Ah newsdesk, Wembley here,

Terrible news. Have you heard? Apparently a dwindling supply of oil combined with an massive global population boom will leave us bereft of fuel and food, and drive mankind into a terrible, relentless war - a war which will suck the last vestiges of anything pure and decent from the bowls of the planet and leave the earth drifting lifelessly through space, nothing more than a poison-filled fragment of rotted space-scum.

I didn't catch all the details as radio reception is not good here (BBC world service is intermittent and I often have to make do with only the daily transmission from Minsk) but that's the basic gist of it.

Of course the situation is far worse than that. England have lost the one-day series and, while the world mourns the loss of Sir Keith of Floyd, Dani Behr is at this precise moment poised, with Photoshopped thighs braced, ready to pounce onto our TV screens any second and cook-up a disgusting dinner for Bobby Davro.

I don't even have a television but for pity's sake Floyd, come back... please. You've left us here to face these cretins alone! Please! Floyd... FLLLOOOOYDDDD!!! Come on, seriously... time now, Keith, for a triumphant return to throw these charlatans and their shoddy market stalls of organic locally-sourced trickery out of the temple, eh Floyd?... Floyd?...

No, stop all the cooking timers, for he is dead.

Yes, Floyd has left the kitchen for good, and if the Martians come tomorrow they will find an absolute embarrassment of a planet furnished with very little decent food and a massive amount of morons.

---

That's not all they'll find. As you rightly point out in your newspaper this week, there is - for the time being - more than enough "stuff" to find here, even if limiting the search parameters to the principle arterial routes of our county. I'm referring of course to the mass of miscellany and furniture found fly-tipped in the lay-bys, hard shoulders and central reservations of the M20, which if properly distributed could be used to seat and provide occupation for many deprived people around the world. Think of the hours of fun to be had, looking out upon your desert homeland from the comfort of a well-used British armchair, trying to work out exactly what is in that barrel marked "corrosive materials".

It's incredible, you can find more random mishmashery on that cursed 50 mile stretch of tarmac than in all of Google.

And I can verify the facts to the letter. Indeed, only the other night I was on the hard shoulder near Aylesford, dragging a fridge from the back of my 1979 LPG-conversion touring wagon, when I bumped into my dear friend Alan.

He was pushing a sofa coast-bound along the carriageway.

"Good evening, Alan"

"Hi"

"Nice night for it"

"Yes, best get on..."

And I probably would have left it at that if I hadn't noticed something odd about the furniture's packaging.

"Hey Alan" I said, peering through the darkness at his find "that sofa's brand new isn't it!?"

He told me that indeed it was, he'd bought it from a Swedish furniture salesman near Dartford only hours earlier, but that his van had broke down on the way back after he'd hit a four poster bed which some fool was sleeping in, in the fast lane near Borough Green.

"I'm pushing the sofa to the next junction" he explained, "my wife's going to meet me there."

I advised him not to bother. "Leave it here, you'll find a perfectly good leather one on the slip road when you get there. I saw it only a quarter of an hour ago. Just take that...

"...but watch out for the dead fox," I warned.

In the end he took my advice, left the Swedish sofa with me and picked up the leather one at the slip-road, fox and all. It's proud head now grimaces benevolently out over the bar in the golf club at 'the village we must not mention for legal reasons'.

I, however, got into a spot of bother trying a similar thing with a cat I found near Harrietsham. The golf club were not interested in that particular night's find, and by the time I got back to the motorway, cat under one arm, the sun had started to come up again and I was left to face the derision of the London commuter traffic winding its way through the gauntlet of armchairs and bathtubs left on the road during the night.

The point is - and I assure you there is one here - you never know what you might find on the side of the motorway. It could be good or bad, but the second you step outside your car on the hard shoulder, it is time to BE ON YOUR GUARD.

And I'm not just talking about the traffic, which holds it's own particular dangers. No, shh, don't move a muscle... there are bats in the trees here, and the road could turn to liquid cement at any moment... Turn your back for one second and a strange woman pushing a pram could appear behind you out of nowhere.

These dangers are real.

And the roadside finds will not stop - In China they've just dug up a tiny Tyrannosaurus Rex, no bigger than a man, that roamed the earth 130 million years ago. Incredible what you can find, just below the surface.

Anyway, enough

I remember when all this was fields,

Wembley