Scientists with nothing better to do have been sponsored by the Daily Mail to calculate the amount of time it will take for the entire country to go to "hell in a handcart". And there is mixed news.
Firstly, the scientists had to solve the problem of where hell is. Some scientists argued that hell could exist in a parallel dimension and that it is therefore very close indeed, if access to that dimension could somehow be reached. But for the purposes of argument and to please elderly readers, it was decided that hell is 1 mile below the Earth's surface, at the beginning of its molten core.
A handcart can carry approximately 10 people at once - of course there is no legroom - and it can travel at 10mph if pulled by a particularly athletic hell-slave. At this rate 50 people an hour can be transported to hell!
All quite shocking! So it was quite a relief to discover that it would take 114 years to transport the entire population of the UK to hell using this method (not counting immigrants and asylum seekers of course).
However, it is thought that many handcarts could operate in parallel, vastly reducing the amount of time it would take.
So, whichever way you look at it, it does indeed really appear that we are heading for "hell in a handcart"!
