Three people in the UK were shocked today, as figures revealed that the country is in recession for a record-breaking third successive quarter.
Prime minister Gordon Brown, Chancellor Alistair Darling and Bank of England governor Mervyn King are all under heavy sedation following the publication by the Office for National Statistics of a further 0.4% fall in the nation's gross domestic product.
Up until this morning, the three men had been supremely confident that mounting job losses, company bankruptcies, retail sales in freefall and the plummeting value of sterling signalled the certainty of a glorious return to the boom years of the British economy.
However, leading economists and pauperised voters said the only surprise was that the best efforts of the government's top calculator-operators had failed to fiddle the figures into the faintest semblance of recovery.
"If the government's own spreadsheets, working to the government's own bent rules, can't produce a positive spin, what the hell is the economy really looking like?" said top financial analyst Rob Blind, as he queued at Heathrow with a suitcase stuffed full of freshly-printed but worthless billion-pound notes.
"How many noughts are there in a trillion?" he added. "Nobody seems to know, but I'm buggered if I'm sticking round to find out."
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