As ever, I add commentary and endeavour to give advice to the poor confused souls who feel the need to take to Google to search for the strange, the creepy or just the downright obvious.

Cats don’t like water – Nah, they love it! Honest. Give one a bath if you don’t believe me. Your cat will think it’s great and will not turn into a hissing, snarling bundle of teeth and claws intent on tearing every inch of skin from your arms. Trust me, I’m a blogger and bloggers never, ever say sarcastic things on the internet.

Tortoise housing ideas – That’s the thing with tortoises, they have these great ideas about housing but no one listens to them. When I was a little girl I had a pet tortoise (Mr T), oh, the happy hours we wiled away discussing the best ways to create more starter homes.

Drawn sex/draw sex – I decided not to Google this to find out more, so can only assume this is some kind of historical porn. However, it may just be someone who likes erotic drawings, so in an effort to help here is a drawing of stick people. (For reasons of privacy I’ve only included the foreplay, they may be sticks, but they have feelings).

Stick-people Play Footsie

I draw sex – That’s nothing! I draw wasps, greenfly and religious fanatics … no, actually, thinking about it, you probably win.

Mascara Guy Fawkes – I suspect this person is confusing Guido with Eddie Izzard. If you are that person: Eddie Izzard is a comedian and actor who often wears mascara; Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament and was not known for his use of cosmetics. As you can see they are very, very different.

Sentence with indignant - OK … how about: Cats tend to be quite indignant when bathed. Is that any help? Maybe not, but it might be useful for anyone who took my comment above seriously.

Why was Oliver Cromwell the odd one out – Umm … I don’t know. Is it because all the others were elephants?

I’m shocking – I doubt that. People who believe they’re shocking are a lot like people who believe they’re zany: usually they’re just pretty ordinary, even a bit dull.

Drink cakes – What a bizarre thing to want to do.

Frog me – Frog yourself, weirdo!

Glow in the dark tampons – Not only are people searching for this, there’s a petition calling for their introduction.

Einstein zunge/Albert Einstein head – (Zunge is the German for tongue.) These terms are odd, I mean, why are people searching for Einstein’s body parts?! Is it some kind of creepy treasure hunt?

George Osborne porn – What? Why? No! If you are the person who searched for this you really need help. Fortunately, I can provide that help. There are these men known as Sean Bean, Johnny Depp and Clive Owen, I have no idea if they produce porn (probably not) but it would be far healthier to Google for photos of them than to spend your time looking for images of Gideon getting  jiggy, an act which is not only detrimental to you, but which has also made me be a little bit sick in my mouth, and left me wishing there was a way to disinfect my brain.

That is all!

Usually, researching this kind of post involves spending quite some time rummaging through the lesser seen regions of Google news, seeking out oddities, anomalies and the downright strange. Not this week, or last week for that matter. No. It seems the great and the good have decided to gift bloggers and columnists everywhere with the kind of material that one really couldn’t make up.

- I begin with Ricky Gervais and his one man crusade to reclaim* the word, ‘mong’. Mr Gervais has now issued an apology saying he had been “naive”, and, “(n)ever dreamed that idiots still use that word aimed at people with Down’s Syndrome”.  However, prior to his climbdown, those who objected were labeled, “humourless”, while his fans described the criticism as political correctness gone mad and an attack on free speech – which is odd because the last time I checked the laws surrounding freedom of speech didn’t include a clause advocating bullying.

- The saga of Liam Fox and his ‘friend’, the delightfully named Werritty** rumbles on. Mr Fox has now resigned but not before blaming everyone but himself for his downfall saying the criticism of his take-a-mate-to-work policy was due to “vindictiveness” and “hatred”. I suppose I can see his point. If plumbers and bricklayers can take a mate to work, why not defence ministers  who are involved in secret strategic talks with key allies? Surely unblocking a sink and discussing the defence of the realm are exactly the same thing? No? OK, I see your point – Mr Fox still needs some persuading though.

