The perils of Space Travel

There is trouble in outer space of all places. The toilet on the International Space Station is broken. Now call me old fashioned but I thought that space travel was supposed to involve shiny rockets shooting rays at each other not hanging about in a metal tube crapping in a plastic bag and blowing it out the airlock. I think I would, if you will excuse the indelicacy, hold it in until I got home.

Which takes me back to the days when the main problem we had with toilets was finding some paper – when rationing finally ended after the war I was so desperate I nearly shot myself! (it was around the same time that I discovered that I wasn't a very good speller.) Soon the country was flooded with handily packaged rolls of paper towels imported into the country, as it happens, by my father's company. What a relief! No more popping next door to ask the neighbours if they had two fives for a ten!

Trophy Wives

It seems that my old friends in the City have been raking in another years worth of enormous bonuses – and very welcome it is too. The poor chaps need cheering up, what with them wrecking the British economy and all that. And if that wasn't bad enough I read that the county's divorce lawyers has been inundated with trophy wives hoping to get a good divorce settlement before the economy goes completely belly up and all the poor chaps in the City get the sack. The good news is that the weak pound will make it cheaper to import a new wife from the far east. Or if you don't fancy that, I understand that you can get a good one from Russia for a song – and the song only needs to be good enough to win Eurovision.

If only Tony Blair had obtained a wife who would quietly spend his money instead of writing books. I have been reading Cherie Blair's memoirs in which she reveals that she and Tony conceived their youngest son at Balmoral whilst visiting the Queen. She says she was too embarrassed to take her 'contraceptive equipment' under the same roof as Her Majesty. One wonders quite what she means by 'contraceptive equipment.' The mind boggles. You'd have thought that the thought of some grubby journalist finding out about it and printing all of the sordid details in whichever rag of a newspaper was prepared to commit such a callous invasion of privacy upon the Prime Minister's wife and child would have put a dampener on the mood. Hang on a minute while I read that last sentence back.....irony is a wonderful thing, isn't it.

Gordon Again

The people who pass for Senior members of the Government these days have been out in force trying to make Gordon Brown look like less of a loser.

I heard one of those identikit Labour party politicians that they have these days; he is a chap called Alan Johnson and he is the Secretary of State for Health. You may remember that he was one of those ones who tried to get elected as deputy leader last year and then got into lots of trouble spending donated money that hadn't been properly registered and which they had to give back because they'd passed a dopey law to make unregistered donations illegal. Of course they didn't realise they were all breaking the law even though it was them who campaigned for it, drafted it, steered it through parliament and lectured everybody else about how great they were for passing it. Frankly what surprised me was that so many people wanted to move into Prescott's office – especially knowing what he got up to in there. Anyway, Mr. Johnson said that the job of Prime Minister is now more difficult than it has ever been, which was why he was making such a dog's breakfast of it. I'm not sure if he has heard of, say, the second world war.

He did, however, demonstrate why Gordon is safe. With people like Johnson as potential successors there is no chance of a challenge.