Then I Feel A Change.

Billy Elliot the musical has played an important part in my life, it was the first thing I ever saw on stage where I cried, it was the first story where parts of it resounded true to my life, and so it was the first time I realised the deep power that art can have on you. Billy Elliot is about so many things, the power of dreams and being inspired; the challenge of frustration and the burning desire within each of us to achieve. This is tied into such a beautiful and yet tragic story of the Durham Minors. I first saw this musical in 2005, and since then I have seen it every year, and not just in this country! I saw it in Sydney Australia! It was amazing to see the musical translate to the other end of the world. Yes, the importance of the minors strike was perhaps a little lost, but the true power of the story – the boy who wanted to dance, still digested itself into the audience like a footprint in newly fallen snow, where the feeling is familiar and yet still excitingly new.
Every year three new Billy Elliot’s take to the stage and begin a journey that, for them must be incredible. They are living the very dream they are conveying, which unlike any other musical means the performance really does come straight from the heart.
You don’t need to want to dance for the story to affect you. Deep within all of us, is a dream of us being who we were born to be. The song Electricity hits a deep chord with me and perhaps is the moment where the very words collide with such a powerful melody and crash into the audience:
“It’s a bit like being angry, it’s a bit like being scared….. and then I feel a change like a burning deep inside, something bursting me wide open, impossible to hide, and suddenly I’m flying, flying like the stars, like electricity… sparks inside of me, and I’m free, I’m free”
Has anyone asked you to describe what happens when you do something that you love; really love? When everything in your life disappears and you become whole in a such a way it is like you have nothing else in your life that makes you feel so complete. Those moments are like our electricity.
We should never stop believing in those dreams, and never fail to enjoy every single moment when we can, for a second do what it is we love to do. And so back to the arts in general. I love them, and I will always love what it can do! It can inspire you and it can transform lives. Art can make you look at life in way you never have before, and it can take you places beyond your wildest dreams.

We All Need Our 24 Moment

I undoubtedly will get responses to this accusing me of sounding like I have a slightly pince-nez view of the modern world, and to write to young people in such a way is superfluous. But I have words to fill and a deadline to meet, and so I ponder further.

I have just finished reading a book by Adam Shand called “Big Shots”. It describes what occurred during the recent gangland wars in the city of Melbourne, where I spent nearly three months last year. In the prologue he writes: “Those intending to embark on a career in the underworld would do well to sit down and watch an old James Cagney movie “The Roaring Twenties”. The moral is not that crime doesn’t pay – it pays well, extraordinary well if you get it right – but that eventually death takes it whack”.

On the surface of this almost precocious warning lies something quite outstanding. Of course this coming from a book on gangland wars makes it harder to connect to, but it is the very same principle that for example Harry Potter is based on, that Spooks and Desperate Housewives, 24, House etc all these epic pieces of modern television drama rock quite easily on a base of good over evil and choice over talent.
Very often we are placed in situations, which demand a decision of catch 22, the proverbial phrase where one bad situation lessons a potentially devastating one.
We are just out of a recession, we are now officially poor yet to cut the deficit, money needs to be found elsewhere, so something has to go, to quit, and so imaginably to suffer. The problem with these 22 moments is that they need a 24 person.
Yes President Palmer and Jack Bauer, even under torture and pressure still have the courage to make a decision, even if it proves to be the wrong one. Thus bringing back into the forecourt the idea that so often choice wins over talent. I have a bomb I know will detonate, do I explode it in a hospital where there are over 1000 patients, or in a children’s nursery where there are 15 infants? Death will occur in both cases and I have sixty seconds to decide.

