Afghanistan in a zen state of chaos

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, welcome to issue number 16 of The Bugle, the unique audio newspaper from timesonline.co.uk for the week beginning Monday the 11th of February with me, Andy Zoltzman, in London and in New York City, Mr.

John Oliver.

Hello buglers, that's New Amsterdam Andy, New Amsterdam.

I don't recognise the new name of this city.

If it's good enough for the Dutch, it's good enough for me.

What is true with cheese is true with anything else.

Also happy 16th anniversary to all the buglers.

It's our sweet 16 and in true MTV style we're demanding that you throw us a disgustingly lavish party, hire Jay-Z to perform and buy us a Mercedes.

Otherwise you must not love us.

As always, some sections of the bugle go straight in the bin.

This week, on the 200th anniversary of this first experimental burning of anthracite as a residential heating fuel, here's a commemorative sound effect of a piece of anthracite being thrown through a window and hitting the Duke of Edinburgh flush on his bombs.

Also in the bin, the chess section, a special feature on the move Night to King 4.

Celebrity singer Placido Domingo tells us what it means to him, and also an interview with the chess-obsessed Bishop of Kloppenberg in Germany, who only walks diagonally and moved house so he can live next door to a horse.

Top story this week, Afghanistan.

NATO defense ministers moved quickly this week to dismiss talk of a crisis over the operations in Afghanistan.

They were at pains to admit that life in Afghanistan is still vastly better than when under Taliban control.

But let's be fair, it's still partly under Taliban control.

And anyway, it could scarcely have gotten worse.

When you essentially live on a scorched rock under a brutally repressive regime and you merely remove the brutal part, you still live under a repressive regime and you still live on a scorched rock whose major export is the opium poppy.

Home, sweet home.

Well, it does turn out, according to NATO, that Afghanistan is fine.

The rumours that it's been going even more tits up than everyone thought of turned out to be lies.

And this emerged on the week that David Miliban and Condoleezza Rice went to Kabul on a kind of political, dirty weekend.

Apparently, they're frustrated at their inability to galvanise their supposed allies to throw more troops at the problem and the Afghanostani warlocks are exerting an increasingly tight grip around the spluttering jugular of an already out-of-breath nation.

It seems that it's hard to rebuild a place that was never really built in the first place and in 2001 world leaders assured Afghanistan that we would be with them for the long run.

What we didn't realise was quite how long that run would be, or indeed that it ran straight off a cliff.

Robert Gates said he thought there was no risk failure.

But in many ways, that's true, because you can't fail at something if you don't know what success is.

What is success in Afghanistan?

No one really knows.

Therefore, Afghanistan is approaching an almost Zen state of chaos.

There can be neither success or failure.

Afghanistan just is.

There may be a lesson for Iraq in this new violent offshoot of Buddhism.

But I'm not sure that anyone could really have predicted that this Afghanistan war would prove so difficult.

I guess there were some clues that suggested it might be trickier than everyone expected, including A, the First Anglo-Afghan War from 1839 to 1842, reviewed by the critics at the time as an unmitigated disaster.

The British retreat of 1842 began with 16,000 people.

One man made it, and he had part of his head missing.

Clue B, the Sovio-Afghan War from 1979 to 189, which so debilitated the mighty Moscow machine that communism collapsed exhausted at the end of it and said, no more, I just want the pain to stop.

Or see any other wars in the history of Afghanistan.

Apart from those clues,

there was nothing to say it was going to be difficult.

It looks easy on a map.

It does, but then that map is sketchy at best.

You do have to assume that the map doesn't have any pictures of mountains on it as well.

There is real suspicion of the British in Afghanistan for many valid reasons which go back hundreds of years.

In fact, some Afghan parents reportedly tell their children to be good or the British will get you.

As if if we're now the equivalent of the bogeyman.

Which historically, of course, we probably are.

Their current suspicion is over a $150,000 camp, which we've set up to teach insurgents about human rights and the Afghan constitution.

It's a rival camp to terrorist camps.

And maybe this is where the real battleground lies now.

Who has the best camp?

We've seen from their videos that they have those swinging monkey bars and scramble nets, so maybe we should get a seesaw, a slide, and a ping-pong table.

Maybe a campfire to toast marshmallows on.

That's always fun.

The British know how to organise a good camp, Andy.

We can do it here.

It's interesting, see, that Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's opium.

A record crop is due this year.

Opium fans are now hoping that opium can retake its position as the opiate of the masses for the first time since 1844 when it was overtaken by religion, according to then-opiate referee Karl Marx.

