The apprenctice and the kebab a modern day fairy story.

Not everyone is screwed by the credit crunch. Every cloud has a silver lining, every repossession requires the employment of several bailiffs, suicide attempts keep nurses in work and on each pile of rotting, bloated corpses is a swarm of plump rats.

Or, to put it another way: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!" Well, as any drinks manufacturer will tell you, you don't need lemons to make lemonade. Neither do you need meat to make a doner kebab-flavour Pot Noodle. Apparently this new addition to the Pot Noodle range is practically vegan.

Excellent! At last, vegans are being extended the same opportunities to get hooked on cheap microwave food as the rest of society. But lemon-free lemonade and meat-flavoured starchy string are exactly the sort of products that are selling at the moment. Everyone is blowing what little spare money they have on crap treats. McDonald's sales are rising; Pontin's is expanding; people are looking for the sensation of wasting money, on a budget.

Why piss away a fiver on a latte and an almond croissant when you'll get a similar buzz from a can of Tizer and a battered sausage and have change from two quid? Plus the taste of your treat is nostalgically reawakened every time you burp for the next 36 hours.

Budget foods are flying off supermarket shelves (that's genetically modified chicken for you), bookmakers are prospering - presumably because lots of unemployed bankers are trying to keep their hands in - and the number of people doing the pools has risen for the first time since the launch of the National Lottery, for which ticket sales have also increased. So we can expect brand new opera houses and art galleries to spring up everywhere, which is nice because they'll be somewhere for all the tramps to sleep.

There are green shoots all over the place, though most of them are green because they died so long ago they've gone mouldy. So, in that spirit of optimism, here is a businesses that has managed to buck the downward trend which I found in the papers this weekend.

Homeless Security plc

With factories closing, hundreds of disused sites need guarding around the clock. But while all this property is falling into disuse, thousands are being made homeless. "We just took those two wrongs and made a right!" says Homeless Security's managing director. "The simple fact is that if there's already a gang of homeless sleeping in a disused factory, another gang aren't going to move in. So, on behalf of the administrators called in to wind up failed companies, we source a bunch of relatively tidy tramps to keep the place occupied. They're as dependable as guard dogs and cheaper since the cider we pay them in costs less than Pedigree Chum."

A wonderful cellar come diner

Joseph Fritzl – obviously an awful case – OBVIOUSLY so I don’t want to seem glib – but… the other day in court he said two things that messed me up a bit. Here they are.

“Elizabeth exaggerated about the cellar”
“They always had plenty of food”

Ok. So what’s your point mate? That it was nice down there? That Elisabeth was somehow ungrateful for her life in a spacious coffin in which the “final word” of death would’ve been a welcome buzz? “That cellar was nice. It was warm – it was romantic – terrific mood lighting for the constant incestuous sex.” And as for this abundant delicious nosh he claims he was providing, I cant help but think it’d be scant consolation for the Grandkids who’d never seen daylight. “Oh no! Granddad/Dad is touching Mum/sister/cousin… again.” “Oh cheer up and have a hob-nob”

The long and winding road

This week was interesting, it was filled with such a range of emotions, I can only describe it by saying it felt like I was eating both sugar and salt at the same time. The fact is that may have been slightly easier at some point to swallow that very concoction. My mind has been revolving lately on the mind of journalism, because that is what is listed as 'my job', however that's not what I do, I am a commentator, that's all I do. I am discoursing my thoughts for you to read and enjoy or loathe and so on. The problem I have found this week, which has added to my rather bitter summary of the week, is that I have realised that writing, and so commentating, is possibly one of the most selfish professions one can enter. You start to believe that your emotional responses to the annoyances of life are of value and you start to get very lazy. You stop genuinely inspecting your own heart, and stop making rational, considered points. This is detrimental to only one person. The writer, me.

The case in point, thus the first cloud that loomed over me this week, regarded the soon to become vacant chair in the Diocese of Westminster, the saga which has been reduced to nothing more then a cheap (very cheap) soap opera here in the U.K. It has been reported that the most likely candidate for Westminster is somebody who I cannot stand, correction, despise. So this week on several news forums remarking on his possible election, I have been livid and thrown venomous tirades and tantrums, not thinking about what is typed on my beautiful white and translucent keys, but writing black and horror and pathetic words which are strung together with no more objection of purpose other then to blacken the forums of the blogs I have darkened. That sounds sinister, doesn’t it? Well it is, and it was. O.K I have a particular loathsome attitude against the candidate because he offended me nearly a year ago, and I have neither forgiven nor forgotten, but it brings me to the point which I am trying to make. In the end, it truly is our emotions that dominate us.

How many of you readers keep a diary? Do you ever read it back to yourself? I read mine once ever six months or so, and it amazes me, the style in which I write down my thoughts. My diary is either a place where argument and example and experience are reduced to considered points that is quite rational, and there is the subjective journey, where memory and experience of a different kind is used to forge a point I am trying make. The problem I find is, emotion is so much more easily accessed then reason.

After various decisions made positively last year, I decided that I would work on my emotions (sounds terribly American doesn’t it?). Still music fills me with so much emotion, that makes me happy, sad, sadder, there isn’t a song that hasn’t been written that fails to enhance or change my mood. Yet at the same time since the decline of the milkman’s whistle melody has It seems that young people attach themselves to their Ipods and listen to their rapular music whilst they smack themselves with heroin and knife each other in the gut. Yes, the milkman’s whistle which created routine and brought with it a sense of honour and comfort as well as community and cohesion, has faded, and so now if you want all of that back, you can go whistle for it.
There you have it you see? The article has written itself, I have gone off down sentimental alley and tied it together with a catchy nostalgic saying by writing ‘you can go whistle for it.’ This is what most diaries novels and weekly columns like the one I write, are full of. Nostalgic crap.

