Councillor Steve van der Whitevanman said of the move today, “I think Mr Sheen would be a great ambassador for the Westside. His track record of winning will be a welcome change after cllr Gordon’s history of vanishing.”

Sheen has not yet replied to the invite. It is thought that councillors plan to send him a case of Tiger Blood as a sweetner.

Gordon was elected councillor for the Westside ward eighteen months ago, after promising every street in her area different improvements, ranging from traffic calming to shiny pound coins.

But in the last year, council attendance figures show that Gordon only turned up once, and the council admits that this record could be due to an accident.

“I’m chuffed to bits,” said rival Julia Wayward. “This pretend councillor has claimed the equivalent of over a grand an hour… I wish I was paid that much!”

The district council was red-faced this morning, and it was nothing to do with the red face someone had painted on the front of Pathfinder House. Spokesman Dean Dexter said, “We’re upset that we managed to have a made-up person representing an entire section of the best part of the best town in the District, and we won’t stand for these ghost-councillors ever again!”

Eaton Socon residents were vague about why they had voted for a non-entity. “I thought she’d come round and promised that all the houses in the street would be 20% bigger,” said Lady Way lady Lou Lady, 52. “Obviously I just imagined it.”

Cllr Wayward said that she would happily pick up the slack left by Gordon’s departure. “It’s typical of these Tories really,” she said. “They promise the earth then vanish into thin air – and in this case are even made out of it!”

The Citizen tried to reach cllr Gordon for comment, but then realised that most mediums were slightly fraudulent, and frankly we’d rather spend the £15 fee on some fried chicken and beer.

We are, after all, from St Neots.

Currently, most people have three wheelie bins, or different coloured bags for their rubbish. The new system will include up to 87 different coloured bags and fourteen bins.

“We think this is definitely the way forward,” said district councillor for Eaton Ford Rob Barrier. “The new scheme will allow people to properly sort their recycling and cut down on the confusion of what goes in which bin.”

Indeed, the new system is much more specific. Milk bottles, for example, go in the purple-with-yellow-stripes bag, whilst milk bottle lids go in the grey-with-pink-flowers bin. Other types of plastic are separated too: Coca-Cola bottles go in the see-through bin with squiggly lines on it, whilst Dr Pepper drinkers will dispose of their empty containers in the box with a picture of Spongebob Squarepants on it.

“Once everyone gets used to it,” said Barrier, “we’ll all wonder ‘why did it take so long to implement such a brilliant scheme?”

Eynesbury resident Joshua Nicassist, 34, called the scheme “absolute ridiculous bollocks.”

“Honestly,” he said, “where am I going to put my fourteen bins? I live in a flat for fuck’s sake. And the binbags – apparently they’ll only be collected when full, about every seven or eight weeks. They’re just going to end up ripped open by cats who will then be disappointed to find nothing edible inside!”

Indeed, the felines of St Neots look set to face disappointment. Meat and bones cannot be thrown into any of the bins, and residents must find a way to dispose of these items themselves. “What are we supposed to do with the leftovers from a Sunday roast, then?” asked Whitehouse man Jimmy Saddle, 67. “I suppose I could mould last week’s cabbage to look like an empty Snickers wrapper, and put it in the shiny bag with sequins on it, and maybe the carrots could pass as unused pens and go in the stationery bag – the one made out of tinfoil with hearts and butterflies drawn on. Fuck knows what I’ll do with the gravy though.”

This reporter, who drinks approximately seven gallons of tea per day, is more concerned about what to do with his used teabags. Councillor Barrier said, “I don’t see what the problem is. We’re providing a lovely net bag made out of rice paper for teabags – it will do the job perfectly, and be collected every six months.”

Long and complicated second names like Gdnagley and van der Whitevandriver van der Whitevandriverman van der Whitevandriver have lead to a plague of difficult to spell names displayed all over St Neots.

Pre-empting this confusion, local parliamentary candidate Marvin Land had changed his name to “something easy to spell”. His original family name of Rumplestiltskin was seen to be too confusing in an environment where long and difficult to spell names were in vogue.

Land commented, “We were concerned that too many long, hard to spell names might confuse the electorate and lead to election fatigue which would be no good for any of us. So after van der Whitevandriver van der Whitevandriverman van der Whitevandriver declined the offer to shorten his name I felt I had to.”

The plans, however, have lead to confusion amongst road users, residents and ramblers alike. The Town Hall has been “inundated” with calls asking where Marvin Land is and where the borders start and finish. A member of staff who did not wish to be named said, “I have to admit there were a few laughs in the office when pensioners and lorry drivers were calling to say they had entered Marvin Land. Lols.”