Yet deep within most of is that 24 character. Thankfully we are not placed in situations where other lives are at stake, but there does come such a time for all of us where our choices will define us, when beauty no longer cuts it like power and pride, both of which in us as humans so often fail to rise to anything more then a froth. But we need to be waves. Power and pride have for so long been beaten and thrown to us as corrupt assets in a human. Yet humility and a coy soul have seemingly led us to be an aggressive nation where we replace insecurity with a lack of motivation and self-limitation with violence. “Power Corrupts” said Winston Churchill. It shouldn’t any more; we should be empowered as young people more then ever. Power corrupts when we mistake it for an immediate pathway to self-perfection. When we expect ourselves to be perfect, and it goes wrong it is one thousand times more catastrophic. But the time is now where young people must cling to every opportunity they have to make decisions for themselves and begin to see potential within. We all have to realise that failure comes to visit us once in a while. But failure isn’t defeat!
Even Jack Bauer gets it wrong, and like Jack we need that scene where we look in the mirror and say clearly that we have got it wrong. And with that, we must go back to the enormous blank canvas being painted with our lives.
When we have the courage to face our problems and make decisions in spite of consequences that may be difficult, we are renewed with a certain creative energy. Fear, shame and guilt often make us stay in isolation. It is by showing our wounds, by allowing ourselves to touch and be touched by the sometimes-forceful hand of life itself, that we are challenged yet graced with some contentment.
Now is the time to play hero, just be ready to think what happens when the bomb is in your hands.

This week in the news

POSTAL workers have staged a protest in Westminster as the row grows over plans to sell off 30 per cent of RoyalMail. There would have been more of them at the rally but most of them turned up late, got lost or went to the wrong address.

Gordon Brown wants to privatise the RoyalMail and sell them to a Dutch company. What a load of nonsense. Royal mail say the reason for their losses are that so many people now send emails. yes of course that's what it is. I mean I fondly remember the days when offers to enlarge your penis had a stamp on them. YES Royal Mail are losing millions, but I'd have thought the thousands of P45s being sent out every day would mean they're raking it in. RoyalMail are having to do this as they have £9billion missing from the pension fund. I look forward to the episode of Postman Pat where he's reduced to eating Jess the cat for breakfast.

BLUE PETER faces being axed because its audience figures have dropped dramatically. The trouble is that kids today are too busy with their own kids to watch Blue Peter. If they want to improve ratings, they need to feature items that include how to make hash brownies with real hash, how to dress old enough to buy cigarettes, and send your mum out of the room so you can watch internet porn.

A recent survey has shown that a lot of people still don't understand what's happened with the banking crisis. Here's a simplified version of what's happened. Imagine if you gave your mate a tenner and asked them to look after it for a week, then in a week's time you ask your mate for the tenner back, but instead he tells you he's bet it on Britain to win Eurovision, so instead he craps in your pocket and retires to Barbados.

Flight of the Con....morons.

British Airways staff are being asked to work for a month without pay. Have you seen those air stewardesses? Max Factor will go bankrupt. You thought that air stewardess hated you before? You can kiss that cushion goodbye. You'd be as well taking a pot noodle on flights. At least for that month the only 'bird strikes' on the runway will be malnourished staff beating them to death with clubs.

A cruise ship in the Caribbean has been quarantined after three people on board were found to have swine flu. There's worse places to find yourself quarantined than on a cruise ship, like anywhere else that's not a cruise ship.

I can't be the only one that suspects what's happened is someone has waited until the last day of their holiday and then started sneezing? This has led to many taking uneccessary time away from work, and records being take by the police who found out that a man dressed as his dead mother for six years to claim her state pension. Everyone was shocked. Especially his father. I'm so surprised no-one got at all suspicious, after all, British pensioners never last six years on a state pension.

And finally, they found oil under Mohammed Al Fayed's house. He took the oil company to court, and got £1000 in compensation. How did they ever think they would be able to keep it from him? He's obsessed with things happening in tunnels.

Voting over it's time to reveal who you think is the weakest link

Last week the BNP won two seats in the European elections. They haven't really thought this through. Now they'll be complaining about foreigners in Brussels - where they are foreigners. They'll have to start putting dogs**t through their own letter boxes.

The North of England is now represented in Europe by fascists, which should be interesting. I can't wait to see Manchester United turn up to the Champions League in brown shirts and jackboots.With half the team 'missing'.

The BNP promise they will "behave like proper parliamentarians". They've already submitted invoices for a giant swastika-shaped chandelier. Their leader Nick Griffin had to abandon a press conference after he was pelted by eggs. It should have been bricks.

