99 YEARS OLD AND STILL REWRITING FAIRY TALES...

TODAY we are proud to offer Cinderella 2016: an update on the classic tale incorporating modern scientific advances and political correctness.

Once upon a time, or three times, if you include the Disney version and the original Cenerentola by Giambattista Basile as well as the popular classic by Charles Perrault, there lived a kind and sweet girl known as Cinderella who was illegally employed on a zero-hours contract as a domestic servant by her wicked stepmother.

Instead of going off and looking for a proper job, Cinderella flitted around the house vaguely hoping that one day things would improve and she’d go to a ball and meet a handsome prince and marry him. One day, Cinderella’s fairy godmother dropped in and told her that she could go to exactly such a ball that evening.

“But I have nothing to wear,” said Cinderella, looking at the rags she was wearing.

“No problem,” said the FG and with a flick of her magic wand, the rags changed into a beautiful ball gown.

“Nice trick,” said Cinders. “You could give Derren Brown a run for his money, I bet. But how am I going to get to the ball? Could you stretch to lending me the taxi fare?”

“I can do better than that,” said the FG. “Bring me a pumpkin, some mice, a rat and some lizards and I shall transform them into a coach, a team of horses, a coachman and footmen.”

“Hang on a moment,” Cinderella pointed out, “all those transformations involve considerable weight gain. You’d need a huge amount of energy to do it. You can work it out if you like using Einstein’s formula for mass-energy equivalence. Where are you going to get all that energy from?”

“Easy,” said the FG. “We use dark energy, you see. They say that 69 per cent of the universe consists of dark energy and the best thing is that at the end of the ball, it all turns back into a pumpkin, mice, a rat and some lizards, releasing the energy and letting us return it to the dark energy supplier. But you’ll have to leave the ball before midnight, because that’s when everything changes back. As long as it’s the same day it won’t appear on the energy bill, you see.”

“Is that midnight British Summer Time or GMT?” asked Cinders. “I’d look pretty stupid if I turned into a pumpkin at midnight BST thinking I was safe for another hour.”

“Nobody’s ever asked that before,” said the FG. “Hang on, I’ll see what the instructions say,” and she clicked on the “Transformations” icon on her spell checker and looked carefully at what it had to say.”

“Sorry,” she said eventually, “it just says ‘midnight’. Maybe you’d better leave before 11pm, just to be sure.”

“But the party will hardly have got going by then,” protested Cinders. Then she glanced down at the glass slippers on her feet. “They’ll never let me in wearing these,” she shrieked. “Health and Safety would ban it and I’d be arrested by security for footwear that can be used as a weapon.”

So Cinders stayed home and the evil stepmother lived happily ever after.