Clavam Hominum Senum Pallidorum

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The Clavam Homimum Senum Pallidorum was — some say, still is — a pre-Enlightenment secret society founded in a remote castle in Romania in the 13th Century. The society’s goals were to oppose promote the interests of all those with a common interest in chasing balls around, building fires, hunting and fishing, machinery, gadgets, explosions, racing cars, trains, space, beer-drinking, weak jokes, Pink Floyd guitar solos and boobs.

Over time The Senum Pallidorum metamorphosed from a harmless fishing club into an occult sect deeply entrenched in all aspects of the workings of society. Members were sworn to secrecy, and required to commit their lives — on pain of confiscation of their entire collection of Yes albums — to actively manouevring in their every activity, public or private, to frustrate the aspiration to self-actualisation of anyone who doesn’t play golf or enjoy Jeremy Clarkson’s Sunday Times columns. To this day, members — who are bound by oath to deny their participation, of course, though they have elaborate self-identification routines by which they identify each other — are deeply embedded in all branches of government, the academy, trade, commerce and industry, so their insidious influence continues to spread like a virus.

The group’s frustrating effect on the progress of social justice has been increasingly apparent, and it has been increasingly vilified by progressive critics who claim that, for all the formal advances in suffrage, equal treatment and legal protection that have been achieved over the last hundred years, much of this is more superficial than it is real, and loyalists to senum pallidorum continue to operate underground.