Still Stranger than Fiction

Watching the news this week I found myself back in the department marked 'Stranger than Fiction'. What took me there was the story about footage of young children being egged on to fight each other which was posted on the web. This was quickly followed by news that several boys had been arrested for arranging fights via a social networking site. It seems that my story last year describing the terrible new urban phenomena of organised child fighting (Fighting For the Kids) wasn't simply a product of my fevered imagination. It really does seem to be getting to the stage where you can't make up anything which someone will then contrive to emulate in real life. Of course, there's always the possibility that these people were inspired to start organising child fights by reading my story. As I've noted here many times before, there seem to be a lot of people out there on the web who appear totally incapable of discerning the difference between truth and fiction.

Mind you, it isn't just the child fighting which is being emulated in reality. Way back when, I published a story called Crime Wave, in which the British government was coming under fire for importing foreign criminals to fill the 'crime gap', caused by the shortage of indigenous law-breakers. Bizarrely, we've recently been treated to the sight of an Australian sex-offender being sent to the UK once he'd completed his sentence in Australia. Now, I know that it was presented in the press as a case of Australia exporting a criminal (in which case, one must question the wisdom of such a policy - can a country with such a small population afford to be exporting such skilled offenders), but I can't believe that he would have been allowed into the UK without some kind of work permit. Perhaps the powers-that-be have decided that we need a more exotic brand of paedophilia in this country, rather than the usual drab perverts we produce. All of this leaves me wondering which of my stories will be next to come true - perhaps next week the Archbishop of Canterbury will be busted for supplying class-A drugs.