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Listen folks, we can all learn from the big guy. Inspired by Donald Trump, I have been working on my own liberation day tariff system for the neighbours and local merchants taking advantage of my generous nature for far too long. Too many of us are being played for suckers by organisations like, oh, I don’t know, shops, selling us things we want at competitive prices.
So if someone has been selling you things, or just annoying you in some other way, it’s tariff time. For a start, my own household needs to do something about the Ocado man, who for some years now has been bringing in large amounts of food to our house while buying none of our own. Each week he arrives with a dozen bags and refuses to purchase even an egg mayonnaise sandwich to ease our hefty trading deficit.
We have warned him that we will shortly be adding a 20 per cent tariff to the cost of his deliveries. I must admit he did not seem too bothered that our grocery bill will soon be 20 per cent higher. My team of crack economic advisers — a couple of journalists and the chap who walks our dog — assure me that though this may hurt us a little in the short term, the long-term benefits are enormous as we will soon stop using Ocado, get an allotment and a small farm and start producing more of our own food just like we didn’t do before. We will end the carnage and bring the sound of sheep, chickens and pigs back to south-west London. I haven’t worked out how to source the manuka honey yet, but we might start employing local bees and see how it goes. Or, failing that, a squeezy bottle of Rowse might work.
Actually, now that I think of it, I may also have to impose tariffs on the dog-walker since he routinely takes money from us but never pays us to walk his dog. His lame excuse is that he doesn’t have a dog to walk but frankly we are fed up with being played for suckers. Alternatively, we may settle for a mineral rights deal, which allows us to dig up his garden in search of rare earths (or maybe dahlias).
Speaking of digging, I have now slapped our gardener with an entry fee for time spent on my land. There has been ugly talk of retaliation, with him saying he’ll simply add the entry fee to my bill, but I’ve warned him that if he tries retaliation I’ll simply double the fee, so he can’t win. I have yet to identify the relative who will take over the gardening duties if he fails to back down but this is a great opportunity to bring one of these key manual jobs back home. Of course, if no one volunteers I may have to grant an exemption for horticultural workers.
Naturally, coming up with a precise formula for tariffing friends, local suppliers and neighbourhood penguins was a complex and exhaustive process. None of us could be bothered with long division and we don’t understand ChatGPT so in the end we bought some bingo cards and we threw darts at them.
And it’s not just economic problems my tariffs will solve. Last night, for example, my wife hogged the TV to binge-watch The White Lotus. Once she might have got away with little more than some eye-rolling and a sulk. Now I can see that tariffs may be the answer. I just don’t want to start off too ferociously and risk having her notice the existing household trade imbalance.
The family three doors down have done nothing to stop their fat Persian cat parking its hefty rump in our back garden and taunting our dog into lengthy paroxysms of barking. So we are currently working on some vicious, but as yet uncalculated, tariffs till they fix their feline border and address the trespussing. Then there’s the neighbour with the crying baby who always steals our parking space and those people opposite who repainted their house in a colour we don’t like, both of whom face a 20 per cent charge for any packages we take in for them.
Of course, we have concerns that the entire street may soon be sunk in a retaliatory tariff war with the households in it taxing each other for every small favour but people have been free-riding on my generosity for too long. Let’s learn from Donald. This ends today.
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