a topical spasm

Sometimes things happen in the public arena that are so shocking that you have no choice but to comment on them. Thus: Joey Essex on Mr. and Mrs. It was an astonishing performance. Inarticulate and weird-looking, he now resembles a real celebrity – the kind who hardly seems to belong in 'reality'. He is also a natural philosopher - at one point, I swear I heard him say: 'I'm language'. It's true, Joey – you are language. You've even invented a word: 'reem'. So what if it doesn't really mean anything? It's more than, say, Heidegger ever did. He just coined neologisms.

Oh, and then something else happened in Woolwich. Somehow, I wasn't shocked. Maybe I've read too much J.G. Ballard. One of the perpetrators of the atrocity went to a school quite near here – bet they won't be inviting him back to give a talk to the students.

Everyone else is talking however. Wading through my Mum's Daily Mail, I'm finding the topic hard to escape – even Fred Bassett is offering his thoughts on the subject (predictably savage). I wind up taking refuge in the 'Answers to Correspondents' section ('Until recently, maggot eyes were not well understood...'). Maggot Eyes – isn't that an Italian horror movie from 1973? No? Well it should be.

One thing everyone is talking about is reintroducing the snappily-titled Snooper's Charter, a bill allowing the security services (who have seemingly just proved how useless they are) greater powers to monitor your e-mails and texts and, for all I know, your excrement too. This bill was voted out quite recently, but is being talked up again on the sound basis that, if something has been rejected after careful consideration and with due process, it'd be a really good idea to bring it back as a knee-jerk reaction to something that happened in the street a few days ago. Anyway it was 'only the Lib-Dems' that objected. And now they want to stop hate preachers appearing on TV. Shame: their slot was the only thing worth watching on QVC.