Laugh or cry. I don't know which

There's a strange feeling that you have when you listen to the radio in the morning, as you wake up. You're overhearing information that enters into your consciousness by the back door, and then when you hear the item of news again later, you feel a sense of deja vu. I experience this pretty much daily, since I use my radio alarm clock to wake me up. It's tuned to XFM, so a fair amount of their morning content is quite strange, veering between items for pure humour value (and I do find Christian O'Connell very funny, even if other people don't) and real news.

There are those occasions where there's a news item that's so absurd that you think it could only be an April fool, or that maybe in your half-sleep you completely misunderstood the idea being reported.

Today has yielded just such a gem, with the news that car drivers in the UK will be expected to pay-per-mile that they travel, tracked by satellite. It's as if I went to sleep in a less-than-pleasant modern society last night, then woke up today in some kind of socialist enviro-nightmare. Don't get me wrong, I would say that certain parts of my psyche lean in a socialist direction (the super-rich should be taxed a lot harder than they are to relieve the burden on everyone else - I'm thinking footballers especially). And I also have sympathy with environmental causes, because we all know that something has to be done about global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, etc.

But pay-per-mile is insanely obtrusive. Can you imagine not only the level of individual liberty that would have to be sacrificed with the implementation of this technology, but also the cost of implementing it?

It's like the story about Prince Charles becoming Countryside Tsar from the front page of the Guardian on April 1st this year. At the time, I read that article and, being in a bout of 'flu, assumed that I was hallucinating. As I continued reading, it became clear that it was a joke.

I've now read the story about pay-per-mile several times, and the hallucinations aren't wearing off.