Yet my problem is anger. Writing with anger is possibly the easiest trap to fall into. It doesn’t even matter what it is, but a bit of fury can take you a long way. I have so much of it, against people who deserve it, possibly people who don’t, but it is destroying everyone around me. I have a friend who phoned me the other evening whose ear was practically bleeding down the phone as he spoke about the very topic I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I fear this person will only now ever mention safe topics in anxiety of having their remaining ear chewed of, or head removed. But it is so difficult isn’t it?

Yes, this week was difficult. So much erupted around me, and much like the volcano around Tonga, a lot of wildlife was destroyed in the process, but what good is writing about it, what good at all? The point is I can learn from it, as can you. What is so intriguing about this process of anger we build inside ourselves is that there seems to be a way for me to tell you how to sort it out, but not a way for me to tell me to sort it out! I wish I could give you an emotional Heimlich so you could cough up that fear and anxiety, but I can't. I wish I could forget all the pettiness and patheticness gone before and just get on with my life, yet somehow I can't. I wish things had have gone one way, I wish things could have gone the other, I wish I could know if some things would have made me different, but what’s the point of all this wishing?
We wake up everyday with a list of wishes a mile long and maybe we spend our lives trying to make those wishes come true, but just because we want them doesn't mean in the end, we need them to be happy.

Life after a cats death.

What happens when we die, it's a big question isn't it? According to a recent survey, the most common belief in the UK is in reincarnation. Do you believe in reincarnation? Apparently you do. It seems to be a 'nice' theory for most people, that way they can come back as a cat, and sit in front of the fire, and watch their widows or loved ones making love to other people who are young and trendy, once the grieving process has run its course. Anyway, I drift, the point is we have got it so wrong about reincarnation, it is such a daunting and petrifying thought if you think about it for what it literally is. We are being told the that the planet's falling apart. Right now, it's the children's problem. We reincarnate, it's our problem. Now where do you think you're going when your full sized aortic pump stops?

Butter ... still one of the biggest philosophies?

I went shopping today, apparently I just eat twenty-four hours a day. And that's when it was confirmed, we just have too much choice. This particular epiphany was experienced in the dairy section of the supermarket, how much choice do we have when it comes to butter? Just give me butter for goodness sake, that's all I want. I haven't got time for all this, I can't believe it's not butter, butter me up, butterlicious, fuck me this is like butter, the choice is overwhelming.
And what are they really on about? I can't believe it's not butter, this has been on sale now for what, twenty years? I am starting to conquer my disbelief personally. I think I they should rename it, I am prepared to accept in fact, this is actually not butter.

Have your misinformed bigoted or racist say about everything you don't like.

It's been a good week for transparency, which is bad news for people who get undressed with the light on. Last Tuesday, Gordon Brown said: "We have clearly got the balance wrong when online businesses have higher standards of transparency than the public services" and announced that, as a result, people are going to be able to comment online about GPs, hospitals, nurseries, schools and the police, just like they can on Amazon, eBay, and my top website - TripAdvisor.

I expect that'll sort everything out. The prime minister is deploying what he calls "the enormous democratising power of information". Well, you don't have to do much surfing to find books, CDs, YouTube clips, newspaper articles, restaurants and theatre shows that have all had the shit democratised out of them. He's invoking the collective wisdom of the nation to pass judgment on and improve our public services. Unfortunately, he'll mainly attract the same self-selecting bunch of inexplicably livid weirdos who infect the comment sections on all websites.

There are many perfectly reasonable remarks put online, and others that are only bland or harmlessly nonsensical, but if there's one thing the internet demonstrates it's that a lot of angry people can read. Their writing, on the other hand, needs work. If you're in any doubt, go to ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com which provides a hilarious selection of the most illiterate, prejudiced and irate posts from the BBC's Have Your Say site. It not only makes me laugh, it makes me angry at what people write, thus providing a moment's insight into what it feels like to be a member of the incensed posting community.

I reckon I've got off pretty lightly from online comments (until now) but still, there's always someone who reads my blog and doesn't just disagree or dislike it but reacts as if I've stamped on their foot and punched their mother. It's like I've said the very thing they have been furiously expecting me to say their whole life. Like they're a teenager and I'm their maddening sibling who, with just a syllable out of place, can release a torrent of rage because they SO knew I was going to say that because that's EXACTLY the sort of CRAP that I ALWAYS SAY. To them, I typify a horrendously unfair world that's all wrong, but will never change because it's run by the likes of me and Gordon Brown and JK Rowling and Bono and Lulu, sitting at the top table guzzling money pie in hypocrisy sauce and laughing in their apoplectic faces.

Last Sunday, someone with the username Veganjules rabidly exhorted me to calm down about teenage spending. It was about as logical as screaming at someone to relax or they might set off a landmine. Then they called me a 'twat'.

So if I, as someone whose work doesn't really affect people's lives, am subjected to this online abuse, what are GPs, nurses, consultants, police and teachers in for? They're obliged to tell people things that they don't want to hear: to arrest them, give them homework, make them stop eating fried breakfasts, announce that their gran died on the table.

While scrutiny of these professions is vital, a single lay opinion is simply not as valid as a professional one in those contexts. This idea of a "democratising strategy" (of endorsing abuse) could have unfortunate consequences. Some things shouldn't be that democratic: "I'm afraid you've got terminal cancer." "No, doctor, I vote that I don't. I won't die." The only consolation for hospitals is that the patients they most fail won't be in a position to criticise.

