101 YEARS OLD AND STILL COUNTING EVERY LETTER...

NEGOTIATIONS for Brexit have hit a new hurdle in the form of a statement from the influential All-Europe Institute for Orthographical Unity (AEIOU) which has raised vital questions concerning the alphabetical implications of the British exit which could have far-reaching consequences for everything from pints of beer to punctuation.

The problem with beer, which also affects other fizzy drinks, concerns the long-standing dispute over the origin of the ring pull. Sweden has always claimed that this was invented by the legendary brewer Hölsten Birkån, who claimed to have been inspired by the penultimate letter of his surname.

“Even as a child,” he said in the drunken haze of an interview given shortly before his death from alcohol poisoning in 1969, “I used to wonder what would happen if I pulled on the ring above the letter ‘a’.”

His claim to have invented the ring pull, however, has long been disputed by his Danish rival Pilsner Ringpull, who says it was named after him. As Denmark and Sweden are both EU members, now that the UK is leaving it has led to demands for a tariff agreement on ring pulls.

“The British will lose all rights to using letters in the Swedish alphabet, or parts of such letters,” says the Swedish representative on AEIOU.

“The British will lose all rights to the use of Danish surnames,” says the Danish delegate.

Meanwhile, the Germans have questioned the continued British use of colons. “When the UK joined the EU, we consented to a standardisation of British colons and German umlauts,” says Helmut Fragezeichen of the Deutscherechtschreibungsinstitut.

“This unified the distance between the dots of a British colon and the dots of a German umlaut, which has allowed punctuational trade between the two countries ever since, enabling colons to be used as umlauts and vice versa through a 90 degree turn.

“We will now have to revert to old measurements to counter the threat of post-Brexit diacritic smuggling. This cannot be achieved without great cost. The Deutscherechtschreibungsinstitut will expect compensation.”

In a highly unusual foray into the political arena, the Apostropher Royal, Sir D’Anville O’M’Darlin’, spluttered a firm rebuttal of the German claim. “The Germans have been smuggling our colons and semi-colons into their country for decades, using the former for umlauts and splitting the latter into commas and full stops much more cheaply than they can make their own.

“This is only possibly through my own campaign of semi-colonic irrigation which led to massive overproduction of semi-colons and the work I have supervised at the Small Colon Collider at Cerne Abbas which showed that one colon may be fused from two semi-colons at room temperature. But for these advances, the Germans would have run out of umlauts years ago.”

Boris Johnson said the Germans can have their umlauts and eat them but nobody was listening as he isn’t Foreign Secretary any more.