According to a poll this week, Labour would do better at the next general election if they replaced Gordon Brown with Alan Johnson.

It also found that their fortunes would be improved if Brown was replaced by Jack Straw, David Miliband, Ed Balls or backbencher Jon Cruddas... Joanna Lumley, Esther Rantzen, Howard from the Halifax adverts, Paul Daniels, (but not Debbie McGee), or the former Motherwell stalwart John Philliben.

Indeed the survey finds that Brown's only chance of winning involves the Tories replacing David Cameron with the reanimated corpse of Hitler. Apparently the Tories would then fail to gain an overall majority, but still do quite well up North.

SuBo YoYo

Susan Boyle had a breakdown after the final of Britain's Got Talent and landed in The Priory. She's amazing. It takes most singers years before they end up there. At this rate, she'll be getting an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award by August. It seems Susan gets upset when she's parted from her cat Pebbles. Which is why she usually wears it on her head.

One of her neighbours said: "It's time for her to come home and get back to some normality." Isn't she's already depressed enough as it is? How is going back to West Lothian supposed to help her? Even the road signs going in say: "Welcome to West Lothian. Please remove your belt and laces." It's the only place in Britain where people list Samaritans in their friends and family phone calls.

The police were called to Susan Boyle's hotel room after she started acting strangely. What they didn't realise was that she was acting normally for someone from West Lothian.

Taking her out of West Lothian was just asking for trouble. It's like taking King Kong from the jungle to New York, but sticking him in a dress. After the show, Susan was admitted to The Priory in London. Doctors did think of treating her at a clinic nearer home, but there's only so much you can do for depression with leeches and a vinegar poultice.

Some people have suggested that people who are emotionally fragile should be stopped from going on Britain's Got Talent but if they did that there'd be no one to take part. So it's a great idea.

A book I won't be reading.

Official biographers of Kim Jong-il claim that his birth was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens. Either it was his birth or the beginning of the Teletubbies.

I don't want to scaremonger but, a few weeks ago, every newspaper had at least four pages per day on Swine Flu panic when only eight people had the virus in this country. North Korea has threatened nuclear war and yet, in most papers, the most you'll hear about it is in a fun wordsearch puzzle on page 34. Can you find the words Kim Jong-il, radiation poisoning and armageddon?

Kim Jong-il has claimed that any sanctions against North Korea would be like "throwing a rotten egg at a rock". Which is actually one of Heston Blumenthal's nuclear holocaust recipes alongside "tenderising a dog with a brick" and "making your dead neighbour into nuggets with a shovel".

North Korea has few computers, almost no internet access outside the capital Pyongyang and teaches students about the web by showing them photocopied papers of monitor displays. Amazing really, but still too technical for many of the students at The University of the Highlands and Islands. They have the skull of a ram with the letters www scrawled into it with a sharp stick.

I love the idea of teaching the internet using bits of paper. I'm guessing they do email with an envelope. And Facebook? Pretty sure that's going to be a book.With a face drawn on it.

The week in tatters

This week's Britain's Got Talent produced some of the oddest sentences I have ever heard on television. "Anyone prepared to die on my show gets 10 out of 10", "We were told to wear less clothes, so we're wearing less clothes" and "Ladies and gentlemen, give a warm welcome to Piers Morgan!" The made-over Susan Boyle appeared on Sunday, blossoming from a dumpy woman into a dumpy woman with dyed hair. Items that Susan has touched are actually being sold on eBay - the whole town of Bathgate has apparently beaten all estimates by going for £23.

An elderly woman in London stored her mother's body in a freezer for up to 20 years. I don't understand why she kept mother in the freezer for 20 years, especially as she'd no longer be edible after two years. She had wanted her mum to have a more dignified resting place, but the binmen refused to take her. The lady said she lost weight through the stress, plus the fact that it can't have made going for a choc ice any easier. At least she got to rest in peas. Asked why she did it, she said she had no choice as the fridge was full.

