Our cathedral is in a sorry state, and so are we. My kingdom for a dead mouse, that's what Richard the Third would say, were he our ruler. We live in ruins, but we have the pleasure to know these are free, independent ones. And ours. A whole population of 3478 souls is tightly packed in a building made to praise God, and all we can think about is food and sex. Where are the fighting spirit, the die-hard nationalism ? Kings of the heaps, heaps of sanctified rubble and garbage that shine under the shafts of light coming from the ceiling. Some victory indeed. In the morning, when we wake up in the cold and damp, we go to the ground windows and peer over the border, just to make sure it is still here. All we can see are the customs officers, asleep in their little useless booths.

The only fun we have is to wake them up, shove our brand new national identification papers under their running noses, cheerfully wave our age-old flag and cross the dotted line as free, independent citizens. They barely nod and let us go. Surprisingly, there have been few incidents. A few days ago our militia shot a foreign dog caught peeing on the left north pillar. The dog's owner came to the portal (our militia had nearly shot him too) and was returned his animal back in a doggy bag. No apologies, because the Independence Treaty clearly authorises us to shoot whoever comes to see us without approval, regardless of race, gender or species. However, this does not solve the food and sex problems, which are increasingly