- And then there is Oliver Letwin, millionaire and MP for West Dorset, who was photographed dumping official papers into a rubbish bin in a central London park. It turns out this is also a perfectly normal thing to do because the papers weren’t top secret or anything***, just letters from his constituents. So, the good people of West Dorset now know how their elected representative treats their correspondence. So far, Mr Letwin hasn’t come up with an excuse, or found anyone else to blame, but if he wants to I suggest pinning it all on St Eric Pickles, patron saint of the garbage obsessed – if only Eric had reintroduced weekly collections sooner ….

- In (very much) related news: still available on BBC iPlayer, Holy Flying Circus is a “fantastical re-imaging” of the controversy surrounding the release of Monty Python’s, Life of Brian, which is quite apt considering the Ricky Gervais story I opened with. Life of Brian is a perfect example of comedy being used to challenge preconceived ideas. Contrary to what the anti-Brian propaganda said, the film did not attacks Christians, it challenged blind, unquestioning belief.

I suppose Ricky Gervais fans could argue that attacking preconceived ideas was their intention, but I’m not so sure. I have a feeling many/most of them unquestioningly retweeted Gervais’ mong tweets simply because of his celebrity status. They didn’t stop to think about what they were doing, they just followed along because some famous person was leading, a bit like the Brianists, really****.

- And finally: the death of Dennis Ritchie earlier this month was a little overlooked, which is very sad. Mr Ritchie was the inventor of the programming language C, and the co-inventor of the Unix operating system.  Although he was hardly a household name in the way people such as Bill Gates or the late Steve Jobs are, his influence on the technology that has become so much a  part of our everyday lives can not be overstated. It is no exaggeration to say that pretty much everything you see or do on your computer you owe to him. Yes, there were other languages, and there were other OS, but the ones he worked on were most elegant and the most practical. He truly was a pioneer!

*Not entirely sure how he intended to do this, because I thought you could only reclaim a word if it had been applied to you. For example: gay people and the word gay.

** Werritty sounds as though he could be a cousin of Raggety from Rupert the Bear.

*** I suspect he’s not trusted with the really serious stuff.

**** I blame their parents who obviously never used the traditional response, ‘And if all the other boys jumped off a bridge, would you follow?’, when their offspring tried to blame bad behaviour on the influence of others. I’m guessing they never said, ‘Stop swinging your school bag, you’ll have someone’s eye out’, or, ‘ But superheroes eat all their carrots, that’s why they have super powers!’, either.

Updated to add: Life of Brian is also on iPlayer – just watching it now, it’s still funnier than a very funny thing indeed!

I first saw this set on Friday Night Live (yes, showing my age), and thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. The problem was I couldn’t remember the name of the comedian, so spent the next twenty-odd years asking people if they remembered a chap who pointed at owls. I have to admit that doesn’t sound particularly amusing, in fact, it sounds a bit odd, so I can understand why they answered in the negative and shuffled away.

Anyhoo, I’ve managed to track the set down – and feel vindicated because it’s still funny

ps: You might need to turn your speakers up because the sound is a bit dodgy!

He's gonna fight for his right to Bieber

So, the big news this week has been the riots, I was going to write something about that, but I don’t really have anything to add to the opinions already aired so it would be pretty redundant. However,  if I must say something it would be that I don’t think poverty is the main motivator – few of the rioters appear to be poor, and for every area where people did riot, there were others which are just as poor or even poorer where people didn’t*. I don’t think it’s straightforward criminality either – few of the rioters appear to be criminals, just opportunistic types who like to get free stuff.

I think the rioters are mostly self-absorbed types who don’t understand the illogicality of smashing up their local area and making life difficult for their neighbours; and who don’t care that their actions will make it more difficult for legitimate protesters who actually have a real grievance. I also think we should take some time to figure out why we have such people, and why people living in similar areas didn’t riot, but on the whole the accompanying photo  is the best response – we should mock them using the magic of Photoshop. I mean, how silly is that man going feel in years to come when that photo resurfaces again and again? Imagine trying to explain that to your children when they ask, ‘Daddy, why is there a photo of you on the internet looking like a grade A plonker’?