The World Beard and Moustache Competition took place last weekend, and was won by a woman from my home town of Oxfordshire. The only news that beat this, was a piece featured in the tabloids about a 66-YEAR-OLD woman, who has become the oldest new mum in Britain after giving birth to a baby boy. I'm amazed she needed to have a caesarean section though, you'd think at 66 she would have needed some masking tape down there just to stop it falling out. She says the most important thing is that she is able to give the baby a normal, happy childhood. Which he will have. Right up until she dies. It's going to be unusual having someone in their seventies picking up a child from school who's not a paedophile.

Internet is child's play.

THE curriculum in primary schools is to be revamped so that children are familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter. Aren't kids already familiar with all of those? The average primary school child is already more relaxed with computers than a Nasa scientist. Talk about putting a strain on the teachers, the only people qualified to teach children aged seven about how the internet works are children aged eight.

Another problem with this is that information technology is moving so quickly that, by the time children leave school, computer applications like Twitter will be as dead as the dodo. Although pupils won't have been taught what a dodo is. They'll be saying as dead as Myspace.

A COMPUTER scientist has invented a shoe that can be used as a phone. He says it could mean less people losing their phones. Fair enough but it'll probably mean a lot more people getting dog shit on their ear. There's a guy in my street who's been talking into his shoe for years. How is he supposed to look mental if everyone gets a shoe phone?

Sack MPs and get 600 Mumbai call centre guys to run UK

Well, what do I think about the expense claims?

Gordon Brown welcomed a "Lumley" of Gurkhas into Downing Street. He looked delighted having them there... a pleasant change mixing with a group of people who only want one house each. The Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, has resigned. He wants to spend more time with his houses. Did you see him try and worm his way out of it? He looked like someone was shovelling sausages down his throat till his was choking on them, and for once, not enjoying it. When the camera zoomed in on his swollen, vodka induced capillary burst face, I seriously thought he was having a stroke, even then the Clarkes surrounding him trying to help him would just be trying to force his pin number from him so they could get the money back he owes, or take claim of his £170,000 pension.

One Lib Dem MP has received death threats over his claims. He is said to be thrilled someone has noticed him at last. Only a handful of MPs have been shown to be not abusing the system. Animals and wives yes, but the system, no.

The MP Sir Hope Peter Viggers was forced to retire after spending £1645 on a "duck island". Looks like a great investment as he'll soon be living on it. He has now lost his job because of those ducks. I think the next time he rehouses them it may well be in a pancake with some hoisin sauce.

A new body will control Parliament finances. The government has set up OfParl. They should add F**k to the start. The Tories say only a new government in Westminster can save Britain. I agree. The Swedish one.

In any other profession they'd have been replaced years ago by an Indian call centre. I think that's how we should go at this. Sack all MPs and just have a team of 600 guys in Mumbai, working 24/7 running the country. "Press one to speak to your elected representative, press two to complain about the bins in your area, press three to declare war on Iran."

Feeling the heat.

Health chiefs are advising that all British homes should be painted white in order to cope with climate change.

Personally, I'm not sure how much difference reflecting the sun's heat is going to make to your house when it's 20 feet under water.

An Army test pilot is the first British astronaut. Tim Peake admits he's on the end of a very long waiting list to go into space. Which right now includes everyone on Earth. I can't wait to see a Brit up in space, grumbling about the weather. I just hope his spacesuit isn't supplied by the British Army. Solar radiation will make short work of a goldfish bowl taped to a bin bag.

Honour before greed

Story one on News At Ten last Wednesday was the latest revelation about high-spending, free-loading MPs. Story two was the coffins of four British soldiers returning from Afghanistan. It made for a stark juxtaposition.

On the one hand you have Government ministers and backbench MPs who have been squeezing every last penny out of a very generous allowance system to ensure their homes are equipped to a high standard. On the other, you have four brave young men laying down their lives in the service of this country. One a story of greed, the other a story of sacrifice. Two very different attitudes to public duty and serving this nation. What a contrast.