Most people don't comment much online. They're not arrogant enough to think their opinions, or anger, are of general interest. But the convention of inviting comment from the benign many has put a metaphorical speakers' corner at the bottom of every web page for the poisonous few.

A friend of mine has come up with an idea to stem the tide of bile. He wants people to post, as a comment, on as many opinion-garnering web pages as possible, as often as they can be bothered, the phrase: "It just goes to show you can't be too careful!"

Give Me Shelter From Courtesy

Daniel Craig got it in the neck last week because a photograph appeared to show him failing to share his umbrella with his fiancée, Satsuki Mitchell. It was a pretty tenuous criticism as the picture wasn't clear: he wasn't hogging it, but then again she wasn't particularly under it. Maybe milliseconds later he'd swept her to safety. Then again perhaps he'd just murmured: 'Get out of my space, bitch. My undampened face is my fortune.' But then she might like the rain and hate being constricted under the clammy spans of a patriarchal society - Craig knows better than to make the patronising offer of shelter. After all, in the picture she's grinning. But maybe it's the brave grin of someone hiding pain, neglect: "I'm alright really!" she's begging us to think. "Deep down he cares!"

Whatever the truth of the situation, people seem very clear that James Bond wouldn't have got himself into it. Bond's far too gallant for that, they say - he knows how to treat a lady. I don't know where they get this idea from, as all we've seen James Bond do is shoot or have sex with people (sometimes the same people, although thankfully not in that order) and - in Quantum of Solace - mope about. The main thing about James Bond is that he doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks. He's a bit of a dick, really - not someone you'd want to end up next to at a dinner party - but he keeps saving the world, so, you know, fair enough.

But anyone looking at James Bond and thinking, 'That's what I call a real man' couldn't be more wrong. That's what you call a fictional man - he faces none of the predicaments with which real men like Daniel Craig have to cope. 'Go in there, kill the bad guys, save the girl and disable the nuke,' doesn't present a dilemma. You've just got to have a go and hope you're good enough. Even Craig's new 'Bond with emotions' never has to deal with anything as awkward as being seen to shelter but not condescendingly cosset a woman in rainy conditions. He's never been in an etiquette minefield, just an ordinary minefield. He has no idea what it's like to be a real man.

I do know what it's like; it's extremely tricky. We live in a society where all the old conventions of manners have been broken down but not quite destroyed - they're left hanging around in sharp bits like a kind of offence shrapnel. It gets embedded in anyone not as immune to other people's opinions as James Bond.

The clichéd example is the question of holding doors open: you know, are men supposed to hold doors open for women? Are women supposed to mind if they do? If encountering double doors in a corridor with a stranger of either gender following, what is the separating yardage below which you're expected to wait with the door open to avoid it slamming back in their face and above which, if you do wait, you look like an idiot and force the follower to break into a jog?

No new convention has evolved. I don't know anyone sensible who gives a damn whether they have to open doors for people or always have them opened by others. We don't care what the convention is - we're happy to expend whatever effort it asks of us - but we're desperate, crying out for a new consensus.

Greeting people causes the worst dilemmas. I actually worry about it in advance of social encounters. Who are you supposed to kiss (and how many times), who hug and whom shake hands with? I'm pretty repressed but I'll happily kiss, hug - and, indeed, squeeze on the arse - anyone who requires it of me if that will make the encounter pass off without incident. Equally I'm not offended, or surprised, if people would rather I didn't touch them at all. I don't care, I just want to know.

But none of us knows. So we end up doing mortifying dances of half-handshaking, half-kissing as one party backtracks from the unexpected kiss and the other is at pains to imply that of course a kiss would have been completely welcome. Will no one help us

Few governments have passed as many laws as this one and yet a quick Greetings Act, that would avoid millions of moments of embarrassment a year, that would save the nation's hearts from pumping thousands of gallons of blood into its faces, is too much trouble. How about this: if they've already met, women always kiss one another (both cheeks), men and women ditto, men shake hands unless they've met 12 times in which case they hug; people who haven't already met shake hands? Will that do? Can that be the law? Please?

All of the above is complicated by the fluctuating conventions of sexual attraction. I'm not talking about genuine sexual attraction, but the strange rule, from which the 'men kiss women but not one another' idea surely derives, that men are supposed to express mild sexual interest in all women. There's a general 'Aren't the ladies lovely?' presumption that's very rude not to go along with, but worse to be seen to overplay.

It must be implied that a man finds any woman attractive, but not that he's going to jump her. And how far he is allowed to go in adhering to this rule depends on many factors, primarily the man's age and his marital status. A happily married man of late middle-age can practically goose a woman and it carries no more force than a twentysomething complimenting her hair.

Now I know I'm coming across like a cold, irritable, hand-wringing weirdo - but people like me need rules or we have to think too much about things that don't really matter. Conventions of politeness oil the wheels of social interaction - they make things easy in the 99 per cent or more of occasions when people don't want to upset one another. Everyone knows what to do when they want to be rude, but wouldn't it help if we could sort out a system for the majority of times when we don't?

a Queen born by herself.

Who can fail to have been impressed by the spectacle of President Obama's inauguration now two months ago? I'll tell you who - the Queen. I bet she sat there watching it on an unpretentious four-by-three portable, while she sorted dog biscuits into separate Tupperwares, muttering: "It's bullshit, Philip! No carriages, no horses, no crown - it just looks like a bunch of businesspeople getting in and out of cars. It's as if the Rotary Club's taken over a whole country. And the new one's not even the son of one of the previous ones, unlike last time. I thought they were coming round to our way of thinking at last."