Instead I’m going to talk about something that was hidden away in the news: the announcement by the unfortunately named Jeremy Hunt that 65 towns and cities will be eligible to bid for local television licences. Many people are criticising this scheme, saying that daily local news programmes will be dull because local news tends to be dull. At first I thought they had a point, but after closer scrutiny of the local news in my area I’m not so sure.

For a long time I thought the local news in my area was duller than the dullest thing you can imagine, and then some. The weekly papers usually have a front page story – something about a mugging, or maybe a fight outside a town centre pub – but then it’s page after page of talented pets**, primary school children holding swimming galas, photos of large and/or unusually shaped vegetables and profiles of people reaching their 100th birthday. Only one type of crime seems to proliferate: thefts from garden sheds. The police usually put this down to organised gangs, and for a while I believed them, but then I started to have doubts. I mean, organised gangs of bicycle thieves? I can believe in gangs getting organised to smuggle diamonds or valuable works of art, but hovermowers?

I think the police are missing a trick here. It’s obviously not a series of organised gangs – why would there be so many, and why target Doncaster? -  this can only be the work of an evil but financially embarrassed genius.

Unlike most evil geniuses, this guy doesn’t have the wherewithal to build a secret base beneath a volcano, so he’s reduced to working from his garden shed. He also can’t afford snazzy equipment to build the evil genius machine that he plans to use to take over the world, so he’s cobbling something together out of old bike wheels and lawnmower fan belts which he pilfers on nightly excursions to the suburbs and villages of the greater Doncaster area. It’s not entirely clear what the machine will do, but it does have ten gears, a switch to adjust the height for different surfaces and a complimentary water bottle.

So far, I haven’t able to identify this hideous fiend, but I have put together a psychological profile based on my own weird imaginings state of the art scientific principles. I think we’re looking for an older gentleman, one of those chaps who decides to take up a hobby when they retire, after all, who else would have the time? And who else could avoid detection for so long? He’s probably doing it under the very noses of the police who don’t suspect a harmless old man***.

This menace to all we hold dear probably started out quite innocently, maybe he was trying to build a more efficient pump for his tropical fish tank. However, several months of soul-destroying daytime television combined with eating his own body weight in rich tea biscuits sent him over the edge. One day he was ranting at Jeremy Kyle, the next he was hell bent on world domination with the view to forcing us all to wear beige slacks, play cribbage and listen to the Nolans’ Greatest Hits. Despicable.

That’s as much as my inquiries have revealed, but I’ll keep investigating, I’m sure more clues lurk amongst those seemingly innocuous tales of endearing school choirs, novelty vegetables and uncatchable pike.

* Plus, why were people raiding pound shops? They’re hardly aspirational and I find it difficult to believe we have people who can’t afford to spend a quid on a novelty plant pot in the shape of a teletubby, or a 15 gallon vat of neon-pink hair gel. I suppose it’s possible they are fobbing the good people of Doncaster off with tat while those in Birmingham and London are offered Tiffany lamps and  pashminas, but that seems unlikely given the overheads.

** Sadly that is usually a cat who makes a noise that sounds a bit like hello, or a dog who looks a bit like his owner. I’d be more impressed if these pets were genuinely talented, if they could juggle, or spin plates, or perform Swan Lake in the manner of Margot Fonteyn, something like that.

*** This why Scooby Doo should be required viewing at police training colleges.

I was reminded of this today while reading Melanie Phillips latest offering in the Daily Mail, in which she attempts to deflect attention away from the fact that Anders Breivik quoted her – not once, but twice – in his ‘manifesto’. Apparently, all the hate and bile she spouts on a weekly basis have absolutely no effect on anyone. Obviously, she can’t claim her columns are full of sweetness and light and fluffy kittens, so she defends her use of hateful language saying, “Some words undoubtedly do have hateful or violent consequences — but they are by definition hateful or violent words”.