And it’s a contrast made starker still by news that urgent equipment needed by our troops on the front line in Afghanistan is still not getting through on time. Fewer than two-thirds of consignments – 57 per cent – reach our battle units on time. After eight years to get it right, that is surely not good enough. I spoke this week to a young officer who has just returned from Afghanistan and who told me they are still driving around in vehicles that offer inadequate protection. He lost men in a roadside bomb because better vehicles failed to arrive. They can equip their homes all right, but not our boys in the firing line.

HOLD ON TO YOUR HORSES.

Politicians are finally acting on the public outcry over their outrageous expense claims.

From now on, MPs are going to use a far fairer system of allowances, like the one used by President Ceausescu of Romania, just before he was marched from his golden palace and shot.

This has been a difficult subject to write jokes about when every time I try to exaggerate a punch line for comedic effect, an even more exaggerated expense claim is revealed.

I mean, what are they going to claim for next - a moat? Douglas Hogg was ridiculed for having a moat round his large mansion. To be fair, it is in the middle of a Sheffield Council Estate. Why does anyone need a moat cleaner? It's full of water. It kind of cleans itself. In his defence, the moat needed cleaning after the drawbridge broke under the weight of the chandelier being delivered.

In this country, let us not forget that a man's home is his castle. Although, in the case of many Conservative MPs, a man's castle is his second home.

Douglas Hogg claimed to have his moat cleaned and Michael Spicer claimed to trim the hedge around his helipad. They couldn't have made the Conservative Party look any more like aristocratic idiots unless they had claimed cash for "the lute player's fees to entertain the peacocks" and "a termination for scullery maid and third class ticket for her crossing to New Amsterdam".

Alex Salmond claimed £650 for curtains. To be fair, if his flat hadn't had curtains, we'd have paid out far more than that to his neighbours in compensation. Shadow ecology secretary Greg Barker has kept his green credentials through this scandal by keeping unused appliances and lights switched off in his second home. He has achieved this by not actually living there.

Many people have wondered why John Prescott needed to claim for two loo seats. Simple, one for each cheek. One MP claimed £135 to hire an electrician to "change the lightbulbs" in his house. Which, if nothing else, proves one thing: Politicians might be thieving b******s but they've got nothing on the real experts - tradesmen.

Ann Widdecombe has claimed the crackdown was going too far, saying: "It is becoming a competition that 'my shirt is hairier than yours'." If anyone is hairier, with or without a shirt, it's got to be Ann Widdecombe. If this expenses scandal gets any worse, they'll be digging a moat around Parliament.

Mr Hogg also paid £600 for someone to kill his moles. What was he killing them with? An Apache helicopter? The list of what MPs have claimed expenses for is incredible.

Tampons, horse manure, an ice cube tray, light bulbs and a chandelier. Coincidentally, those are the exact same items that Peter Andre has been offered in his divorce settlement.

Some MPs are still trying to justify the allowances system, saying that without it they would be forced to buy things using their salary. Last year, MPs were fighting against the disclosure of their second home expenses because they said it would be a risk to their security. It turns out it was a risk to the security of their overpaid jobs.

It was The Daily Telegraph that printed MPs' expense claims and its readers were furious. They have to pay for their own tennis courts, chandeliers and clean moats. One Tory showed she was still in touch with the public. Cheryl Gillian claimed £4.47 for cat food. Which is now the average British shopping list.

Oliver Letwin made a huge claim to have his "tennis courts modified". Judging by his multiple chins this means "fitted with a fridge". What I'd like to know is if MPs can claim for all those things, then what aren't they allowed to claim for? Chocolate fountains? Cream horns? Golden baths? Or are all those sexual practices allowed, too? The big news is the suspension of Elliott Morley. I think I'm with the general public when I say Elliott Who? Morley has been stripped of his role as international climate change envoy. Just as well, as his solution to climate change was for a second Earth about 100 miles away from the old one..

I.D cards

Id cards are to be made available from post offices. Fantastic! The queue in there already takes an hour and people are only buying stamps.

What's it going to be like when they're scanning irises and taking DNA swabs? The queue will be so long it will be quicker to have a letter delivered by passing it back along the line until it gets to your destination.

