Culture sneaked, city weeps

The grimy-faced people of Liverpool were left distraught yesterday, as the last piece of culture was finally hauled out of the city by a faceless legion of robot slaves. The Merseyside concentration, once home to The Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley, had enjoyed a prominent period as a ‘European Capital Of Culture’, but its citizens were unaware of the small print in this apparently Faustian pact.

Art critics, commentators and prominent figures such as Cilla Black, Sir Simon Rattle and Les Dennis were last night loaded into cattle vans and driven across Europe by cover of blackness, in order to be repurposed as talking points in Vilnius, Lithuania – and Linz, in Austria. The fate of their hastily constructed families had not been determined at the time of writing.