Local resident Ethel Farqhuit, 79, said, “We were coming back from Roxton when we saw all these Marvin Land signs, my husband Ron was worried as we didn’t have our passports, we thought we were in Cambridgeshire, no one told us about this new country. We blame the district council”

Local haulier Dave Skandia was also confused. “Nothing showed up on the sat nav, there were no border controls, my mate Bob said it might be a bit like Arnhem Land in Australia but wetter and colder.”

Huntingdon District Council were asked to comment and made the following statement:

“There is no such place as Marvin Land and to our knowledge there has been no declaration of independence locally. We assume he must be a person, even though nobody has ever physically seen him, and people should not be concerned that they may be in a different country.”

Local councillor Steve van der Whitevandriver van der Whitevandriverman van der Whitevandriver, who shortened hsi name to van der Whitevanman, told the Citizen “There’s no such place but wouldn’t it be good if we could declare independence from those tossers at district?”

Local candidate Jonathon Gdangley said he knew Marvin Land and said “he is certainly no country but soon could be if he got any bigger.”

When asked why had they (SNCG) had nominated someone from so far afield, Cllr Paul Marcel replied “Grafham’s not that far. We have allowed our District councillors to stand as PPC as far as Birkenhead”

Current Eynesbury District Councillor and Birkenhead PPC, Cllr Andre Gribbert, followed up Cllr Marcel’s comment. “It’s perfectly acceptable, why should us Tory candidates have to live in these run down constituencies. I don’t live in Eynesbury I live on Eynesbury Manor, Eynesbury residents will not understand. I doubt they will even vote.”

“We will win Eynesbury, the Grafham candidate knows all our dirty tricks.”

Cllr van der Whitevanman has vented his disgust at the candidate. “Arrogance, pure arrogance. Has he ever been to Eynesbury? Clearly not, or he’d be getting involved in the pointless arguements about Tesco petrol prices!”

We caught up with Tory District hopeful Lan der’scaper, “What are you talking about, I’m not standing for election am I? Where? Eynesbury sounds awful.” He promptly walked off huffing.

HDC CEO Davis Munts was seen fleeing Barrtts department store using obscene language after trying to use the cafe toilet without buying anything.

Frightened staff were shaking after a tiraid of abuse from Mr Munts after being told that he would need to buy from the cafe to use the toilet facilities.

Betty Taylor-Harrogate, Barretts’ cafe cashier, was shocked to see such behaivour from Mr Munts, “I was scared and shocked, he was like a wild animal. All he kept screamimng was that he was touching cloth and need to use the toilets urgently.”

“‘Turtle’s head or not’, I said, ‘unless to buy a tea or scone your not using the facilities’.”

At this point an enraged Mr Munts fled the store and was seen heading in direction of Westgate’s. But quick thinking Barretts staff phoned ahead to give advance warning.

Having been seen off by staff at the Co-op department store, Mr Munts was seen heading to the soon-to-be-charged-for Lidl car park with a whiff in the air.

Mr Munts denied St Neots Citizen comment.

The town’s location in a geographically distinct “bowl” or dip means that the temperature in St Neots is on average 1.5º higher than Huntingdon or Cambridge, but also means that locals are protected from the worst of the weather.

“You can really notice it if you visit one of the few streets which is up on the ‘rim’, so to speak,” said local Expert Scientist Jim James of CERN. “Have a wander through Bean Close next time it’s been icy, and the frost and snow stays on the ground that little bit longer because they’re not in the dip.”

However, St Neotians have refuted these claims, laying the blame squarely at the door of Pathfinder House. “It’s a disgrace,” said Eynesbury resident Peter Husbanick, 31. “Huntingdon always gets the better deal: more cinemas, more traffic lights, more chavs, and now more snow.”

Town councillor Terrence Dougall, 81, said “I’ll have to look into this. I’ll ask the District Council some questions without the use of any punctuation and see what they have to say about it.”

The Citizen contacted a local pensioner for a quote as well. Ethel Cotton, 79, ranted that “In my day we had ice on the inside of the windows, and the Thames used to freeze over, but we strapped wooden planks – with the nails still in them – to our feet and used them to ski the forty-two miles to school every day.”

“What a fucking excellent scheme,” said District Councillor for Eynesbury ward, Paul Marcel. “We set ourselves a load of secret targets we knew we probably wouldn’t hit, like processing all waste in the same day, and not having a big queue of cars on the road outside the new Marston Road tip.

“By not telling anyone the place was open, and hiding the signs for it behind trees, we’ve managed to hit and pass our targets on day one of operation! Fantastic!”