There are a lot of practicalities about the ID card scheme the Government don't seem have taken onboard. For example, how are they going to get fingerprints off people from Bicester? It's going to take at least a couple of hundred thousand years for their hooves to evolve that far.

Brings me out in a rasher

I'm not feeling as gloomy as usual this week as I've been able to get a whole train carriage to myself just by sneezing and wearing a sombrero. Gordon Brown says Britain is one of the best-prepared countries to handle a flu pandemic, which is especially reassuring after he said we were one of the bestprepared countries to handle the worldwide recession. The first confirmed case of swine flu in my area (Oxfordshire) was diagnosed this week. The good news is that Oxford people might have to wear face masks. Something I've been petitioning for many years.

Thousands of people have cancelled there holiday to Mexico to avoid catching the virus. If I'd spent any time at all in Mexico and all I came back with was swine flu, I'd be delighted. My doctor would be saying: "The good news, Mr McGowan, is you've got swine flu. The bad news is you've got gonorrhea, dysentery, hepatitis B, alcohol poisoning and you seem to have been shot in the spine." Most cases have occurred in villages containing massive pig farms. What are they moaning about? I would have thought having a blocked nose for them would feel like a two-week holiday.

The whole country is terrified they will be killed by this. The biggest killer in the UK is heart disease. And yet we're all sitting at home on our sofas eating KFC, too scared to go outside for some exercise in case we bump into a sneezing pig.

I'll say no more.

GRRRRRR

Just when it looked like Gordon Brown couldn't get any more politically inept, he's found a way. Having spent hundreds of billions trying to prop up the economy, you'd think paying the comparatively tiny amount that it would cost to allow ex-Gurkhas to settle in the UK would be a political choice preferable to telling some war heroes and Joanna Lumley to piss off.

I mean, even ignoring justice, what was he thinking? Has he got a very early start the day after the next election and so wants to make sure the result is confirmed by midnight?

What's his next move going to be - changing his name by deed poll to Mussolini?

When the heartaches are Special K

For many years now, my palate has been trying to kill me. In the end, it's bound to succeed. But it won't look like murder - it'll be ascribed to something apparently innocent, like "heart disease", "type 2 diabetes" or "exhaustion due to lifting mince pies". In reality, it will have been slow poisoning.

Everything my mouth tells me about what foods do to my body is a lie. If it screams: "Yes! Devour! Consume! More of this please! This is the very stuff of life itself!", it means I'm eating a Stilton and streaky bacon sandwich, deep fried in goose fat and served in a bucket of double cream. If it's saying: "Oh no, there's something wrong here - you might want to spit this out. Are you sure this is even food?", it's because I'm struggling through a salad.

I do eat some fruit and vegetables, but out of grim duty because I believe the people who've told me it's necessary - I have come to recognise my taste buds' malevolent purpose - but without that "finish your greens" tutoring, I would happily eat three meals of carcinogenic cholesterol a day, because that's the only sort of grub that genuinely feels to me like nourishment.

At least I can ignore all those conflicting scientific reports, saying that blueberries are or aren't superfoods, salmon gives you or cures cancer, cheese enhances scepticism or wheat is a sign of intolerance. I say let's stand the scientists down. I can tell everyone exactly what foods are good or bad for them: I love the latter and think the former taste like shit. (Metaphorically - I can only assume, given that eating excrement is very bad for you, that to me it would be ambrosia.) It's a useful skill, I suppose. But I'm not letting my palate off the hook - it still means me harm, even if it hasn't mastered reverse psychology.

So I was interested by last week's news that breakfast cereals are delicious. I'd assumed the opposite: advertising vitamins, minerals and slow-release energy, they sounded as mouthwatering as a cream cracker-eating race and so I hadn't eaten any for years. But it seems the manufacturers were being modest.

A survey of 100 cereals by Which? found that 31 had more than four teaspoons of sugar in them per bowl and many contained more sugar than a helping of Tesco's dark chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, while 100g of Tesco Special Flakes have the same salt content as Walkers ready-salted crisps.

