September 20th 2004 - September 27th 2004
Sunday Post-prandial
Saturday Hush now
Friday Pajamahadeen
Thursday It's Vera
Wednesday Tight
Tuesday John Leslie
Monday Golf war
Sunday 26th September 2004
Saturday's txts:
I'm in the Joiners, should you (and yours) fancy something post-prandial.
Does parendial=shag. Cos thats what we r going to do imanantly. Kev doesn't know yet tho.
Saturday 25th September 2004
Friday 24th September 2004
Thursday 23rd September 2004
Heaven only knows why my friend Gregory has sent me this (very poor) photograph of him and...why!...could it be...yes! Princess Vera of Ut Thangor.
Wednesday 22nd September 2004
A dreadful warning
When Mr Hain attacks the "men in tights" (this Government seems to a have a weird "homophobic" objection to this form of dress), he is not really standing up for a strong House of Commons: he is trying to bring a previously independent body, with its own officers, under government control.
Thus Charles Moore Editor-emeritus (ie ex-editor) of The Daily Telegraph, speaking from the lofty sinecure-space of his weekly column.
It was Moore, famously, who refused to allow his journalists the use of the word 'gay' in anything other than a headline; here we see him squander a (relatively) rational argument about Government interference in due democratic process with a cheap jibe about Labour's pro-gay policies.
Worse, far worse, than that however is that, having stumbled, Moore proceeds to shoot himself in the foot - as readers scratch their heads over the marmalade and wonder what on earth homophobia has to do with the traditional costume of Commons officials.
Slowly, too slowly, the penny drops. Tights! Men in tights! Like ballet-dancers, Muriel! D'you see? The Labour government thinks the Serjeant-at-Arms is a pooftah on account of his wearing long lisle stockings! Damn clever.
Meanwhile, back at the argument of the piece...Oh never mind. Any more tea in the pot?
Tuesday 21st September 2004
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the fate of John Leslie has been a peculiarly modern kind of crucifixion, a warning that no celebrity now can expect to get away with living the louche life.
Look closely and you will see that his army breeches are a little bit too short and his cavalry boots keep slipping down, while his giant red and gold jacket looks as if it was made out of a pair of theatre curtains. Never mind, for he gives it his singing and dancing best as villainous George Wickham in this adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice.
It's not his fault that he looms above the rest of the cast like a Scots pine in an orchard, nor that some in the audience are cross-eyed with boredom by the interval.
When he's doing his dancing bits, his facial expressions seem to suggest a goose after a particularly pleasurable bowel movement, but no one threw a cabbage at him, he's not quite the worst thing in the production and he's brought in some useful extra publicity; perhaps that's why [the director] cast him in the first place?
"No," she sniffs. "I don't read the tabloid press, so I hadn't taken anything to heart.".. Quite so, although, in a more candid moment, she says that what she really needed was "someone from Edinburgh who could play the piano".
Monday 20th September 2004
This might not be last whipping US takes
Now what does the US do?
Clueless USA get Euro-thrashed
Europe gives US a lesson
Europe overwhelms US
Europe's rout in Ryder Cup prompts US soul-searching
Not, of course, that there could ever be a geo-political aspect to anything as dull as a simple game of golf...
......previous week
