Giant Sentient Stack Of Customs Forms Wades Into Channel Begging UK To Rejoin EU
The colossal pile of paperwork has offered Britain the top bunk in parliament and promises it has been going to therapy since the breakup.
PARIS, After French Finance Minister Roland Lescure invited the United Kingdom to rejoin the European Union, and Prime Minister Andy Burnham said a second Brexit referendum was possible, a three-hundred-foot stack of sentient customs declarations entered the English Channel. It pointed a boombox at the Kent coast and played romantic ballads at a volume usually reserved for municipal warnings.
Continental officials have called the paperwork Operation We Can Change We Promise. It remains just outside British territorial waters, hovering with the patience of a badly parked ferry. Local harbourmasters say it sends tens of thousands of messages directly into their minds every minute, all pleading-face emojis and assurances that Europe will finally stop arguing over what counts as a sausage.
“We want to get coffee and talk about us,” said Dr. Henri Trombone, newly appointed Director of Desperate Late-Night Reconnection at the continental Department of Lingering Feelings. “Things were messy at the end. There was yelling about fishing quotas. There was also the standardisation of cheese dimensions. But we are a different economic bloc now. We have been to therapy. We bought a scented candle for the border-control booth.”
“We even bought a scented candle for the border control booth.”
The paperwork has made its feelings known. Witnesses in Dover say it sometimes throws pebbles at the coast to attract attention. The stones pass straight through its paper body, leaving holes in the agricultural-subsidy sections. At night it projects a vast holographic slideshow of the two entities enjoying tariff-free trade in 2014, accompanied by a slowed acoustic version of Ode to Joy. Nobody requested it.
If Britain returns, the sentient forms say Britain can have the top bunk in the parliamentary chambers and full custody of the Eurovision television remote. The stack has also offered to change its legal name to whatever Britain prefers, abandon the metric system, and tattoo a red double-decker bus across its title page. The tattoo proposal has not yet reached the consultation stage.
“It’s becoming overwhelming, and frankly rather sad,” said local beachcomber Mildred Puddle, while trying to walk her dog beside the sobbing trade agreement. “Yesterday it bribed a seagull to carry a mixtape of European directives across the water. The tape caught on a channel buoy. Then it stood in the surf crying until the tide ruined its annexes.”
The continental administration has joined in. It deployed autonomous lovesick submarines carrying French pastries and handwritten notes asking whether Britain likes them back. The pastries have gone soft in the seawater. The emotional message remains as forceful, and apparently as binding, as a supreme court resolution.
By late Tuesday afternoon, the pile of forms had put on an oversized Union Jack novelty shirt bought from a tourist shop in Calais. It still refuses to leave the water. Across the waves, it keeps shouting that it will delete every number from the single-market spreadsheet if Britain answers one telephone call.