Liadnan

The Today programme this morning had several slots on various aspects of the obesity report put out yesterday, the very last item being Norman Tebbit and Boris Johnston, not that I could quite understand why (I was in the whosershower when they started).

According to Uncle Norm, the rise in obesity is due to this government "doing everything it can to encourage buggery".

Que? Something about destruction of the family it seems.

Cue Humphries effectively telling him to shut up and Boris coming out with some polite variant on "what a load of rubbish". Oh, and then he started banging on about how it used to be possible to bring up families on one income so the woman (obvs) could stay at home, but mercifully the beeps came. Honestly, why do we give these loonies airtime? And why does anyone care? Same goes for Princess Michael of Kent. Why does anyone care? One can usually get even fairly devout royalists to admit that she's particularly stupid, ignorant, arrogant and unpleasant so why the surprise? The only question is why Her Lizzyness allows a relatively third-rate royal who by all accounts she personally dislikes; with a cloud over her re use of grace and favour apartments and a habit worst than Philip's of opening her mouth before engaging what it pleases her to call a brain; to do these junkets at all.

Heigh ho. Been fairly busy, went to see Almodovar's Bad Education with Anna-who-lives-upstairs Tuesday (worth seeing, full of Almodovar's usual things, perhaps not his best though) and dinner with the lovely Frankie last night.

Was coming out of the Winding-Up court yesterday morning in full get-up and a very cute member of a party of American tourists/exchange lawyers/whatever who were wandering through the costume exhibition evidently thought I looked great. Remind me to see if I can change my vote in the internal survey on court dress to keeping wig and gown... (though it would be better if we came out of mourning for Queen Anne (? I think) and went back to red robes).

I put it to the vote: which is the better* opening line:

"A man obsessed with pop singer Sonia, who believed the Germans were controlling his mind, decapitated his 80-year-old mother with a chainsaw, a court heard today",

as Greyarea would have it; or

"Before Toma Petre's relatives pulled his body from the grave, ripped out his heart, burned it to ashes, mixed it with water and drank it, he hadn't been in the news much",

as Liz contends?

*Edited to add: look, I have a loud and annoying inner pedant, and it gets very cross when I make grammatical errors, so I correct them silently when I spot them.