I find this argument very strange because she seems to be saying that hateful and violent words can influence people, but those who write the hateful and violent words are in no way responsible. How can that be? Surely, the writer chose to use hateful words? The words don’t write themselves. It’s disingenuous of Ms Phillips to suggest that somehow she is not responsible for what she writes. The words made me do it is not a defence.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take too much notice of the sources that influenced Breivik, he’s obviously not entirely rational even if he is found to be sane. And, irrational people have done all sorts of terrible things because they believed completely innocent texts supported it. However, in this case I do think Melanie gave him an awful lot to work with; her columns are not objective, she doesn’t play the ball, she plays the man, or the woman, or, on occasion, the dog.

Melanie Phillips is a bit like the Razor Ruddock of journalism. When she writes about, for example, single parents the resulting piece is less informed commentary and more of a two-footed tackle to the back of the knees. Instead of an insightful overview of the coalition government, she produces the written equivalent of elbowing David Cameron in the face. She rarely uses facts – pesky things, they get in the way of a good rant – preferring to rattle off stereotypes and generalisations. She then backs herself up by insisting her views are “shared by millions of decent British people”. I suspect she may be wrong about that, and that her views are shared, but not by decent people, British or otherwise.

Of course, Melanie does differ from Razor in some crucial ways. Razor could argue that he nobbled opposing players because of competitiveness, because he desperately wanted his team to win, and that his opponents were perfectly capable of defending themselves.

Melanie prefers opponents who don’t have the luxury of a national newspaper column so who can’t fight back, and she doesn’t act out of a will to win, but because, I suspect, she enjoys kicking people who can’t retaliate. And unlike Razor, who took a sending off in good humour, accepting it as part and parcel of the physical style he chose to play, Melanie refuses to accept that she has done anything wrong. Not only does she feel she has no responsibility for the words she writes, she actually believes she is a victim of  a left-wing conspiracy to smear the right.

“As soon as the atrocity happened, people on the Left saw a heaven-sent opportunity to smear mainstream conservative thinkers and writers by making a grossly distorted association between Breivik’s attack and their ideas.”

Except, that’s not really true is it? I haven’t seen anyone using this as an opportunity to ‘smear conservative thinkers’. Norman Tebbit is pretty far to the right but you’d have to be a bit potty to think his opinions would lead him to use mass murder to promote his cause. Once again, Ms Phillips is being disingenuous.

No one seriously believes the ‘right’ are one homogeneous group who all think the same; no one seriously believes the right are violent, homophobic, racist misogynists to a man, woman and dog. The people being scrutinised and found wanting are those, like Melanie, who choose to denigrate whole sections of society simply because they are different. They align themselves to the right, but really they’re just intolerant arses.

I doubt Melanie will ever read this, but just in case she happens by:

Melanie, you are in a very fortunate position. Not only do you live in a country where your right to speak freely is protected in law, but you have a national newspaper column to expound your views. However, with rights and privileges come responsibility. You have the right to express your views, but you also have a duty to do so in a responsible and appropriate manner. This does not stifle your opinions, it just means you use words with care and skill. You have to play the ball, not the man.

You are a very talented writer – your long career is testament to this – you know that words are not merely words, words have power, but that power is in the hands of the individual who uses the words, not the words themselves. I’m just a naive, inexperienced and relatively young blogger, but I know that. You, with your glittering career and years of experience most certainly do.

Stop hiding behind words, admit you screwed up and went too far, show some humility. It’s the mature thing to do and it may possibly gain you a modicum of respect. Continue to play the victim and ‘decent’ people, British or otherwise, will continue to think you are reprehensible.

In Recent Weeks I Have:

- Ejected a frog from my kitchen. No idea how it got in, I just found it hopping about one morning. This is one of the reasons I’m starting to think living in a town might be a better idea; I never found wildlife in my kitchen when I lived in a town. Since I moved here I’ve found the above mentioned frog, a bat, a pigeon, assorted rodents, some kind of mutant wasp** and a dog***. Apparently there are plans to reintroduce wolves into the UK, I do like that idea, but if it happens I am definitely moving to a more urban location because I suspect that, unlike frogs, it will take more than a dustpan and a mop bucket to eject a wolf from your kitchen.