And she'd have a point. It might have been considerably grander than a new prime minister pulling up outside Number 10 and waving but, compared to the coronation, it looked like someone signing for their security pass and being shown where to hang their mug. And that's what comes of having an elected head of state. There's always got to be some fudge between the dignity and status of the office and the politician's desire to seem humbled by the occasion.

In fact, it's one of the most startling examples of politicians' self-belief that, as they assume offices of massive power for which they have striven, to the exclusion of all other activities, for decades, they'll still back their chances of coming across as humble. Now, there's an insight into the megalomaniac's mindset: "Not only can I get to be in charge of everything, I bet I can make people believe that I'm not really enjoying it so that, thanks to reverse psychology, they'll want me to stay in power longer!"

Whereas the Queen didn't have to pretend she wasn't enjoying the coronation; from the little bits of grainy footage I've seen, it's hilariously evident. A poor, terrified slip of a girl, the fluttering eye of a storm of pageantry, hesitantly mewing her lines, while thousands of incredibly important people in fancy dress behave as if she's the Almighty made flesh. That's what I call a show.

I don't envy the Americans their political system. I envy them their success, money, inner belief that everything isn't doomed to failure, attitude to breakfast, and teeth, but not their constitution. The fact that their figurehead and political leader is the same person gives them a terrible dilemma, especially when it was George W Bush. The man's clearly a prick (he says he'll wait for the judgment of history but, if the jury's out, it's only because they're deciding between personable incompetent and evil moron) but even his political enemies were squeamish about calling him one.

They had to respect the dignity of the office and couldn't come to terms with the American people having bestowed it on someone who can't string a sentence together and would only make the world worse if he could. To completely let rip in slagging off Bush would have caused collateral damage to national prestige, not only by undermining the office of president but, more important, by openly admitting how far America is from being the classless meritocracy it claims.

We in Britain have no illusions about being a classless meritocracy and it's therefore thoroughly appropriate that our head of state should be chosen by a method dominated by class and utterly and openly devoid of regard for merit. Separated from the nitty-gritty of politics and power, our monarchy can be a focus for both national pride and self-loathing, the latter being much more archetypally British than the former. A harmless little old lady dutifully going about various tasks she finds stressful seems about right for our national figurehead - neither better nor worse than we deserve.

Don't mistake me for a republican. I genuinely like this system. It means the most powerful man in the country still has to kowtow to someone (other than the president of the United States). It encourages tourism. The royal family, while nominally our betters, are in fact our captives and an interesting and profitable focus for media attention. It's as unfair as life; the royals can't escape and if you want to become royal, you basically can't. It's a more or less functional arrangement that no one would ever have had the wit to devise deliberately.

Which is why Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris's attempt to fiddle with it is so enervating. He wants to change the Act of Settlement whereby Catholics can't marry the sovereign and end the discrimination against female heirs to the throne. He thinks this will make the monarchy more fair. I suppose it will, in the same way that throwing some bread into the Grand Canyon will make it more a sandwich.

The monarchy is overwhelmingly, gloriously, intentionally unfair - that's the point. The defining unfairness is that you have to be a member of that family to be king or queen; fringe unfairnesses like their not being able to marry Catholics or men having priority in the line of succession are irrelevant in that context. And what's so fair about primogeniture, which Harris is not planning to touch, or the sovereign having to be Anglican, which is also apparently fine? He wants to spend parliamentary time, mid-credit crunch, on a law aimed primarily at helping Princesses Anne and Michael of Kent.

When will people get the message? If you want a fair system, have a republic, elect a president and live with some arsehole like David Cameron giving a speech every Christmas Day afternoon, bitter in the knowledge that you asked for it. Otherwise, we should stick with what we've got, rather than trying to tinker. No abdicating, no skipping Charles, no changing weird ancient laws. We get who we get because we'd rather live with the inadequacies of a random ancient structure than the inadequacies of one designed by Brown and Cameron.

The monarchy's not perfect, but it's also not harmful, powerful or, and this is the clincher, our fault. The inevitable imperfections of anything we replaced it with would be.

New cyber moan just around the bend.

When Carol Thatcher said that a black tennis player looked a bit like a cartoon designed to ridicule his ethnicity, she probably thought that was exactly the kind of banal remark The One Show thrives on. Clearly no one has ever told her it's a touchy area. Maybe she had an unusual upbringing. But the real victim of her merciless dismissal is the British public who have been denied their now traditional week of recreational outrage while the BBC vacillates and disappoints. We've had to fall back on other topics of conversation.

"I don't know how many times I've cleaned my windscreen today!" a taxi driver said to me last week. I didn't either. I felt if anyone would, it'd be him. I didn't really understand why he needed to know; it's not like taking heart pills or getting married, events you ought to keep count of for your health and self-respect. My feeling was he could let that particular quest for remembrance go and get on with his life. What I said was: "Yeah!"

Because I think he meant he'd cleaned his windscreen (not got out and cleaned it, but pressed the button that makes the bonnet do a little upwards wee for the wipers to deal with) a lot of times that day. Many more times than usual.

What he meant was: "I see there's rain!" He was joining in with the national frenzy of rain-noticing and chaos-lamenting. "It's shameful! Look at us! They wouldn't bat an eyelid in Moscow, yet here it's got to the point where cab drivers have lost count, have actually lost count, of the number of times they've cleaned their windscreen just in one morning."

