It was bound to happen. With El Gordo's thinly veiled threats still ringing in their ears, the mugwumps at Freeman's asinine Commission for the Long Grass must have realised that although they're past the halfway mark in their two-year group hug they've yet to come up with anything better than an unsigned rant in green crayon on ACS notepaper and a high-score on PC PacMan. So I shouldn't have been surprised to return from my holiday to find a removal van outside DRIP. Of course, I feared the worst - maybe Hutton had taken objection to my Qatari expense account. But the truth was even more dire. Freeman had suddenly realised he'd better get cracking on the 11 million e-mails he's got to read between now and Christmas if he's going to find the "smoking gun" so beloved of headline-writers in this prominent organ. Unfortunately for the pine forests of Scandinavia, none of the lightly trained chimps at the Competition Commission have found the 'forward' button on their e-mail, so they've spent the past two weeks printing them out. "Hope you don't mind helping out, Pumsey," Freeman scribbled in his covering note. "Sure you've got a few spare Oompa-Loompas with nothing to do. Just see if you can find the words 'stuff', 'customers', bribe', 'backhander', 'profiteering'‚ or 'Goebbels' in any of these, would you? Any order will do. PF." Pumsey's network stretches to a contact in paper recycling and for a small cash consideration I diverted the van. Funnily enough, the driver called to say he got stuck behind a fleet of Tesco and Asda lorries in the queue to the shredder. At least the silly business over Dobbies Elf Centres resolved itself in my absence. Looks like the Cheshunt Chumps managed to outbid 'Braveheart' Hunter for about 200 tonnes of fresh garden manure, if Dobbies' profits are anything to go by.