- Tried to find a ghost walk in York. Actually, it’s more a case of trying to find the right one to go on, there are loads! At least three of them claim to be the original York ghost walk, and one claims to be world famous, but I’d never heard of it, so I’m a bit dubious about that***. Anyhow, I’m supposed to be going to York for a few days next month, and I’d really love to go on one,  so if anyone can suggest a tour it would be much appreciated.

- Watched the Hackergate coverage which seems to get more bizarre and unsavoury with every new revelation. I’m guessing certain politicians will be hoping it will all die down during the summer recess, but I have a feeling this is a scandal too far.

Oh, and someone should tell George Osborne that smirking at the opposition during a debate about the hacking of the phone of a murdered teenager makes you look like an insensitive loon.

- Planning next year’s holiday. I’m going on a big adventure taking in Greece, it’s islands and Albania! However, according to a friend****, this might be quite a risky undertaking because we won’t have a rep (not package tour people) and it will be hot. I’m not quite sure how having a rep alleviates the effects of heat, do they follow you with an AC unit over their shoulder?

It does make me wonder how people managed for all those years before package holidays – and reps – were invented. For example, the Duke of Wellington, I’m sure he didn’t have a rep during the Napoleonic wars, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a problem with his men spontaneously combusting. Admittedly, my knowledge of that period mostly comes from watching Sharpe, but I don’t remember an episode when Sean Bean says, ‘Eee ‘Arper, I’d love to capture that enemy fortress, but in this heat when we haven’t got a rep? No chance’. Obviously, it is not historically accurate.

Anyhoo, I’m jumping on my seat excited about the trip, and rather hoping it will be hot.

That’s about as exciting as it’s been, so I’ll go back to thinking about paint, and leave you with a LOLcat


see more Lolcats and funny pictures,
and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

*It’s a choice between bluebell blue or a kind of peach shade, I say kind of because I mixed it using bits of paint from other tins, so it’s probably not on a paint chart.

** No, it wasn’t one of those Spanish ones the Daily Mail were warning us about. It was thin, about three inches long and had an evil glint in what I think was it’s eye.

*** Not my dog, it was some random dog called Ted – he was wearing a collar, he didn’t tell me.

**** Sorry, just because some of your customers are from overseas that does not make you world famous. Following this logic: I used to be a waitress in Stratford, our customers came from all over the world, therefore, because these people are aware of my existence I must be world famous too.

***** A man who wears speedos and flip-flops while holidaying, completely unaware that this makes him look like an aging porn star.

Today should be my brother, Will’s birthday, but he’s not here to congratulate. So, instead, here is a song for him. It’s Nina Simone singing Here Comes the Sun, just because he was a fan, and even met her once. Apparently, she was very taken with his dog, Lady – a scary beast he’d almost literally stolen from a man who was using her for fighting. Odd behaviour I admit, but pretty much what I expected from my little brother, and he was rewarded with a lifetime of love and loyalty from a very grateful dog.

He wasn’t the most conventional of people – his exploits would probably outrage Daily Mail reading Middle England – but he was never cruel or malicious, quite the opposite; he was intelligent, kind, brave, very talented, and most important of all, very much loved.

I was very touched to see how many people attended his funeral. Hundreds of people from all walks of life and from all over Europe came to say goodbye to him. The establishment rubbed shoulders with New Age travellers, all got along remarkably well, and all had an anecdote to share. My brother was remembered very fondly, which I think is a sign that, although his life was short, it was worthwhile; not only will he be deeply missed by many, many people, but in time they will remember him and smile.

Anyhoo – Bilbo, I hope you, Lady and Nina Simone are having a bunfight, replete with lots of blancmange, and JD. Keep an eye on Barnie for me … and tell Pater to stop trying to redesign the afterlife; I’m sure that if it needed built-in wardrobes it would already have them x

Recently, I’ve noticed a big increase in the number of people being wrong on the internet. Oh I know, people have always been wrong on the internet, but usually they were wrong in the right way: they disagreed with you, but they did, at least, have an informed opinion, it was the wrong opinion but they sincerely believed it, and could argue their point rationally.