Town Councillor Terrence Dougall, dangerously risking thinking for himself once again, said “This is a bloody marvellous idea; what legend thought that up?” When it was pointed out to cllr Dougall that it was in fact the mad scheme of a Conservative, rather than Liberal Democrat, member, he spat “What a pissing ridiculous plan. How am I supposed to recycle all this crap in my garden if I don’t know where the tip is? I mean I can’t even find Marsden Road on the map.

“Furthermore,” he continued, “I’d like to know what our local MP Jonathan Gerdangly has been up to on his holidays; why wasn’t he around to open the dump?”

Residents were equally underimpressed as Dougall, sixty-odd, who is fast taking Derek Miles’ crown as the crankiest Lib Dem representative. Naseby Gardens homeowner Scott Adams, 50, said, “I’d be pleased with the new ‘recycling centre’ if I ever had anything to recycle, but since the missus left me I only need one of those half-sized blue bins.”

Duck Lane resident Miranda Rankin, 44, voiced her concern that “it’ll just become another place for these twats in Nova’s to hang about at night, won’t it. There’s something that attracts them to a shithole – which must be why there are so many in St Neots to begin with.”

Under directive 09/447/EC, the terms “spitting distance” and “a stone’s throw” could soon be disappearing, particularly from promotional literature.

EU spokesman Johann Rohan said today, “It is clear to me that St Neots is not “a stone’s throw” away from Cambridge. Neither is your own riverside park “spitting distance” from the Market Square.

“This can be very confusing, especially for foreign visitors who already get confused by your insistence on using archaic Imperial measurements for almost everything.”

The directive aims to officially define a stone’s throw as the average distance a stone can be thrown in Brussels with a prevailing north-easterly wind, when the weight of the stone is a known factor. This value is apparntly 26.3 meteres, although how legislators arrived at this figure is really anyone’s guess. A 7,335-word report compiled by oft-quoted Expert Scientists into why spitting distance is defined as “about three feet” is also available.

Rohan added that a number of other expressions were also under review, in particular the threat of knocking someone “into the middle of next week”, which may lead non-native speakers of English to believe that time travel had at last been cracked. Avoiding international confusion in the UK is no new minefield, as the last decade has seen Jif change to Cif and our beloved Opal Fruits to Starburst.

Councillors hit back at the policy. “What a load of old shit,” said Bob Farms, councillor for mystery Hardwick parish. “These are traditional common-use English expressions, and the EU has no right to interfere with our colloquialisms and odd sayings.”

Rohan responded that a “load” of “old” shit was specifically two metric tonnes of faeces which is three weeks and one day old. He added that anyone caught using outdated expressions after 1st December this year would face a fine of up to half a Rowley Million, and this would also apply to people who still call Somerfield “Gateway”.

Council leader Julia Wayward said, “It’s a load of absolute bollocks.” The legislation does not yet specify how many bollocks a load comprises.

We gained access to a secret testing facility near Abbotsley, thought to be in Cllr Bob Farms’ mythical Eynesbury Hardwick parish, and managed to take a photo or two.

It is thought that the contraption, which is essentially an enormous household dustbin, will be used by the Council to process unrecyclable waste – including that which they cannot be bothered to recycle – to avoid sending it to a traditional landfill and thereby receive increased Government and EU subsidies.

“Brilliant ruse,” mused former town council leader Derek Miles of Eaton Ford. “Instead of sending everything to a big pile of garbage it’ll be stored in these three-storey bins, in a warehouse, and it’ll just look like it is ‘awaiting processing’. Genius!”

The height of the bin seems to be roughly that of the upper level of the new Cromwell Road tip, currently under construction. This would allow residents to empty all manner of crap from the back of their car directly into the receptacle, where it is thought that the rufuse will be compacted by “some geezer jumping on it”.

It is understood that when each bin is filled, it will be sealed and left out the back of Tesco, where local chavs will hopefully set fire to it, allowing for incinceration without all the associated paperwork. “I think it’s a bit daft to be honest,” said Weston Court resident Nora Thampton, 32. “If the council want to burn rubbish without a license why don’t they just say that someone dropped a fag-end in the new tip or something?”

Rumours also surfaced that HDC plans to construct a wheeled version of the monstrous trash can, and provide one to every household – making fortnightly bin collections a thing of the past. An unnamed contact at Pathfinder House said “usually when people talk about abolishing bi-weekly collections, they think we’ll go back to picking up their unwanted waste every seven days. With these new bins, every seven months is a more realistic timescale.”

The council had no official comment.