It's uh, opium fans is a far nicer way of saying heroin addict, isn't it?

He's a real he's a die-hard opium fan.

Before it was fashionable.

Off and everything.

Wrapped round his arm needlessly tightly.

But more than half of Afghanistan's GDP comes from drugs.

This is a timely reminder of this story that the Coalition of the Willing, or the Coalition of the Willing, coerced and misguided to give us our full title.

We're not just about Iraq.

Yes, we caused a mess there, but we've caused messes all around the world, which we're receiving little or no credit for.

And there has been some finger pointing from NATO nations such as the US and Britain at other NATO nations who've arguably not been doing much to help militarily over there, namely, you've guessed it, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany.

And the German Defence Ministry spokesman made a strange comment saying, I think people in Britain should be aware that we lost two world wars and we have a different attitude to the question of soldiers, wars and blood.

It's a really strange thing to say.

Too little, too late.

Well, not only is that true, but also, let's not compete over who lost the most lives in those two continental meltdowns.

It's not a competition.

It was, and what a competition it was, but in many ways the big loser in the first half of the 20th century was humanity.

But Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, in between cheering defence, defence, defence at the US infantry in faraway Iraq in an effort to improve military morale, he promised to nag his NATO allies in an effort to get them to pledge more troops.

So America is kind of like a domineering wife that it's always wanted to be.

It's quite interesting interesting terminology.

I think Rumsel actually still thinks of the Iraq war as a high-tech and explosive form of nagging.

But the problem is what does nagging generally cause?

Resentment.

Take that from me, John.

That's why my bedroom's untidy.

And that's why my tax returns on my desk.

Is that still true?

It is sadly still true.

Oh, dear.

God's news now, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has called for British law to be replaced with an extreme version of Islamic Sharia law.

Or at least that's how it seems to have been reported in some parts of the British press.

I don't know what you think of this, John.

I mean, I'm not sure really that Williams, as the head of the Church of England, should be calling for Muslim law to be forcibly imposed on all British people.

Well, that's right, I mean, he definitely shouldn't be doing that.

That's really why he hasn't.

I guess that's the one good thing about it.

I mean, that's the one thing.

It's cold comfort, though.

The Archbishop is a philosophical and deeply intelligent man who clearly clearly has made the big mistake this week of making a thoughtful and decisive statement about life in multicultural Britain.

And you may have seen headlines such as Archbishop says sharia law in Britain is inevitable, when what he actually said was that the UK would have to face up to the fact that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system and that allowing parts of sharia law might help social cohesion.

That's just not the kind of behaviour you want from a religious leader, Andy.

He can take his message of inclusion and put it right back in the Communist Manifesto, which I'm sure he secretly keeps inside his Bible.

We all know what you're really reading, Mr.

Williams, if that is your real name.

Drop the act, take off the fake cover.

Williams did actually say that an approach to law, which simply said, quote, there's one law for everybody, and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant.

I think that's a bit of a danger.

Now, that to me seems a little bit rich coming from a religious leader, given the lack of flexibility traditionally exhibited by religion and the whole burning in hell afterlife business.

But of course he probably isn't one of those men.

That's the ridiculous thing in this situation.

He said that sensational reporting of opinion polls had clouded this issue, a comment which in turn fell victim to the sensational reporting pandemic which is currently sweeping the British Isles.

You cannot trust the British press with a comment like that.

That is like giving a child a tambourine.

They're going to waggle it around and they're going to hurt someone with it.

So the Coach Secretary, Andy Burnham, said you cannot run two systems of law alongside each other.

He said this would be chaos, although he should perhaps bear in mind that we already do, in fact, run two systems of law in parallel, trial by jury and trial by media.

In fact, the former is being rendered increasingly obsolete by the latter, and current predictions do suggest that all trials will be carried out by media within 30 years.

So hopefully that will clear any confusion up.

It must be very tempting for the Archbishop to look at how this story has been reported and then release a second statement saying, Do you know what, you can all go f yourselves, I'm going to heaven anyway.

The race away from the White House continues this week with the news that Mitt Romney has dropped his bid to be president and this is terrible news for nobody.

The final tally is that Romney paid exactly $1.16 million per delegate, and that's a lot of money for what works out as nothing.

He has spent a huge amount of his own money on this pipe dream.

It is a vanity project on a huge scale.

Some people self-publish their novels.

Mitt Romney ran for leader of the free world.

That is some hobby.

He needs to get himself a shed.

