Topical

Amy Childs went to Dubai and learned how to make scrambled egg. It transpires that Dubai, unlike LA, is 'not like Essex'. It is useful to have this kind of certainty in a fast-changing world. The other day I woke up to the news that I no longer live in Europe. Apparently David Cameron had split up with it, on our behalf, because he needed to go to the toilet.

I'm not kidding. He was using the 'full bladder technique' of decision-making, wherein you put off having a piss in order to keep yourself focussed. I don't think I would make very good decisions under those circumstances. I think I would just make the decision that got me to the nearest toilet in the fastest time. Perhaps that's what he did.

Anyway we needn't worry, because he was right. According to the Mail On Sunday, anyway, whose headline blared: 'YES, CAMERON GOT IT RIGHT.' This was the actual banner headline, not an editorial, and it referred to the result of an opinion poll. But what a relief! Now we don't have to wait and see how it actually turns out. Above this was the story of a Tory MP who had gone on a stag weekend in France at which someone was dressed as an SS officer, and they all toasted the Third Reich. Does that make him a Eurosceptic or a Europhile, I wonder?

I love the way the Mail brands people like Kenneth Clark 'Europhiles', as if they've identified a sickening new sexual perversion.

Within the paper, Peter Hichens was unconvinced by Cameron's stand, which would not, he feared, avail against 'Angela Merkel's giant vampire squid'. By which I think he meant the EU. Although politics would be a whole lot more exciting if Angela Merkel really did have a giant vampire squid.

No doubt all this stuff was covered on Friday's Have I Got News For You anyway - I didn't see it because I was enjoying a Christmas meal at the golf club. Well, maybe not the golf club, but a golf club. And it was good. I had a green plastic frog in my cracker, and - a nice touch this - the joke was about frogs also. It maintained that frogs use 'Morse toad' to communicate. Of course this is nonsense, as toads are a completely different species. You might as well say that they use Morse hedgehog. But it's the thought that counts.

Men, Sex, Blood

Approaching work the other day, Sufjan Stevens was arriving at a crescendo in my ears with a long track called Djohariah, and suddenly three binmen appeared, pushing bright yellow wheelie-bins in formation and it was just, you know, an amazing moment? Though the binmen must have wondered why I was staring at them like that. (And applauding.)

The Christmas decorations have now gone up in the office. Carol was looking for suggestions for what to do with a bit of tinsel. 'Around the clock! Around the clock!', we chorused like children. The word 'clock' was misheard in the next office, to general hilarity. Tinsel also decorated Lorraine's rubber duck (a sample from a supplier), which then was referred to as her 'Christmas duck'. 'I hope that doesn't get misheard!', I commented and further hysteria ensued. It was like an episode of the Two Ronnies or something.

The duck had been perched on the partition between Lorraine's desk and mine, but facing her, so that I was presented with a tinsel-wrapped duck's arse. It has now been moved - amazing what a quick e-mail to HR will do.

The most exciting thing to happen at work recently - apart from the ongoing debate about whether to increase the monthly tea fund by 50p - has been the fun generated by changes in the law regarding 'practicing' gay men being able to give blood, which they can now do providing the old chap has been off active service for a year. This has meant a rapid reprint of a leaflet now called Men Who Have Sex With Men And Blood Donation, which has a new red cover, intensifying the fantastically lurid air of the whole thing - the words 'sex' and 'blood' leaping out at you as from a poster for an erotic horror film. I knew I was in this job for a reason.

To Live And Die In Brentwood

I wonder if it's time for me to relaunch this blog as an offshoot of TOWIE. I do live in Brentwood after all. 'Essex is like LA', says Amy Childs in her new programme It's All About Amy. Shots of Nando's in Brentwood High Street don't quite bear this out, but the trick - and it is surely one that Amy is mastering - is not to have any real idea where you are at all.

'I'm the most normalest person probably ever', Amy declares. If this is true - and 'celebrity' is indeed fast becoming the norm - it makes me wonder who wants to watch a series of hour-long programmes about a normal person not even bothering to pretend to be anything else. Perhaps this explains why the series is already showing signs of shifting its focus onto the incontinence problems of Amy's pet pug, 'Prince Childs'.

But the main thing is that you get to see quite a bit of Brentwood, where Amy has just opened a salon. Because it just isn't enough for me to see it in real life every day, I have to see it on TV as well. Although at one point a shop that is clearly in Crown Street is described as being in the High Street, which has me sputtering in rage. TV shows should be followed by errata, I think, like books used to be. Amy should be made to read out the mistakes after every episode - which could conceivably take longer than the programme itself.

People might wonder whether I watch programmes like TOWIE 'ironically'. I tried for a while, but it's impossible. TOWIE exists in a place that is beyond irony. And that place is Brentwood, where boutiques are springing up as fast as you can paint a wall pink and hang up a chandelier, and tourists from all over the UK pack the Premier Inn, each of them no doubt hoping that one day they too can become 'the most normalest person probably ever'.

However I do fear that Amy's new programme is doomed, simply because, unlike TOWIE, it doesn't have a user-friendly acronym. Ask someone if they have seen IAAA and they'll think you're having a stroke.