They sound like a delicious treat after all, I thought to myself, and so much more convenient than frying eggs and bacon. Just add milk and my indulgent delicacy is ready. So I went out and bought myself a variety pack, opened a nice bottle of wine and tucked in.

It's sludge. They all turn to sludge. They start off a bit crunchy, which is fine, but then they go soft and gooey - and not in a nice way like caramel or egg yolk, but more like slurry or milk after a summer in the sun. The taste isn't actually horrible - all that sugar and salt must help a bit - but it's throwing good after bad. Ludicrously tasty it isn't.

What is ludicrous is that something that has the advantages of delicious killer ingredients uses them to such little effect. It's the first time in years that eating something bad for me has failed to hit the spot. It was as depressing as KFC chips; this, I thought to myself, is no way to die.

No wonder the manufacturers had to pretend the cereals were healthy. And they certainly taste healthy enough for people to believe it. You don't feel you need to check the ingredients for dangerous goodies when there's a party in your mouth but no one's brought a bottle.

How did we become a nation of breakfast cereal eaters? Does the gruelling nature of consuming it appeal to a sort of neo-Christian urge to self-harm? Is it like mortification of the flesh - we assume it's virtuous because it's unpleasant?

If so, we've created a huge market for a weird product that isn't good for us and is nowhere near as nice as toast. Even toast with margarine and diabetic jam is like a night alone in a cake shop compared with a bowl of All-Bran. I was given All-Bran a few times as a child on the basis that it keeps you regular. Looking at it, I found that plausible.

Breakfast is often called "the most important meal of the day" but it must be the least important. No other meal would be given over to mass-manufactured dried and reconstituted shards of shit knows what that you have to moisten in order to be able to swallow. They don't sell lunch cereals that you add gravy to.

I would rather leave my early-morning hunger unsated than have it die such an inglorious death; to be suppressed, rather than assuaged, by sludgy brown flakes. I mean, "flakes" for goodness sake! It sounds like a dermatological symptom. You might as well call them scabs: "Kellogg's Bran-Scabs - never has so much sugar been so effectively suppressed by the bland illusion of roughage!"

There are breakfast cereals that don't contain loads of salt or sugar, but they taste even worse. People try to jazz them up with fruit or yoghurt. It never works - they'd be better off deep frying the stuff and serving it with a mayonnaise dip. Now there's a tasty delivery mechanism for riboflavin.

What a total prick.

ALISTAIR DARLING announced the rich will see their tax rates change. Yes, they will — when they bugger off to Switzerland.

The one bright spot in the Budget was when the Chancellor said: "I’m taking the necessary measures for Britain’s recovery." Unfortunately, the gun jammed when he tried to shoot himself in the head.

I couldn’t believe that in the current financial climate it took him 20 minutes to explain our Budget... how long does it take to say: We have three beans, we are going to eat one, plant one and attempt to trade the other for a magical harp?

Analysts expect that Britain won’t be able to balance the books until 2018, when at least two or three General Elections have passed and the British Civil War has ended. Duty on the average bottle of beer has gone up by two per cent, thereby putting an additional strain on Scottish parents as they’ll have to increase their kids’ pocket money. And two pence has been added to a litre of petrol. This will upset many rural types, making their favourite tipple unaffordable.

He has been criticised for allowing pubs to close, while trying to save the car industry. This is a silly move; the more drivers we have using pubs and then ploughing their cars into bus stops, the more demand for replacement cars. This will also help buoy the replacement limb industry and florists.

The Chancellor announced a 2billion package aimed at preventing school-leavers from joining the dole queue... he’s going to build a big fence around job centres to stop them getting in. The City has dismissed Darling’s predictions on the economy as overoptimistic. Coming from them, that’s interesting. They based their entire financial model on receiving a mortgage payment from an unemployed, one-eyed banjo player in Detroit.

Most Chancellors proudly hold the Budget box high for photographers, whereas Darling looked so embarrassed he used it more to cover his face like a paedophile getting into a police van. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d delivered the entire Budget speech holding a blue folder in front of his face.