I’ve spent many happy hours engaging with the right sort of wrong on the internet. I’ve shared my thoughts on the great DeNiro vs Pacino debate; wrestled with the thorny issues surrounding the whole Led Zep vs BOC controversy; I’ve even waded in to the toxic swamp that is Bruce Lee vs Jackie Chan. I can even tolerate the dissenting voices of Man United fans, they are of course wrong, but it’s the right kind of wrong.

No, the wrong people I’m talking about are those Attila the Mom* mentions in her most recent Asshat of the Week post, those who are wrong because they seem to lack the ability to actually read the words in front of them. Instead, they read a title, assume they know what lies beneath, and rattle on about what they thought the writer had said, rather than what is actually written there. Alternatively, they’ll ignore both the title and the article, and drone on about something else entirely.

These people are everywhere. At one time you only found their UK brethren on the Daily Mail website, but now they’re branching out. They’ve even infiltrated the Guardian! Nowadays, Charlie Brooker makes an amusing point about some aspect of popular culture, and a boatload of the wrongs turn up to berate him for not caring that penguins don’t have any socks because they’ve been stolen by chavs**. Meanwhile, another bunch of wrongs will post what appears to be a random assortment of letters that make absolutely no sense***, ‘u suk u libral twet’.

And now they’re even turning up here. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been merrily deleting what I thought was spam, until I took a closer look and realised they were genuine comments. To give an example: one wrong person left me a comment predicting the end of something, possibly the world****. I dunno.  But, the wrongest thing about the comment was the fact that the commenter, somehow, believed this was my fault. I have no idea why. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what I’ve done that could be so influential it could effect events thirty years hence, but I’m flummoxed. Maybe they know something I don’t, maybe I have some hitherto undiscovered superpower. Gosh! I wonder what it is. I’m guessing invisibility because I know I can’t fly, I don’t have x-ray vision and I have absolutely no talent for shape-shifting – truly, if I could do the latter I’d spend most of the day as a cat. Anyway, I apologise for whatever it is, and would like to thank the wrong person for alerting me to my apocalyptic tendencies.

I do think it’s time we re-introduced the concept of the walled garden website especially for the pathologically wrong. Such places were commonplace in the late 90s/early 00s. The idea was you signed up with an isp whose website then became your home page. The problem was once you accessed it, it was extremely hard to escape and access the rest of the internet because every link led to another page on the same site so you just trundled around, eventually finding yourself back where you started. When I first went online, I spent several days trapped on Compuserve, endlessly going round in circles trying to figure out where the real internet was kept; it felt like someone had used Portmeirion as a template. Fortunately, I then discovered Google, and made my escape.

A walled garden site was a bad thing for most people because it kind of defeated the object of the internet – that it gives people from all over the world a chance to interact with each other. However, for the very wrong it would be a very good thing. They could just hang out with kindred spirits, all being wrong (and inarticulate, and crazy) together. Meanwhile, the rest of us can get back to the right kind of wrongness. Heck,  we could even finally resolve the age old dispute about shuffling zombies vs running zombies which, like this post, has gone on for far too long.

In the meantime, the very wrong should consider themselves slapped with that wet haddock.

*I’m a little jealous of Attila the Mom. She came up with Asshat of the Week, and managed to find a photo of a donkey wearing a hat to accompany it. I decide to slap people with a metaphorical haddock and can I find a photo of such a thing? Can I heck

** OK, I’ve never seen that ‘exact’ comment, but it’s only a matter of time.

*** No, they are not teenagers using text speak, these are usually middle aged men who have lived their entire lives in this country, yet have somehow managed to avoid learning the language. It takes a very special kind of wrong to be able to do that. For a while I did wonder if these people were getting their dogs to comment for them …. but it can’t be that, dogs are far brighter and have much better social skills.

**** It happens in 2042, so make a note of that if you feel you might like to make plans for whatever it is.

Boudicca, I pity the fool who told her to put a shirt on.

