If you say 'whilst', kindly leave this website.

'Whilst' is a complete waste of phonemes. It has no earthly point. It's like a wasp or an appendix or - I can't even bring myself to say this - a fish knife.

You don't see a big sea creature and say, 'Look! There's a whalest!' You don't look at your desk and exclaim, 'What a big pilest of paper work!' Do you? Well, do you? Doest thou?

The sort of people who use 'whilst' are the sort of people who put '(Mrs)' after their names and spend all weekend polishing their plastic conservatories.

In America, 'whilst' is considered quaint and silly - a bit like 'methinks' - and it's only ever used in writing, if at all.

It deserves extinction and I intend to make it my mission in life to eradicate 'whilst' from this planet.

Once upon a time, people in shops used to say, 'thank you sir' to me and refer to me as 'the gentleman' when talking to other assistants. I approved of this, despite my liberal tendencies, because it made me feel important when I actually wasn't.

Then, in the late nineties I think, they started saying, 'thanks mate'. I wasn't their mate. I didn't know them from Adam. I didn't like it one bit.

And then, just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I popped into Focus in Hertford today to buy a plant pot.

The assistant who served me was all of 12 years old and I had high hopes of a 'sir'. But no. I didn't even make it to 'mate'.

He scanned my pot, smiled politely, looked me in the eye and said, 'cheers fella.'

Just in case you found that hard to take in - the phrase was

CHEERS FELLA

ie.

CHEERS

followed by

FELLA

Debretts Guide to Etiquette doesn't cover such moments. I was so flabbergasted I resorted to an emergency 'pardon?' to allow him to upgrade his language.

'Cheers fella,' he repeated.

'Thank you,' I replied in my best Penelope Keith voice, making a dignified exit with my £1.99 terracotta pot and resisting the tempation to smash it over his egaliltarian little teenage head.

A cat has become station master at a railway station in Kinokawa, Japan. Bollinger lookalike Tama, 9, has an office, wears an official cap and is paid a salary of cat food. Profits have gone up by 10% since Tama was employed.

We should try it here. Get a cat to run Heathrow Terminal 5 perhaps.

And Bolly would make a great Prime Minister in my view. She's popular, knows what she wants, and rarely does u-turns.

I bought this 1902 antique print yesterday for a mere £5 and intend to put it up next to my wardrobe. If a 2008 yoof dressed like this, I suspect he'd be severely beaten up.

I know it's deeply wicked, but I'm sure I'm not alone in noticing the frightening similarity between poor Shannon Matthews' mum Karen and Kathy Burke's Waynetta Slob.

First Capital Connect, who run the train service from Hertford to London, have introduced a useful new information service in their carriages.

The small, openable top windows now have stickers on them saying OPEN FOR EXTRA VENTILATION.

How very useful. Thank you First Capital Connect. I had no idea that, if you require a bit of fresh air, opening a window can help.

I suggest they expand this thoughtful new service, adding stickers saying KINDLY LOOK THROUGH THIS WINDOW IF YOU WISH TO SEE OUTSIDE or PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LOOK THROUGH THIS SOLID WALL BECAUSE IT IS OPAQUE or PLEASE DO NOT FALL ASLEEP WHILE STANDING FOR THE ENTIRE JOURNEY, AS THIS MAY RESULT IN FALLING OVER.

I'm feeling deeply ruffled. It's 9am, but it feels like 8. Bollinger's confused as well, as she had her breakfast an hour early. This whole nonsense about moving clocks backwards and forwards must stop.

Apparently it's to prevent road accidents in the darker parts of the UK. Can't the Scots just be made to wear lamps on their hats? Or have their own time zone? Why should we suffer down here?

My parents say it was even weirder in World War Two when we had Double British Summer Time and it was light till midnight. Who wants that? We're not in Norway. This is Britain for goodness sake.

Several of my friends live in flats. I like flats. I have nothing against them whatsoever.

But it upsets me greatly that flats aren't called flats anymore. Thanks to the M&S effect, everything now has to be poshed up. So my friends live in apartments, loft apartments, units, duplexes, condominiums and mansion flats.

It's the same with terraced houses, which have suddenly metamorphosed into mews houses, link houses or cottages.

But it's a simple fact (is it not?) that a flat is a flat is a flat. Is a flat.

This is, of course, a reference to Gertrude Stein's 'a rose is a rose is a rose' - meaning 'things are what they are' and they don't necessarily have to signify something else (as in Freud's possibly apocryphal 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.')

Stein once said, 'Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a … is a … is a …' Yes, I'm no fool. But I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.'

I'm a big fan of picturesonwalls.com Don't visit if you're offended by un-PC graffiti or swear words. But do if you're not. Here are some of my favourite graffiti from the site.