Remember when it snowed? As one member of the public, interviewed on television outside a large, snow-covered London railway terminus, commented: "It's like a third world country!" Except a third world country's most pressing problem doesn't usually disappear of its own accord if you wait a few days.

I'm not criticising this man. He was just trying to reach out to another human and got me instead. People don't form bonds by exchanging controversial or scintillating remarks. We reassure each other by sharing observations of the obvious: death is sad, rain is here, Carol Thatcher should be sacked - oh, she has been! I mean, Carol Thatcher should be reinstated. Those are the things everyone really wants to discuss, not Gaza. Not that I'm in the habit of bringing up Gaza with taxi drivers, or only if I'm trying to lighten the mood by getting us off the congestion charge.

Sunshine seems to lighten the mood. Somebody once told me it's because its reflective qualities alleviate the past midwinter light deprivation. But that's exactly the sort of neat explanation that usually turns out to be bullshit - or a ploy to sell those expensive alarm clocks that pretend to be a gently emerging dawn. Take that view to its logical conclusion and I'll be persuaded to spend 20 minutes every day with my head in the freezer, shining a torch around, because snow is exactly the same.

No, people like any abnormal weather conditions because they're something to talk about. They relieve the monotony. As our parents told us when we were little: "You wouldn't like it if we had it all the time!" (Which, along with: "Don't eat it all at once" and: "It'll all end in tears", is from a genre of wisdom for which the phrase "Fuck off!" was invented.) They're a shared and completely safe topic of conversation.

And when people have finished luxuriating in having noticed it, they can start talking about both what a nightmare and how ridiculous it all is. A nightmare, because everything's ground to a halt, and ridiculous because it shouldn't have done. This is where I start to isolate myself by saying things like: "What would be ridiculous is if Britain were as well prepared for snow as countries that experience it every year. That would involve having thousands of gritters and snow ploughs on expensive stand-by through years of mild drizzly winters." This, I've come to realise, is missing the point. People enjoy the complaining - they don't really give a damn about gritting budgets and my mentioning them is just as curmudgeonly as saying: "That'll only melt" to some children who are building a snowman.

My view is that thousands of man-hours spent pissing around on Facebook may have been irretrievably lost and costing us thousands in overtime etc, but it gives the dawn of the new cyber moan - which is just around the corner tut tut!

CMcG

F.A.S.T becoming the most irritating thing around.

That stroke advert is scary! Burning a hole through your head, you know the one.
Yes, if you see someone with a collapsed face, and a slurred voice they're having a stroke.....OR they're Shirley Bassey.

Last week, Maureen Lipman admitted that in the 1960s she took LSD and cannabis. Well, would you believe it? Maureen Lipman! The 1960s! Taking drugs! An actress taking drugs in the 1960s! I've never heard of such a thing! What's the next headline-grabbing revelation going to be? David Tennant wore flares as a child? John Sergeant once threw up during his student days? Keith Chegwin took two bottles into the shower?

Lipman's admission (to be broadcast in a documentary series starting tomorrow night on Five) may have created a new unit of measurement - a Maureen - for the smallest, most unremarkable piece of news it is possible to record: it's about a tenth of a celebrity divorce or half a failed traffic-calming measure. Lipman's is just another tiny voice in a titanic chorus of prominent people saying that they dabbled with drugs, didn't really like it and moved on. Couldn't we just assume that they'd all had a go unless they specified otherwise?

After all, in 2000, when loads of the shadow cabinet were coming out as having smoked cannabis, the only thing I found memorable was Ann Widdecombe saying she hadn't. The nation's dealers must have been rubbing their hands: Ann Widdecombe, the face that launched a thousand shipments. If she cared about our nation's youth, she'd have kept quiet.

But the fact that everyone from Helen Mirren to Francis Maude has had a druggy phase presents a problem for anti-drugs campaigns - because most of these people are clearly fine. They didn't go through 'drugs hell' and they didn't die. They had a go, it didn't take for whatever reason and then they went off and were successful. 'By all means, try it but you probably won't like it' isn't quite the message that government agencies want to put out. Unfortunately, those who tried it, loved it and were destroyed by it don't seem to get interviewed on chat shows very often.

'Cool' is the key to all this. That's why the celebs are happy to make their admissions. They're boasting that they were the kind of people who were cool enough to be approached, to get involved, to try stuff. They were creative and experimental and dangerously unwise and there's no one alive who, at some point, didn't want to seem like that. Except maybe Ann Widdecombe.

This is also the problem with anti-smoking campaigns. They persist in trying to persuade kids that smoking isn't cool. Come off it. Look at Sean Connery as James Bond or Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue. We're trying to stop millions of young people from doing something that may kill them and we kick off with a demonstrable lie.

Smoking is cool. Addiction isn't (people huddling outside offices in the rain don't look cool so much as cold) and cancer certainly isn't, but smoking when isolated from these things obviously is. No, there's a harder but ultimately more persuasive message we need to find some way to convey: being cool doesn't really matter. We shouldn't let 'cool' become a direct synonym of 'good'.

The problem is that to the marketing and advertising companies this is heresy. Invoking 'cool' is how you make people do things they otherwise wouldn't: buy electric shavers that jizz moisturiser, endlessly drink mini-yogurts, douse themselves in a smell Kate Moss has reportedly made. Cool is why they're smoking, so it must be why they'll stop.

We'll never stop the young from wanting to be cool and it's worth promoting uncarcinogenic ways they can do this. But we might as well spend some time trying to undermine being cool as an aim, rather than pretending we know better than them what constitutes it.