I think what it does show, John, is that Mitt Romney, who of course we did a little potted biogue of two weeks ago on the bugle, has fallen first victim of the curse of the bugle.

Every presidential candidate we've done a potted biogue of has pulled out within a fortnight.

Admittedly, Romney is the only one, but that is still 100%.

So I think we are now basically, we are the kingmakers in this presidential race, John.

We just need to hold back our potted biogs of the remaining candidates, you know, Obama, Clinton, McCain, Huckabee, and Mike Gravelle.

Hang in there, Mike.

Do them as and when we see fit, and we have the future of the world.

If we really hold off and we become Kingmaker, we might even be able to wangle ourselves an attorney general position.

The key rule with leaving the presidential race is when you go out go out with some class and what a speech Romney gave, including such ear-catching sound bites as, America is the most powerful nation in the history of the earth.

I beg your pardon, Miss.

In the history of the earth, take that claim to the Romans.

Give it two minutes and their lions will be using you as a toothpick.

Lest we forget, the sun never set on the British Empire.

You've artificially enhanced your width as a nation with Hawaii, and that's not a state, that's somewhere to get shipwrecked, at best.

In a speech littered with contempt for large swathes of humanity, perhaps his most striking comment was this.

If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win.

And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

That's right.

You heard him correctly.

He essentially just labelled 50 million Americans terrorists.

And if that's true, when suggesting doubling Guantanamo, he was really lowballing us on national security.

We need triple Guantanamo with bunk beds.

The real fact is that Mitt Romney's true colours came splattering through during that speech and the speech really couldn't have been more revealing unless at the end he pulled his own face off to reveal a sinister robot underneath, muttering, have not been programmed to lose.

Romney is the bullet which just whizzed past America's ear.

And after the speech, there was a collective sigh of relief as a nation, as one found itself saying, Whew, that was close.

Romney also reached out his message of hate to the rest of the world as well.

He said, I'm convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st century.

Presumably, he means that America will like well-cooked but over-rich food, stylish but flaky rugby, and will be casually disliked disliked by large sections of the British population for historical reasons they don't fully understand.

So, welcome to the future, America.

What will that make France, though, if it can no longer be the France of the 21st century?

Well, I think it's a knock-on effect.

France then becomes a Belgium, and essentially, someone gets bumped off the planet.

Right.

Probably Burundi.

In bigotry news this week, a poster claiming that gay people want to abolish the family has been criticised by an advertising watchdog.

The Christian Congress for traditional values, traditional medieval values that must be, they had an advert which showed a man, a woman, a boy and a girl with the statement underneath, gay aim, abolish the family.

Here is the beauty of the situation.

Under the rules of advertising, there has to be an element of truth to the claim to prevent advertisers saying things like, red wine can make you fly, which has led to the Advertising Standards Agency ruling that the Christian organisation could not make that claim stand up.

And to overturn that ruling, They would have to prove in court that abolishing the family is indeed a gay aim.

And that is a court case I would frankly pay to see.

Oh, I'm pretty sure it is, John.

And if it'll explain what the homosexualists have been trying to do all along, the taxpayer spends millions, millions on things like the various OJ Simpson trials and assorted corporate fraud cases.

It would be nice if we finally got something you could really sit back and enjoy.

And it's always good to see bigotry confronted by the the cold, hard hand of law so they can realise just how moronic their views are.

I think this is really what the homosexualist campaign has been about all along.

I mean, it's not been particularly effective.

The gay campaign gays have proved less effective at breaking up families than other campaign groups, such as heterosexuals, lawyers, and pushy employers.

I did a bit of research into what the other gay aims are.

Here are a few that I found: one, to make the perfect paella, two, to abolish the crop top, and three, to locate and extricate Rush Limbaugh's mythic redeeming feature.

Are you going to give an explanatory note for our British and global listeners on that, John?

No, because if you don't know who Rush Lambau is, I would feel awful telling you.

It's better to live in a world where he doesn't exist.

So stay there.

So if you know of any of the other secret aims of the gay conspiracy, please email us in thebugal at timesonline.co.uk.

Bugle feature section.

Food.

Food, love it or hate it, it's here to stay, and it's getting cheaper and cheaper.

Tesco's, the British supermarket champion, are now selling whole chickens for £1.99.

Oh, God.

Now, that's not a lot for the life of one of God's own creatures, albeit not one of his favourite creatures, and nor one of his better creatures.

But it must be pretty psychologically tough for the chicken, you know, to go through what passes for their life, only to have a one pound ninety nine transfer fee slapped on their ass.

