It is so difficult to resolve financial issues as a Nigerian Prince

Money, wolves, cookies

Anyone can get into financial difficulties, including those who are like myself waiting to be entrusted with the stewardship of Africa’s largest nation. Yet when you’re dealing with navigating decades of political corruption, and your reputation as a political reformer has made you enemies at home and abroad, it’s easy to find yourself needing to move money out the country and fast.

The only thing to do is to reach out to foreign friends. You’ve got limited time, and have to somehow steal away from your minders at the palace, but desperate times call for desperate messages, so you find yourself emailing people out of the blue. Admittedly, your English isn’t the best – you’ve run this piece through ChatGPT to resleeve your habitual orthographical issues – but you’re sure people will overlook that given the force of your message and the large sum of funds you have to disperse. All you need from them first is a few thousand dollars to unfreeze your bank account and pay the relevant bribes.

And yet crickets. Your 3AM screeds, written with such intense passion to people you thought were friends and acquaintances, go unanswered. Here you are risking your life, sneaking out under cover of darkness to access the Palace’s one working computer, and what do you get for your troubles? Either silence – the usual response – or abuse, such as ‘Nice try Prince!’ or ‘1995 wants its spam emails back.’ Even after you’ve risked it all by revealing the exact level of your considerable personal funds.

So desperate have you become that you find yourself at times emailing completely random strangers, always taking time to address them with effusive honorifics such as ‘Dear Mrs Lovely’. You may have gone slightly overboard in some of these messages, producing long screeds of barely punctuated prose, but you really would honour your word and transfer them all your funds if they would just be generous enough to send you their account details plus a modest sum to cover the admin. And yet some, faced with my extraordinary financial largesse, even threaten even to report me to the police!

Most of the time no-one even replies. Or mockingly, with some strange allegation of catfishing. How can I fish with the walls closing in on me? There’s more than enough evidence out there by now to see me thrown in jail, such as my personal email (picked for its irreplicable obscurity) and my use of non-secured VPNs.

At this point, the fate of the entire Kingdom depends on a stranger letting me transfer them $15446574747479 pronto. Obviously, Nigeria is at this stage a Republic, but I can assure you the money is there.

I may just have to take the next step and start calling people up personally. But I don’t want to frighten them or associate them with me, so I’ll take the precaution of using software to give me a robot voice. In such difficult conditions, that should reassure recipients. After all, my title is intimidating enough on its own.

I bet that wolf regrets eating Von der Leyen’s pony

A wolf, addressing the European wolf convention:

I don’t know exactly who needs to hear this, but there has to be some kind of lesson about tactics and strategy here. This is precisely the one pony that none of us wanted to eat.

And this happened at a time when things were going so well for us. For years, people only viewed us as a problem, decimating Europe, causing problems, attacking stuff. Carrying off the odd baby, admittedly, but not out of spite.

And then what happens over the last few years? We’re finally getting the species’ reputation sorted. We’re monogamous, we pair bond for life, and we look after our young; we're basically slightly wilder dogs at this point. All leading up to the decision to start rewilding us in the late 2000s, which got our numbers up to levels not seen since the 19^th century. Wolves were so back, baby.

And then what happens? Someone eats the President of the European Commission’s fucking family pony.

I’m not going to single out which of us exactly did that. We all know it was Chris. What I’m interested in is what we’re going to do about it now. This is the biggest PR setback we’ve had since Daniel Defore wrote about us so unflatteringly in ‘Robinson Crusoe’.

Certainly we now need to get ahead of this situation. Obviously, with our lack of opposable thumbs, we’re limited in our ability to make effective use of social media. And I’m sure all of you feel, as I do, that the fate of European rewilding policy shouldn’t actually depend on what happens to the President of the Commission’s bloody pony.

But we are where we are.

At least if VDL is making policy decisions on such a personal basis, we can only hope she’s responsive to the PR gesture we’re about to launch. For we going to send a delegation of our finest wolves, hundreds of them, to apologise personally. Why, right now there are hundreds of our finest alphas galloping through the Lower Saxon countryside, heading to prostrate themselves before von der Leyen and loudly howl our apologies.