So ran a headline in Harmsworth's Magazine in 1899. Having heard that their beloved city was gradually sinking, the magazine pre-empted the climate-change-and-flooding hysteria of the nineties and noughties by 100 years. Their enterprising picture editors published mocked-up photos of the capital with Venetian canals and lagoons, adding new Italianate place-names.

Stazione di Pancras

Piazza St Pauls

Hyde Park Corner

Palazzo degli Horse Guards

Canale del Regente

Fenland in Cambridgeshire

Thanks to the new National Express train 'service', I spent yesterday afternoon meandering gently through the Cambridgeshire countryside in a coach. And, having lived in Cambridge for years and worked at BBC Radio Cambs for a large chunk of my youth, I suddenly realised I'd never visited half the places I used to broadcast to.

As the coach plodded its weary way in the direction of Hertfordshire, we passed villages and towns I'd only ever encountered in news bulletins and travel slots and almost seemed fictional at the time. I had fond flashbacks to my phone-in regulars, who were always known by their first name and place of origin, in the manner of Guy of Gisbourne, John of Gaunt, or Hildegard of Bingen.

There was Coral from St Ives, Nancy from Yaxley, Agnes from Kimbolton. And the redoubtable Bert from Manea who once sold a pile of manure via my programme if I remember rightly. Happy days. They seemed quite old back in the 80s. I wonder if they're still alive.

I'm greatly taken with carp magazines at the moment. Every day, there seems to be a new one. WH Smith's magazine section is starting to resemble a fishmongers.

I was in Harlow the other day - a place devoid of all nature - and there were seven different carp mags on the shelves of a newsagents there.

Carp magazines have strict rules. The cover must feature a carp-brandishing gentleman in a hat, posing as if playing air guitar with his carp, which must be fat. The man should ideally be ugly. If he's wearing a baseball hat and glasses, this is considered to be a great boon. It's also a good idea to include a union jack on the cover, because carps are very patriotic fish.

Total Carp is my favourite. It's full of useful features such as 'How can breakfast cereals make your zig rigs more productive?' And I recently read a very evocative piece about bread - the forgotten bait. It begins, 'Armed with loaves of bread, baguettes and finger rolls, Craig erects his brolly to seek shelter from the elements.'

It's also good to see a carp hitting the headlines. Who can forget the Daily Mail's Angler catches world's biggest carp - which weighs almost as much as Kylie

Kylie the Carp

There are countless carp-related websites too - Carp Mad, Carp Culture (German), Carp Passion, Carp Crazy and Carp Universe, to name but a few.

I'd like to run my own niche carp publication one day - Feminist Carp, Postmodern Carp, Evangelical Carp or whatever. I'd find this oddly fulfilling.

Today's Pollock is by Jane from Hertford.

Today's Pollock is by Ben from Cambridge.

Today's Pollock is by Frank from Waltham Abbey.

Apparently, there's a shortage of Gordon Brown lookalikes. What a relief.

We're told the lookalike agencies are desperate, but I fear they won't locate any - at least on the earth's suface.

Perhaps they ought to extend their quest to the seabed, which is where the Gordonfish live.

Gordon Lumpfish

Gordon Blobfish

Gordon Stonefish

No 5 by Pollock - yours for £130 million

You can now paint your very own Jackson Pollock online. It's great fun.

I'd love to see your Pollocks and display them if you'd care to email them to me.

My first musical obsession of 2008 is the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Lead singer Jonsi has an ethereal falsetto voice and sings in Icelandic and occasionally in a made-up language. Their bass player uses a bow.

They record their wraithlike tunes in odd locations such as an abandoned swimming pool. And they've recently made a film called Heima, which consists of a compilation of unannounced gigs performed in far-flung locations in Iceland.

Their song titles are a bit enigmatic (eg 'Hoppipolla' means 'hopping into puddles' – it's pleasing to know Icelandic has a word for this) and their videos are very Nordic. I like the one for Glósóli (which you can watch here - just choose the right player for your PC). It's worth watching to the end.

There's a BBC Culture Show about them, available on iPlayer for the next few days. The latest album Takk is a good starting point if you want to hear more.

one of my new cat postcards

I was in an antiquarian book shop today, buying some old cat poscards. And I noticed one or two cards wishing relatives a happy Christmas.

One - dated 1907 - had been posted on December 24th.

Clearly the habit of leaving Christmas to the very last minute isn't anything new. On the other hand - I guess people didn't really have time off to prepare in advance a hundred years ago. And - with two posts a day and a reliable service - at least they could guarantee it would arrive on time.

Thank you to Hazel for pointing me in the direction of Prof Richard Wiseman's Quirkology site, where you can take part in some interesting surveys. I recently filled in a short questionnaire about my friendship with Bolly.