The new supertax will affect people who earn over 150,000. It’s surely of no surprise that Alistair Darling earns 141,866 as a minister. The real surprise is he hasn’t introduced a tax for people who’s hair and eyebrows match.

They are taxing the rich to help pay for assistance for the unemployable.

So Labour have returned to their socialist principles. Tony Blair must be spinning in his four £9million homes. Darling is putting 150,000 young people into jobs in green technology. This should be successful. Brit teens are already experts at smashing streetlights and heating whole estates with one burning car.

DEMON..STRATION

It's been an interesting week or so in the land of law:

It’s been revealed thousands of policemen suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing so much violence and horrific injuries. Luckily, there’s a cure. Stop beating people up. The police said they now want to carry Tasers permanently. I can’t wait for the next demonstration in London. It’ll look like the video from Thriller.

Then of course cops were caught taking photos of each other sitting on the Queen’s throne while on duty at Buckingham Palace. It’s lucky the Queen didn’t catch them. As she’d have got a slap in the face and a baton to the legs.

Finally, a Japanese woman has been sentenced to death after four of her neighbours died when she served them a curry laced with arsenic. There are probably still British men who would complain it wasn’t hot enough. Arsenic curry? That’s a bit too bland for me. Can you do me a polonium vindaloo?

Ranting about rants...surely not!

In these troubled times, we all need something consoling to cling on to, something familiar, although not necessarily something good. There is nothing more comforting, for example, than a cold, particularly if you've got the time to indulge it, which, in unemployment-racked Britain, thousands more do every day.

It doesn't hurt - the symptoms are as cosy as they are uncomfortable - and it's an excellent justification to moan. You know exactly what's wrong with you and can feel sorry for yourself, safe in the knowledge that you don't deserve genuine pity and won't get any.

There is nothing further away from the uncertainty and fear of worrying you may have a terminal illness than the gladdening pseudo-glumness that comes over you as the certainty of an incoming sniffle becomes apparent. "Oh no, a cold," you can say with a weary shake of the head. It's so different from how you might say: "Oh no, Aids."

Sometimes when people complain, it's because they like doing so, not because they're asking for a solution? When someone says they find it difficult following conversations at noisy parties, they want the response to be: "Oh, I'm the same!", not: "This is how you can get yourself a hearing aid." When I whinge about backache, it's because the whingeing seems to lessen the pain, not because I want the phone number of another sodding acupuncturist.

Familiarity is so heartening that it can cheer us up even when the familiar thing has horrendous connotations. Everyone was reassured when Winston Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty in 1939, partly because they'd seen it before - he'd held the same post at the beginning of the First World War.

Like that went well! What kind of nutter perks up at the recurrence of something that, last time around, presaged the most murderous conflict in history? It's not even as if Churchill had done the job brilliantly the first time - he was responsible for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Surely no one was seriously buoyed by the thought that this new war might only be as bad as the last one?

With hindsight, we know that, had that been the case, tens of millions of lives would have been saved. But, in 1939, you'd have to be a severe pessimist to call that sort of speculation "realism".

Nevertheless, people were using their familiarity with a global war to make the prospect of another one less alarming: "It's just us and Germany and Churchill all over again," they felt better for thinking. "Bit of rationing, the odd zeppelin, every mother loses a son and we'll all come up smiling in four years' time, even if quite a few of us have developed stutters and get the shakes whenever a door slams."

Our fear of the future is so great that likening something to previous problems, however enormous, is far preferable to envisaging unprecedented ones. In other words, old problems are never as scary as new ones. Someone predicting that the credit crunch will be as bad as the Great Depression is something we can bravely take in. Saying it might be worse is a pant-wetter.

Of course our greatest moan, will always be the weather, and it seems that even with that, our days of moaning about the weather may be numbered; when it's 30 degrees in the shade in March, with the sea encroaching on Coventry, our nostalgia for bemoaning drizzle will be heartbreaking.

"There's nothing new under the sun", "'Twas ever thus", "Dear oh dear!" - these are the mantras of middle England and we need their calming effect now more than ever. So let's not focus on solving old problems that don't much matter or we'll be left with nothing to distract us from the insoluble new ones that do.