And as a final tribute to the seriousness with which we take this the entire pack has gone on hunger strike. Let Von der Leyen see just how much we’re prepared to suffer from the floods of drool dripping from our mouths.

It’s sure to go down well – after all, it’s the European Commission who wanted us back in the first place!

Holy Cookies. But are they €4.50 worth of holiness?

The dilemma of the cookie

There is a moment sometimes when you’re purchasing an item and it’s revealed to be much more expensive than you were expecting. I wouldn’t be surprising if your reaction then isn’t significantly a marker of your class identity, whether you baulk at the sum demanded or pretend to brush it off, as if this was a reasonable price to pay for, I don’t know, a cookie.

I recently paid €4.50 for a cookie. I was on the way to a movie, I passed a cookie place, and I wanted a sweet treat. I went in and confidently ordered ‘une fois cookies and cream’.

Then the price was announced.

Well, I must be resolutely middle class, as I just paid it and acted as if that were the kind of price I could afford for a biscuit. A mate of mine, a bigger earner than me but from a modest economic background, did not react with similar cool when recently charged ten euros for my order of a mocktail.

I was frustrated at myself as soon as I left the shop. How on earth, old boy, I asked, do you think you can afford for this kind of thing on your budget? It was particularly bitter because I was on the way to the movies with my monthly 20 euro cinema pass, which entitles me to go as many times as I want. And I go a lot; I think it’s now down to about four euros a film. Not only that, the Cinematek repertory cinema has – and I appreciate I’m letting the cat out of the bag here – a vending machine which sells perfectly drinkable hot chocolate for fifty cents.

I’d arrived early for the movie so I sat down with some machine chocolate and the cookie. I took it out of its bag (I think the bag was free). I had the listings of next month’s showings – Is there a greater pleasure in life than ringing films you might see? – and took the cookie out. Absent-mindedly, occupied with my thoughts, I bit in.

Fucking hell, the cookie was good.

I mean, it wasn’t just good. It was comfortably the best cookie I’ve ever eaten. Crisp and soft at the same time, with a generous measure of white chocolate chips amongst seemingly endless (tho actually quite limited in measure) fields of dough, and the whole think having a wonderfully homemade taste, as if the baking soda and powder and sugar had been blended to utter perfection.

I ate that cookie. I’d been tired all day, but this cookie was revivifying, mood-altering, a truly great cookie.

Which I’d paid €4.50 for.

How could I reconcile this? How could anyone? If any cookie was ever worth €4.50 it was this one. And yet, could a cookie ever be worth that? It certainly didn’t cost that much to make. Baking soda costs €2.50 in the supermarket tops.

I finished the cookie and the deliciousness gave way to a serious ethical dilemma. Two hearts beat within my breast. The joy of a delicious cookie which had been a rip-off. And also the joy, like the machine coffee, of a bargain, where, to further adapt the German, der Preis isst mit.

Which was the greater joy - cheapness or quality?

Was it paying over the odds for a sublime experience? Or did, to paraphrase Kate Moss, nothing taste as good as a bargain feels?

I’d been broke all my adult life. Even now in full-time work, I certainly can’t be affording almost-five-euros-worth of cookie. My money has to go on luxuries like food and rent. For my friend it’d have been a clear matter; paying that cookie would have ruined her day. Particularly if she’d had to share it with me.

But still, what a cookie.

I would ruminate on this for days. Perhaps indeed for the rest of my life; like Emperor Cincinnatus, I would retire to contemplate this cookie. It was Apollo and Dionysus, paganism and Christianity; it was serviceable machine choc against über-fancy baked goods. I knew I could never bake anything as good, just something that tasted of my having tried.

I put the bag in the bin and want to watch the film. It was an excellent one by the way, and I was in the perfect mood for it. Aided of course by that magnificient cookie. Which had cost more than the rest of the cinema trip together.

Still, at least I went to the movies again Sunday, which must be getting me down close to three euros a movie by now. I really should buy some flour.