It irritates me when teenagers in bad dramas or adverts say things such as: 'Your mum's cool' to mean: 'I like your mum.' The correct response should be: 'No, my mum is not cool - she doesn't wear sunglasses indoors or weird clothes. She is a middle-aged woman who is nice and good and wise and worrying about what's cool is beneath her.'

Unfortunately the reply to this would inevitably be: 'Cool!'

PLEASE HELP - HAVE FORGOTTEN ALL WORDS I HAVE EVER KNOWN, DEADLINE IMMINENT, IMMINENT YES, I HAVE ONE WORD, NOW FOR THE 399 OTHER WORDS NEEDED SO I GET SOME MONEY.

Don't talk to me about teen spirit

A teenager now costs, on average, £9,000 a year to run. People must really like them. You could keep a horse for that and they're lovely. Or, with current interest rates, service the mortgage on a small chateau in Provence. But then nothing beats watching a young human attempt to surf a wave of fluctuating hormones and self-doubt. Whenever I want to cheer myself up, I remember that I'm not 15 any more and the best way of doing that is watching someone who is.

It's impossible to read this list of "necessities" without inwardly ageing, and the phrase "in my day" jostling its way to the front of your brain. I'm going to go with it. In my day, teenagers were expected to stay in, grimly getting on with their homework, shuddering at the prospect of human contact and meekly looking forward to the next series of Blackadder. That's what it was like for everyone, right?

I'm sure this spending power feels necessary to teenagers themselves but it isn't, and it's only peer pressure that makes it seem so. I realise the phrase "only peer pressure" will sound to teenage ears like "only an atom bomb" and I'm sorry. But the fact remains that if hardly any teenagers had flashy mobiles or expensive trainers, the rest wouldn't think they needed them.

But massive teenage spending has become the premise on which much of our economy, and popular culture, is based. Advertisers venerate youth. That's because fools and their money are soon parted and teenagers are the most foolish of age groups.

The teenage years are the time when most of us are at our most idiotic - terrified of harmless things, unafraid of the lethal, crushingly obsessed with acceptance by our fellow fools and in petulant denial of the future. These are all traits that recede with hairlines. Anyone who thinks they weren't more of an idiot when they were 17 is an idiot now.

One of the fastest growing areas in our economy in the years leading up to the crunch was the selling of crap to twats. Why waste a fortune expensively marketing carefully designed products to the thrifty middle-aged with long-established spending patterns when you can make a quick million pushing ringtones and cheese strings to kids? They've got nine grand each, largely courtesy of their parents, which they are not just willing, but desperate, to piss away on some manufactured craze.

I know I'm being harsh. Teenagers are not all or even mostly morons, but almost everyone is at their least prudent and reasonable at that age. What Sir Fred Goodwin must have been like when he was 16 is beyond imagining - I'm surprised he didn't destroy the world. But I'm particularly bitter about feckless teenage spending because of the disastrous effect it's had on television.

Television audiences are falling but not plummeting. Purely in terms of numbers, there's no need to panic. But they are plummeting among the young, who are deserting TV in favour of new media, and the advertisers and their money are following, leaving commercial broadcasters skint. Last week ITV announced job cuts and huge losses - it's unclear whether it will even remain a viable business in the long-term. Channel 4 is not much better off with a vast hole in its budget to fill. On the plus side, Five is also in trouble.Advertisers' obsession with youths and their money doesn't just cause financial problems. It also affects programming as TV executives cravenly try and tempt teenagers back. This has become BBC Three's raison d'être even though it's not even dependent on advertising revenue. It seems to want young viewers purely because they're sought after by its competitors. And the programmes that are produced by this demographic thinking are so often shit.

If you've ever wondered why there are now so many TV adverts for stairlifts, life insurance and incontinence pants, it's because advertisers have begun to target the next most susceptible group after teenagers: the nearly senile. The largest generation in history is reaching retirement age and will live longer than any of its predecessors. Decrepitude, not youth, is the future, and advertisers will have to find more ways of parting the elderly with their cash. At least they earned it.

Make way here comes the King of Persia

They keep saying Barack Obama is the first black President, that's a lie though isn't it?
What about Wayne and David Palmer in the series 24? And they did a bloody good job.
Oh, and now Americans are paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for his extra tightened security, because they are worried about attempted assassinations. Where are these assassins? Moreover, where were they for the last eight years when we had President Emeritus Bungle George. The revolution I am starting must begin to pick up pace.
Gordon Brown has decided to jump on the Barack Obama bandwagon in his recent meeting with the newly enthroned President, Gordon Brown said:
"I share many values with Barack Obama."
Sadly, popularity isn't one of them. Gordon continued to tell Barack we are all better now because crime and fear have gone down in the U.K especially since the fight against terrorism. Umm..... really? We should all relax because the fear of crime is actually greater then crime itself. Good, because I miss those days when I saw an unattended piece of baggage at a train station, and I thought 'oooh I'll have that.

Right must dash, yet again another busy day, reviewing a book by Jillian McKeith, called You Are What You Eat, well if she's right then after reading the first chapter, at some point in her own life she's eaten a proper miserable bitch.

uummmmmmm.....

I realised tonight, in a non-alcoholic induced frame of mind, that I have indeed been absent from some dear relationships I treasure very much for the wonderful and amazing people they are and also becoming to me (wink), for so many reasons.
All I can say to those people (you know who you are) is:

Look after my heart, I've left it with you.



Now, where did I leave that empty glass?

Pass Go, Collect £650,000 and shove it up your arse.