How does that make them feel about themselves?

Of course they're not gonna they're not gonna be that tasty if they're treated like that.

That doesn't help with your self-esteem to be valued like that.

Now Tesco's media director, uh, In Between Cackling Like a Demon, stated that no one should feel guilty buying a chicken just because it's good value.

Well here's the thing, yes you should.

Uh you should at the very least be concerned.

If someone offered to sell you a car for twenty pounds, your initial response would be, what's wrong with it?

Not, that sounds like unexpectedly good value, you have yourself a deal.

And it's the same with the £2 chicken.

The question should be, what's wrong with it?

Because the answer is pretty much everything.

A lot of these very cheap chickens are different halves of crashed chickens welded together.

The National Farmers Union said that Tesco's move was ill-judged and short-sighted.

And Tesco's response, the traditional supermarket response to any complaint from the farmer was, do you guys want to earn a living?

Do you really?

Eh?

Do you want to come here and say that?

So it looks like they will probably win.

Tesco say the reduction is only in price not in welfare on the grounds that it would be impossible to reduce the welfare.

This might be that this is irrelevant anyway because the FDA announced a couple of weeks ago that cloned meat is safe for human consumption.

So just after a decade when the first animal was cloned, the last major barrier to meat and milk being sold to people has been removed.

The FDA announced that you probably wouldn't eat a cloned animal directly as they're too expensive.

I'm not sure expense would be people's biggest psychological barrier there.

I'll tell you what has no place at the dinner table and that is the adrenaline rush of the bunchy jump.

I don't want to raise a fork of meat to my mouth and feel like someone should be photographing me so I can look back and remember how brave I was.

A cloning though, John, is one of those trigger words that provokes ill-informed knees to jerk around like the headless chickens it promises to produce.

Kind of like nuclear power and immigration.

But I'm a bit worried.

We've seen what happens in films with cloning.

Today they clone meat, tomorrow they'll clone Hitler.

And I, for one, do not want to have to eat cloned Hitler, not even if they're free-range Hitlers.

In fact, especially not if they're free-range Hitlers.

They're, in fact, the most dangerous type.

If only Hitler himself had been battery farmed,

the world would be a much happier place today.

Vegetarians also have a very tricky call to make here, because if it's being grown, is that not technically a plant?

And it's good to eat plants.

And it means that a plate of festering genetically engineered meat is, under the rules of science, basically a salad.

And we should all eat more salad.

And now a bugle restaurant review.

This week I went to the Pastulentia in Cragswick, Hampshire.

My companion and I sat down to dinner on cycling-themed seats.

Mine was based on a model of the bike used by Jacques Anquetile when he won the Tour de France in 1957, then melted down, reconstituted, and shaped like a chair.

My partner's Bostiri was less fortunate, plonked down on a pile of hypodermic syringes and some excuse notes.

We ordered frantically as if our meals depended on it, then watched in horror as our waiter, the former world lightweight boxing champion Roberto Duran, got our orders mixed up, trash-talked the neighbouring table, and knocked out a young boy with a savage flurry of punches to the ribs and chin.

Eventually my starter, a scrimmage of kidnapped vegetables with tuna-friendly breadsticks, arrived in a taxi with its new girlfriend Hilary Swank.

The dish was, without question, one of the most edible things I've ever eaten and tasted like the broken promise of a rogue aunt.

My companion's hors d'oeuvre asked for and took no prisoners.

Enough said.

For main course, I'd ordered the dead salmon.

The poor little fish's lifeless flesh was served with an intimidatory sauce of recently assassinated whelks and heap-tortured potatoes.

Overwhelmed by the blood-curdlingly moving tale of its preparation, I could not bring myself to eat it.

Instead, I lovingly embalmed it, boxed it up like a Valentine's Day puppy, and posted it to the chef's parents, so they might become aware of the creative killer they had spawned.

My companion, by contrast, played safe and went for the hackings of faux dinosaur with a side order of non-existent spinach and the hollow echoing laughter of a secretly anguished nun, all served in the preserved skull of a native Welsh tiger.

But my companion is on a diet, so she took a Polaroid photo of her dish, ate the photo, and shot the food whilst accusing it of ruining her teenage years.

Our meal was served with liquefied grapes, which had been trampled and fermented beyond recognition to the extent that they had to be administered via a bottle, expertly catheterised by the on-site urologist.

A glass of water was also provided, insensitively containing some novelty miniature icebergs, just 96 years after the Titanic took 1502 food fans to their icy graves.