This was supposed to be a more cheerful post, but it’s gone a bit ranty – although, I have tried to be amusing, here and there. Sorry about that, but I’m really quite irked – and appear to be channeling an inner Emmeline Pankhurst.

A quick quiz for you, Dear Reader. It’s a spot-the-odd-one-out type of thing.

• Oliver Cromwell
• Nicolas Sarkozy
• Henry VIII

OK, which one is it?

If you said a or b, you’d be wrong. The odd one out is actually c. HenryVIII. Despite being a serial adulterer with a penchant for lopping the heads off superfluous wives, Henry was pretty relaxed about how women dressed. Cromwell famously banned any hint of ankle*, but did at least have an excuse what with being (more than) a little mad. I’m not entirely sure what Sarkozy’s rationale is, if he has one, maybe he too has boarded a fast train to Barmyland. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, it’s this**, Sarko’s great new plan to win friends and influence reluctant voters by telling women what they can wear***.

The argument for the ban seems to be based around the idea that women who wear them are forced to cover up. Maybe so, but I’m struggling to understand how forcing them to uncover really helps, because a man who has cowed his wife so much he even gets to choose what she wears, is not going to have a problem with confining her to house when she can’t comply.

Surely, if women are being subjugated to this extent, they are likely to be subjected to other abuses too. Surely, the most helpful course of action would be to offer these women a way to escape the people who are abusing them, not to make them prisoners in their own homes, where they will have less chance of communicating with the people who could help them. To me, this is the equivalent of enacting a law that bans women from appearing in public with black eyes, instead of tackling the domestic violence that causes the black eyes in the first place.

Putting that to one side: this is a French law, but there are calls for a similar thing this side of the Channel, something I feel deeply uncomfortable about. The government should not be telling women how to dress. Nor should they be listening to anyone who suggests it, whether it’s Little Englanders demanding a burka ban, or radical feminists**** railing against high heeled shoes. The idea of the state legislating on what women can and can not wear is disturbing, and downright insulting. Insulting because it implies we need to be protected from ourselves; disturbing because if we accept governments impinging on our right to choose our own clothing, in what other ways will they decide to do our thinking for us?

I can honestly say that if a burka ban ever comes into force in this country I will start wearing one (with high heels), just to be awkward.

* I think officially this was for religious reasons, but I suspect he actually had a thing about ankles and couldn’t help coming over all unnecessary whenever he spotted one.

** You may already have heard, but I’ve been dealing with the whole multiple bereavement thing recently so I’m a bit out of the loop.

*** Ironic when you consider this is a man who thinks 50′s style stacked heels make for a really good look. Seriously Sarko they don’t, not unless you are being ironic, and even then . . . Maybe French women should give him a taste of his own medicine. They could assemble a crack squad, headed by Catherine Deneuve, who’d kidnap Sarko and take him to central Paris. Once there, he would be forced to parade around the boulevards clad in garments from one of those catalogues aimed at old men – these delightful slacks for example.

**** As far as I know, they haven’t actually called for a ban, but high heels are a hugely contentious issue amongst feminists, often likened to a modern form of foot binding and called a “visible symptom of the overarching influence of the patriarchy and it’s continuing subjugation of women”. I’ve heard several variations on that theme, my response has always been the same: you can’t walk in them can you? That really, really annoys them.

Less than two weeks into January my beloved, younger brother died, suddenly and unexpectedly. The following week I found out my dad had also died – swine flu*. Because my brother was young, and there was some suspicion about the manner of his death, we had to wait several weeks before we could hold his funeral. During this time, my dog – Barnie the Battery Eating Hound** – became ill with what turned out to be cancer and had to be put to sleep.

I feel I should write something more eloquent, but at the moment it’s still too fresh and I feel pretty fragile – a bit like the emotional equivalent of being run over by a bus, which then reverses over you, twice.

That is all.

* You know, that thing the tabloids told us was a lot of fuss over nothing. Hmm.

** As mentioned on this blog.