For months, newspapers have been brimming with frugality features: "The pages that save you money"; "How to moan on a budget"; "Use your child's tears as food!" Interestingly, none of them says: "A daily newspaper is a luxury you may find is getting you down." (A Sunday paper is, of course, a necessity. What else are you going to wipe your arse on in a recession?)
Even the Queen is complaining on her private train, moaning about how much it costs for a cup of Darjeeling and a swan roll.
There isn't enough cyber space to write about how many mistakes the Government has made in the past twelve months, but I'll give it a bloody good go. The problem is where do I start? What about how they didn't regulate the banks, how they allowed a bunch of people to run the banks without so much as a banking qualification awarded by chance card in a game of Monopoly? What about how they trust Alistair Darling? I don't trust Alistair Darling, I don't trust anyone whose hair doesn't match his or her eyebrows. I expect if he were to open his flies there would be a bunch of daffodils. Alistair himself may have never smoked cannabis, but I would say his eyebrows most defiantly have.
So Alistair and Gordon have continued to lie to us like this is nothing more then a game of Cluedo and insist that they will save the economy, in fact they all but say they are the economy. Bollocks. If they were superheroes, I'm fairly sure they would be the lamest superheroes ever:
"Quickly Alistair, to the Batcaravan"
Why do they insist on trying to bullshit us with rescue package plans? I want my money to be safe, not sound like a shit all-inclusive holiday at Butlins. Here he is, Super GB and his sidekick AD to the rescue with their package plan, which is Robin Hood style without any grasp of economics whatsoever.. I’m guessing the opening line in this package plan is to encourage us all to pay into our banks lots of money or at the very least an amulet made of cats teeth.
In this package plan (which also sounds like a camp terrorist bomb) Gordon agrees we should save money by not wasting food, like it is the biggest waste of money, which it isn’t. We spend millions and millions of pounds on weapons to blow up shepherds, and you’ve got someone who spent two million pounds on several aircraft carriers this week, standing in front of us telling us that we should use our potato peelings to make some kind of flan.
Interest rates are down to two per cent and they say soon it will be down to zero.
So putting your money into a bank is literally just using it as a storage facility.
You might as well just take your money to a self-storage lock up. It would be far more convenient being able to store your victim AND her ransom in the same place.
Meanwhile, thousands of Scottish pensioners have been overpaid. The government said it knew something was wrong when most of them were still alive in January.
Parliament says it won’t be asking for the money back. It's just putting a 70 per cent tax on shortbread.
We first felt the effects of this horrific demise when Woolworths left our high street. Although I have to say a lot of old people were alarmed at the demise of Woolworths, weren’t they?
Although it went in January, the administrators are selling the name on so they’re saying, “Woolworths will be back.”
But no one knows when or in what form. That’s quite frightening.
Like, you will be sitting watching Murder She Wrote one day and some red and white foam will start to seep under your door and before you know it there’s a 20 foot pick and mix isle trying to kill your kids. Woolworths has incurred the highest job losses so far with 27,000 workers being sacked. But where WERE all these people?
Usually Woolies was devoid of all human life, except an 18 yard queue of old ladies trying to buy metal teapots from the one 17-year-old Saturday assistant.
Where were these hordes of staff? Thirteen people in a back room individually unwrapping a hundred weight of cola cubes?
The point is, we’re in a mess, and we aren’t going to get out of it for ten years apparently, according to some ‘experts’ who I presume were nailed to the back of the door for ten months so they didn’t cause widespread panic when they put up notices asking ‘why don’t you ask the banks where your money is?’
What good can come of the recession? In my view it would be we sort the wheat from the chaff. I believe there could be tough times ahead for Clinton Cards, for example, a shop that's always annoyed me. Only to sell greetings cards would already be a specialism too far in my view, but they manage to further specialise in ones I couldn't send to anyone I didn't hate. You'd think they might squeeze in a small section of cards that an ordinary human might actually buy, but apparently that would too far compromise the range of pale pink cuddly-bear-covered slurry they're able to provide for their core customers - people with no gag reflex. So what’s my solution, what’s my package plan. I need to find people better qualified to deal with this crisis, hmmmmm someone better then Brown and Darling. Someone unknown to the enemy and who possesses a special skill. How about Professor Hawking, John Leslie, Phil Neville, the Wu-Tang Clan, Usher, the Sugar Puffs Monster and Daniel Day Lewis?
WELCOME TO OPERATION MINDFUCK!
In summary, I don’t know much about this in all seriousness. But I find the title TOXIC FUTURE very terrifying. The things is, this sort of money, that sort of money, it is just some numbers disappearing on a computer. Why can’t we just type it back in. There’s no actual stuff, nothings caught fire, or exploded or sunk, it’s just a load of wanker bankers having made stupid bets with each other when they’re drunk. No bad thing has happened, it’s not like all the pigs in South America suddenly died of Blight. It’s just people juggling with numbers that didn’t exist and it got out of hand because they’re assholes. The bad thing is, we’ve known they’re assholes for ages, we know it every time they charge us 13million pounds for being 4pence overdrawn.

Part two coming soon, although if you don't hear from me in two weeks presume I've been taken hostage by 11 Downing street, where I will be tortured my having my hair dyed lighter, and forced eyebrow extensions.

A cure for boredom maybe around the corner. Here it is... a train.

Those who can teach, anyone seen that advert? Anyone throwing a brick at the telly when that advert came in?

Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector of schools, has got it in for boring teachers. She's announced a "crackdown" on them. Not incompetent teachers or corrupt teachers. Not drunken teachers, teachers who put a video on for most lessons or teachers who they say once touched Benson on the bottom. No, she is cracking down on the ones who fail to convince the random bunch of kids in front of them that physics isn't just some dry and counterintuitive rules, but a veritable party in their brains.

Well, if my experience of school is anything to go by, she may have to root out half the profession. School is mostly boring and the lessons are the most boring bit. Some teachers are born boring, some achieve boringness, some have boringness thrust upon them by the national curriculum. And although most of them aren't dull people, and may be fascinating in private, plenty still give boring lessons.

And how is Christine Gilbert planning to find out who the dreariest educators are? She certainly mustn't take the pupils' word for it - that would be putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum. Perhaps she'll ask the boring teachers to own up? But the most mind-numbing people are usually completely unaware of it and often consider themselves quite the life and soul, in contrast to everyone they meet who, they seem to find, either slinks away, nods off or begins quietly to weep.

I'd certainly hate it if this crackdown ended up benefiting the kind of smug, preening, self-styled 'popular' teacher, who encourages pupils to use his first name and talks about "how inspiring the kids are" in order to get off with people at parties. You know the type: disingenuous, needy and often, in extremis, suddenly cruel. Give me a mouldy-armpitted nerd with halitosis and a voice like distant drilling any day of the week.

But I imagine the plan is even more hopeless than that - they're going to try and make boring lessons more interesting. Any scheme to do this at a national level is likely to be as effective as attempting to thread 20,000 needles by chucking the cotton at them from 100 yards away. It ignores the fact that some of the things that children really ought to learn are boring. Information is not interesting in direct proportion to how important it is. But are teachers to be penalised for that? Are we going to phase out maths in favour of more media studies and dance?

This study is a result from talking at the morons who are people who boast that they "get bored very easily". They're implying that their minds are too active and creative to be tied down for long by one task, career or even group of friends. Most things, they're suggesting, are beneath their contempt. But getting bored easily is the mark of the moron, the person who can stick at nothing and anything really worthwhile, anyone but a superhuman has to stick at. School is where this wearying truth must make itself known.

Fortunately, this crackdown will come to nothing. It's just a soundbite that will make teachers even glummer and give affirmation to children who don't pay attention. They'd better enjoy it while it lasts.

Pack, scan and therapy.

Do I look like an agony Aunt to you? No? Good then sympathise and agree with me when I say how irritating it is when someone tells you their problems when you're paying for a packet of rosemary. Great you've got trouble with your veins, why don't you walk once a week and stop eating crisps and fried cheese? Then as you haven't been able to get a word in, Mrs Moaner says how great a listener you are (for a man) and tell you to have your own help column. I think not, I'm going to start writing to an Agony Aunt myself.

Dear Bitch,
I have trouble making friends, what are you going to do about it?

COULD FERAL CHILDREN BURGLE BRITAIN'S SWANS?

Headline courtesy of the Daily Mail headline generator at:
http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/toys/dailymail/
Watcha!
I hope your weekend was pleasant, mine was really busy entertaining two of my best friends (hello, I like you O.K) and reading Eclipse, part of the Twilight series by Stephanie Myer. I won’t spoil it for any of you who are reading the series, but when you have finished, drop me an email, and I will converse with you at rapid speed of my love and addiction for the whole thing!
That aside, I have finally toned up, and lost a bit of weight I was desperate to shift. I have kept off the booze for a while which has made life incredibly dull at times, as I tend to circulate with people that become funnier and far more enjoyable with three chardonnays inside me. The turning point came when I was watching a programme on babies and began to feel broody, and then I thought I was lactating only to find my left tit had fallen in my Greek yogurt. So I’ve shed the fat and feel fab, keep your eyes peeled for the fitness DVD release soon.
Thankfully the weather is starting to change, and I am beginning to think of planning a holiday with my friend, although it will probably be a cheap Ryan Air flight from Luton, landing in Gatwick. Or we may take the seven-pound flight to New York, although as always with Ryan Air it does stop just outside New York, in Dublin. I may get in early of course, and take advantage of global warming by booking a 2025 scuba diving tour of Holland. I imagine if the recession continues to destroy us the way it has done, I can actually pay for my holiday using the new currency to come into use actually worth something, bubble wrap. Booo recession
Did anyone else listen to Radio 4 at the weekend? I only tune in because that way I'll know if the world has ended when I hear someone present the show with a regional accent. Anyway, after I realised Martin Jarvis wasn’t reading the speeches of Hitler in a high-pitched girls voice, I listened again to the Question Time programme, wandering why the hell I am not allowed to host that show, the people are so patronising! The questions are never what we want to ask, if I were on it, I would screw the political correctness:
“That’s a good question from the young man there, so Mr Darling, why don’t you shove your financial plans up your arse”. Then Radio 4 continued to give us listeners advice on how to sell our houses; “Open the curtains, and tidy up”. Thanks for that, I had planned on redecorating using diarrhea pills and shaving ‘welcome’ into my dogs back.
Finally The Guardian gave us financial tips by telling us to do our own conveyancing if we were selling our house, whilst The Sun newspaper told us to clean our shoes with the skin on a banana. Mighty England eh?
Right must dash to help record a podcast for some unheard of radio station. I have to write the voiceover, which nobody listens to anyway.
‘Next more lesbian propaganda with Woman’s Hour’ I know, I know, I sound misogynistic, but I’m not, just ask my bitch.

Ps. For those who emailed me comments asking for a blog on the economy, keep your eyes peeled Wednesday and I should have something up and ranting for you!

Chris