NINETY-SIX TEARS

WHATEVER ONE MAY THINK ABOUT PRINCE CHARLES, one can never say that he is a quitter. Even when he was being forced by everyone to accept the opportunity of being happily married to a nice girl, with whom he could live the rest of his life admired by many other men, he abandoned Diana Spencer and went doggedly after his “first, one and only true love”, Camila Shand. If he can stick to his guns in a face-off of this kind then one would be at best foolhardy to imagine him giving up on his absurd crusade to save the planet.

IN FACT, OUR CARING KING-TO-BE, much as took place during the excruciatingly embarrassing period encompassing his “falling out” with Diana and espousing of the Shand woman, seems to be spurred on into “straining every sinew” [his expression] to save “old Mummy nature” [idem] each time a jibe comes his way about him being roundly off his cake. We now, he told us all in his Mayday speech, have only ninety-six months before it is “too late” and “all over” for all of us. I must confess I was moved to tears, thinking about everything I will lose when the temperature increases by nearly 2º Centigrade over the two-hundred year period after this date. Who will look after my Triffids?

THERMAGEDDON, AS HE CALLS IT, cannot be avoided unless we act now, act together, and “act as one”. “One” wonders why he does not understand why “we” think he is mad. “Forget the credit crunch,” he droned on, “this is the climate crunch,” adding that there will be no point in having any money in the bank in a few years’ time because the planet will be dead in July 2017, a date he repeated in a speech to a giggly Italian parliament, more worried, no doubt, about Charles’ graphic detail of “a football pitch” disappearing every four seconds in the Amazon. If the Italian deputies seemed shocked it was because they took this literally, and hoped this disaster would not spread to Juventus, AC Milan, Napoli, Lazio or Cagliari, football clubs in which most of them hold shares.