Fantasy dreams

I've just woken from a deep and troubled sleep. A nightmare really. The lottery didn't exist and all those billions, from which retailers make a margin, weren't there. And we all had to build traffic from the current national craze, the ABC Circulation Fantasy League.

It's a strange game because it involved 10 national teams, each with a manager (known as a circulation manager or CM) and they had to run a race each day to deliver words and pictures to 50,000 destinations or `goals'.

All the team players who did the racing about were qualified members of Accelerated National Moving Words. They were paid wages and a performance bonus with hundreds of millions of pounds changing hands each year.

What I couldn't work out was why all the members of ANMW were playing for all the teams at the same time. We were told it was a competition, but who was competing with whom?

Then the penny dropped. They were all playing to lose, of course. Each team was scoring less and less each season and the real end game was for each CM to survive the job on his share of less and less. They had also worked out that, having more and more destinations, kept up their work rate and kept up the wages they could claim from more and more goals.

The guys from ANMW had worked this out and had succeeded in playing for everybody making sure that they had secured a bigger share of less and less and avoid relegation.

But I was still in the mists of confusion when I spoke to some of the 50,000 goalkeepers chained up at the destinations.

They said the ANMW team players were coming round each week and demanding more and more payments. Something garbled about the losses they were making from the shrinking figures and something called a carriage needed feeding.

Last week alone, the ANMW players demanded extras averaging 1.2%. I asked about customers, but nobody seemed to know what they were.

Then I woke up in a muck sweat, shaking with fear. Thank goodness we don't have to deal with something like that every day.