and so on

The new job has its awkward moments. I accidentally left the office without my pass and by this simple act rendered myself unable to get back (you have to swipe it over a black box in order to achieve access). I had to wait to be let back in. I had become like a dog.

At lunch I found myself looking through the same issue of Chat I picked up a month or so ago. Luckily, there's a lot in it. It's rather like the Bible in this respect. How, for example, did I manage to miss this headline, in blazing red, on the cover? He Axed My Girl To Death - Now WE'RE Paying for His Sex Op! Well how very liberal of you. Oh no, that's the tax-paying 'we' they're using there. As for the 'sex op', that's a sex-change operation, not surgery undergone purely for sexual thrills. Though you can never really be sure in the wild world of Chat, where puppies are eaten by sofas on a regular basis.

Do I really get pleasure from reading this magazine? No, in retrospect it offends me: I must ring a national newspaper to complain. Unfortunately, they only have time for the ludicrous Ross/Brand debacle, which has now caused the Daily Mail to start a campaign to get people to refuse to pay their TV licence. One of the key figures in this was the guy who used to present One Man And His Dog (no sour grapes there, then) who complains that the BBC does not represent the countryside and that Springwatch is 'too politically-correct'. Quite how you make Springwatch politically incorrect I'm not sure. Get Bill Oddie to black up? Shoot birds as soon as soon as they emerge from the egg? But then people would complain, and refuse to pay their TV licences...