what I did on my holiday

I had a week off. How did I spend it? Watching Celebrity Masterchef. Or it felt like that. This show is so formulaic that it seems somehow eternal: a constant loop into which new celebrities are inserted at half-hourly intervals. The same phrases crop up again and again with slight variations. 'Can so-and-so's experience of playing thingy in Brookside help him create a really fine mushroom and mango Stroganoff?' Everyone talks about being 'out of their comfort zone' as though that were a good thing. Clearly they have a different definition of 'comfort zone' to my one. I like being in my comfort zone; I feel comfortable there. Surely if you want to be out of your comfort zone, that just means your comfort zone is expanding.

Speaking of comforts, I also saw Famous, Rich and Homeless in which celebrities were given a taste of life on the streets of London. Although had I seen Les Battersby and Lord Blandford on the streets for real I would hardly have been surprised. Not that the latter spent much time on the streets since he soon found himself a hotel to kip in. I wasn't clear how our Lord got the money for his hotel stay. Was it through begging? In which case, wasn't that something of an achievement? Hadn't he, in fact, won?

As it was, he stormed off, outraged at the poor quality of the room service.

Despite or because of this, the programme was quite effective in its way, and when I went to London the day after watching it, I expected the homeless to be raking it in. I was even considering parting with some spare change myself. Strangely though, I never saw any homeless. Maybe they didn't want people to think they were selling out. Or maybe they made so much money during the first rush hour, they all went home early.

Perhaps you can tell from that last sentence that I haven't had my diversity awareness training yet.