There then followed the in-meal flight, a somewhat uncomfortable 48-hour round trip to Buenos Aires in a quadruplet-engined World War II Malcovious clown plane.

For dessert, the wolf and gravel sorbet was just the lethal disappointment we'd been hoping for.

Whilst the sacred profiterole of Jampuzala was literally divine, the chef's complimentary at-table self-immolation lent the dish a subtle aroma of burning brandy and human flesh.

If I had one criticism of an otherwise unforgettable evening, it was the restaurant's use of cheap labour to make our coffee.

By the time our cappuccinos had arrived in the sweatshop in Phnom Penh, made by locally sourced children, they'd cooled beyond acceptability.

The Maitre D fired us home from his cannon with a friendly bang, although his excellent food had altered our ballistic properties, and we fell a mile short of our destination in the one part of Britain still controlled by the Viet Cong.

All in all, four stars ideal for a first date.

That has raised the bar of lying to

an almost Sergey Bubka level.

Well, if you can tell us how many lies were in that restaurant of you.

Don't, don't do it.

I don't think you physically can.

You will win a complimentary lie.

And now it's time for your emails.

There's a great email from Corey Hawkins, who responded to our suggestion of stop and search over this week.

And Corey writes:

At your behest, I stopped myself and searched my person yesterday at 8:15 p.m.

Eastern Time.

A cursory search turned up a 38 special revolver in a waistband holster.

A more detailed search turned up a Georgia concealed carry weapons permit.

So I had to let myself go with a verbal warning just to be safe.

Good call on the searching of oneself.

I almost caught an armed criminal and almost kept my neighbourhood safer.

Almost.

Congratulations, Corey.

You're one of America's local heroes.

Well, it's interesting that Corey should have taken those measures because Ross Ballinger, aged 16 from Cheltenham in the United Kingdom, writes: After listening to your podcast in the library during a free period, I decided to follow your advice and perform a search of myself as soon as I could.

Unfortunately, due to recent exam stress, it was not until this search that I discovered a small nuclear warhead tapped to the the back of my leg that I'd previously overlooked.

I have no idea how it got there, but I could do without the stigma of somehow smuggling a warhead into school, so I shoved it into the nearest locker and legged it.

That if it's primed and blows the locker apart and has my fingerprints on it, I'm holding you personally responsible for triggering the discovery of dangerous weapons in the first place.

David Cameron was right, writes Roz.

These searches are nothing but trouble.

This email will serve as proof of that.

Shame on you, buglers.

And controversy has hit Hotties from History due to an email from Kalina Caffarella in Melbourne, Australia.

She writes, I found the hotties from history somewhat underwhelming.

Are you truly human?

What criteria were you using to choose these hotties from history?

She writes, I cannot see the common thread between any of these nominees, except they are dead.

Let's have some transparency in the nominations.

Well, I don't know.

We're up against the wall here, John.

I don't think that is a valid criticism.

These hotties transcend being alive or dead.

Joanna the Mad is the perfect example there.

We had a couple of pictures of of her emailed in.

One at the email said, I've enclosed a photo of the infamous Joanna the Mad.

Though one does not recognise the flaming madness upon first glance, she does appear to be carrying some unexplained rage in those crazy eyes of hers.

And they're intoxicating eyes.

And then Sarah wrote, wow, thanks for the tip, John.

Joanna the Mad is not only pretty, but my friend Aaron insists that crazy girls are better in bed.

And then she advises, I'd hit it.

Well, Colleen, I guess in response response to your email about transparency and nominations, anyone can be nominated because one man's hottie is another man's naughty.

And that applies as much to historical hotties and naughties as living ones.

It's true.

It's true, Andy.

And it rhymes.

So it must be true.

The best of the rest of your emails will be rounded up in this week's Bugle blog.

Apologies for the absence of last week's Bugle blog.

This was due to the cruel hand of fate and me being busy.

Do keep your emails coming into the bugle at timesonline.co.uk, the only email address of any relevance in the modern world.

Sports now, and congratulations to the New England Patriots.

Yes, 18 and 1, baby, 18 and 1.

For having the courage to fail at the last hurdle.

Glorious failure, as we Brits know, is infinitely more of a success than actual success.

And where the Miami Dolphins had let us down by winning a game,

the Patriots did not let us down by losing with 30 seconds to go.

What do you think were the key factors in that game, John?

Well, the key factor, Andy, was clearly the play for the ages.

Third and five, Eli Manning, visibly sacked and yet somehow emerging from the back of the pack like a man in a Hieronymous Bosch painting, throwing an absolute bomb.

which was then caught with one hand pressed against a helmet.

