great grandson of the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, from Platform for Cataluna who had once run for governor in the fascist stronghold of Manresa on the outskirts of Barcelona. Fuentes had been given the unenviable task of determining whether Paolo still harboured fascist tendencies, or worse, could he possibly be a closet racist. Paolo has struggled to speak even a smidgen of pigeon English since he left school in the fourth grade to join Italian third division soccer team, the East Genoa Spaghetti Munchers, as linesman & chief lackey. When pushed to answer allegations that he had made a Nazi salute, he stated that he was only trying to imitate his favourite black athlete, Usain Bolt's now famous victory salute. Di Canio said he had originally seen Bolt at a junior Olympics meeting held in a mountain resort in the Pyrenees where they had been required to run down the side of a mountain slope backwards without any parachutes or other safety devices. The putative charges were going to be difficult to exculpate because of the breakdown of communication and the lack of a common dialect. The resignation of one of Sunderland's honorary directors, Silvio Berlusconi, was due to the fascist allegations originally leveled at Di Canio. Berlusconi was awarded his honorary status due to his many years of charity work assisting young, unemployed women at his famous Bunga Bunga charity hooleys over the last decade. In a public statement with the chaste Sabina Began at his side, Berlusconi emphatically declared it was morally wrong to employ someone of Di Canio's fascist held dogma. "My karma ran over my dogma," came Di Canio's retort. Berlusconi's karma meanwhile was more akin to dog style than dogma. Meanwhile, Di Canio has been cleared to manage Sunderland, and Berlusconi is now running for the position of Italian premier for the fourth time having renamed his party, the Bunga Bunga Female Adolescent Brigade for Freedom of Expression & Pole Dancing.

Paolo waves to the crowd

Members of the Bunga Bunga Brigade