Before I begin may I just make a delayed apology for any increase in VaT you might be having to fork out? I don't think VaT is actually payable on this article, and strictly speaking it wouldn't be my fault if it were, so it's an English sort of sorry, born of good manners rather than blame.  The word 'tax' comes from the Latin taxo meaning 'I estimate', which hardly seems a precise concept, but then it turned out the word 'prudence', which we spent a decade hearing about, was a rather looser term than had been supposed.  It was the ancient Egyptians who first thought of tax. Twice a year the pharaoh would tour the country gathering money. I like to think of him striding on stage at large venues wearing a range of dynastic merchandise while a slave bellowed: 'Good evening, Memphis! Let's give it up for the Pharaoh!'  apparently our VaT hike is needed because the country has run out of money. Now, I only know this because many trustworthy politicians have stated it as fact, but I haven't actually been to the bank to check. I know I didn't overspend. I'm not sitting at home with unopened boxes of flat screen televisions that I scooped up on a whim.  Perhaps the Coalition have been going mad with the Downing Street credit card insisting that they must have two of everything. The fact is I don't know how much money is missing. Truth has become a slippery fellow and you sometimes wonder if we aren't all the victims of a giant hoax. Perhaps there is plenty of cash in the government vaults and the extra tax is merely a slush fund for those poor bankers fallen on soft times.  I think it would be worth checking for we, the public, can be terrible mugs if we are not careful. It was today in 1749 that a riot took place at the Haymarket Theatre in London when the assembled throng (who had paid as much as 7s 6d to be present) realised they had been conned. an unknown person had taken out an advertisement declaring that 'he would, on the stage, get into a tavern quart bottle, without equivocation, and while there, sing several songs, and suffer any spectator to handle the bottle'. Even from here the only thing you can smell from the advertised 'quart bottle' is the noxious fumes given off by a mountebank yet that evening the place was packed with the good and the great, including the Duke of Cumberland still glowing from his triumph at Culloden.  apparently the duke was the first to get into a rage when the bottle-dwelling charlatan failed to appear. 'Butcher' Cumberland drew his sword and soon the theatre was in uproar and most of its contents demolished.  I'm not suggesting, as some do, that riots should be ? la mode, but perhaps we all need to be a tad more sceptical. I have a dreadful tendency to accept official statements.  I had always believed it, for example, when the FBI declared that Kate 'Ma' Barker (who died today in 1935) was a rare female mastermind in the public enemy era of american crime. It is true that Ma Barker had three boys who fairly rapidly turned to crime. What is not true, I recently read with regret, is that she had much to do with it. Indeed, the Barker boys probably took up naughtiness because