What a play.

What a play, Andy.

The best recovery from a sacking, probably, since the relics of Roman civilization managed to influence the entire future of the West after the Visigoths had got all over them, also ironically, at a third down.

I was at the ticker tape parade earlier this week, Andy.

Eli Manning had the worst case of poor booking in terms of speeches because he's actually a very quiet, unassuming man, which is strange for a sport which has such titanic egos in it.

Michael Strahan, who is a loud man, he went on before Manning and was screaming at the crowd, We stomped you out, New England.

We stomped you out.

And then Eli came up, and the first thing he said was, I told them not to put me on after Michael.

As a stand-up, I could really, really sympathize with him.

Go, you're right.

You're in trouble here, Eli.

There's no gig left in this room.

NFL films always shoot stuff fantastically and they had a half-hour package.

In fact, I've recorded it, Andy, to show you when you come over here next week.

You'll love it.

And so it's got the mics up on certain people.

So you can hear the referees talking to each other during the game, saying things like, oh, this is quite a good game, isn't it?

Yeah, it's really good.

I don't know how it's playing at home, but it's pretty exciting.

And the speeches beforehand, the Patriots were talking to each other saying, let's not take this for granted.

Let's go out there and win.

Pretty arrogant and confident.

And the Giants were saying to each other, we've been dreaming about this since we were little boys.

As As if I couldn't be any more glad that the Giants had won.

To see them acting like that made it even sweeter.

It's so sweet, it's almost diabetic level, this victory.

I guess if at any point in your team talk you say, we don't want to take this for granted, you are already taking it for granted.

Absolutely.

Very much like Iraqi democracy.

Football news and real football this time, the Premiership are discussing taking football matches overseas following the success of the NFL's jaunt to play a really low-quality game at Wembley last October.

Premiership football is going to take a round of games every year overseas.

If these plans go through, football, of course, is only played in England.

So it's very important if football wants to reach beyond England that it plays games in countries where there's never been any football.

So

these guys are heroic pioneers.

What they mustn't do is bother coming over here, Andy, because they have proven year after year they couldn't care less about football.

Don't flog this dead horse.

It's already been pulped.

Making this debate more complicated, the Archbishop of McCanthy Rowan Williams has said that all football should be played under the sharia off-side rule.

And now it's time for the much praised and maligned Bugle Audio Crossword.

It's an audience divider.

This week's clue is 16 down.

And after the resounding success of last week's two-part clue, this also has two clues for the same answer.

It's eight letters, the answer split into two words of three and five.

And this is a fairly simple clue.

And it's do this if you want to know how to pull off a giant killing.

And the other clue is this.

This is the start of apocalypse.

An opera starlet has fallen over backwards after 500 kilos of sulphur went up.

What should we do?

Request advice from the leader of the Conservatives.

Is anyone still listening?

I'm not.

I don't know about about anyone else.

And instead of the bugle prediction this week, we have a free gift.

It's Valentine's Day this week, as romantic bugle listeners won't need any reminding.

And so, as a free gift, here are some bugle chat-up lines to win the heart of your desired.

Wow, could you do me a favour and pick my jaw off the floor?

Now call an ambulance and implement some proper workplace safety standards.

Your father must be a thief because you've been here to visit him every week for the past 18 months.

Now don't try hiding a knife in his birthday cake this year.

You must be a witch because I'm under your spell and boiling to death in your cauldron.

What?

You're not a witch, just a straight down the line cannibal.

My mistake.

If that doesn't work, try this one.

Was your father the Champions League semifinal?

Because you've got two legs.

And finally, the classic bugle chat up line.

Uh, there was something I wanted to say.

Uh no, you go first.

Okay, I'll go first.

Um Sorry, this is a bit awkward.

It's just that,

really,

look, I mean, since I met you,

you're a what?

Andy, I think what we learned from that is your marriage had better work out.

Otherwise, you are dying alone.

So, good luck, Bugle Valentiners.

And do join us again for next week's show.

Also, check the website for all the added bugle goodies, timesonline.co.uk/slash the bugle and email us in with anything, particularly if it's a hottie from history.

Interestingly, with next week's show, it will be the first time that Andy and I have been in the same place for an episode of the bugle.

Let's see what that lack of 3,000 miles distance does.

It'll be very interesting to see what it's like when we are merely one foot apart or even closer.

So, put your bets on.

Will we come to blows?

Bye.

Cheerio.

Hi, buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.