Professor Wiseman - based at the University of Hertfordshire - is fascinated by the odder nooks and crannies of psychological research and his site and his books are very entertaining.

Ship of Fools has just announced this year's kitschiest Christmas presents for Christians. Here are some of my favourites...

St Sebastian Pin Cushion

Virgin Mary Memory Stick

Holy Toast

I've just received the following spam email from someone who's clearly a real academic.

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Alistair Darling

As the ancient Croatian proverb says, 'Nikada pouzdanje čovjek čiji obrve jesu različit naličiti from njegov kosa' -

Never trust a man whose eyebrows are a different colour from his hair

It was dark at 6am when I tottered downstairs this morning to put some coffee on. Boll was running ahead, as ever, almost tripping me up. Then I saw him. A man at the foot of the stairs. I saw his shoes first. And then his trousers. I was genuinely terrified and felt a shiver down my spine and a horrid burst of adrenalin.

Then I realised I'd hung some jeans on a clothes horse to dry and left a pair of trainers directly underneath. 'Silly me' I thought, leaving everything as it was.

Ten minutes later, I popped downstairs again for some toast. And I got exactly the same shock again.

The mind's a strange thing.

I downloaded Radiohead's excellent new album In Rainbows for £3.00 today. You can pay whatever you wish, from zero upwards. My theory was that they'd still make a profit if I paid that. And I've bought all their previous albums, so I'm a pretty loyal fan.

I like Radiohead's idea and enjoyed reading a BBC feature about honesty boxes, with some interesting comments at the end.

a specialist chicken catcher

It's awful news that a lorry full of chickens has crashed, causing chaos in Scotland, and I seriously hope no chickens were harmed. But it's good to know that 'specialist chicken catchers' have been called to the scene.

Still Lost in Translation has just come out and it’s very funny. It’s Charlie Croker’s second compendium of bizarre and baffling English encountered abroad. Here are some of my favourites:

Off-Licence, Portugal
Selling of alcoholic drink is forbidden to minors of 16 years old and to those who are notoriously drunk or to the ones who appear to have psychic abnormities

Roadside, Japan
When passenger on foot heave in sight, tootle the horn

Hotel, Japan
All rooms not denounced by twelve o’clock will be paid for twicely

Restaurant, China
Roasted duck let loose
Rashers beaten up in the people’s fashion

Lake, Oman
Drowning accidents are now popular

Monkey Area, Japanese National Park
We do not like to be stared at our eyes. If you do so, we are not responsible for what will happen. We do not hope to be such a monkey.

Door, Oman
Physio the rapist

Restaurant, Switzerland
Half a lawyer with prawns

Restaurant, China
Dumpling stuffed with the ovary and digestive glands of a crab

Hotel, Canary Islands
Great entertainment - live paella

Hotel menu, France
The salmon smoked house
The ham of stage coach
The sausage of ass
Spotted frog thighs
The flap with shallot
The nice one of pig green pepper

Coast, Spain
Beach of irregular bottoms

Sign, Ethnic Minorities Park, Beijing
Racist park

Hotel, Prague
Water is officially drinkable (but not for sucklings) but we don’t recommend to drink it

Hotel, Munich
In your room is a minibar filled with alcoholics

What a relief. It's now 100% legal to keep a sloth as a pet without a licence.

one of my best friends

It used to be called the 'beer garden'. Now, it's called the 'smoking bit' (as in - 'I need a cigarette. Are you coming out to the smoking bit?')

When my smoking friends leave a bar for a cigarette (typically in twos) I'm always torn between staying inside - paranoid they're talking about me - or going out and getting even more drowned in smoke than I was in the old days.

And it's often the more interesting bohemian types who go out and smoke, leaving a load of tedious old puritans indoors and creating a sort of Friday Night Apartheid.

This smoking ban is divisive and wrong. I'd rather die from passive smoking than passive boredom.

Last week was weird. I had several migraines (one in the gym). And I had the oddest nightmares ever. In one, I was imprisoned in a manor house run by Attitude magazine and forcibly injected with poison by a mad dwarf from a Velasquez painting. In another, I was chased round an African restaurant by a vampire which I stabbed to death during a peculiar cabaret. The next night, there was a horse on the roof. It fell through into my bedroom, but it was fine and rescued by the RSPCA.

Last night, I was finally back to my usual media anxiety dreams. I had to stand in for Terry Wogan at short notice but I had no records or CDs. And the Pause for Thought vicar was too short-sighted to read his script and alarmingly off-mic.

According to one online dream symbol dictionary, the rooftop horse means I'm connecting with a higher being. What a relief. But the vampire means somebody in my life is bleeding me dry and draining my energy.

There was sadly no explanation of being imprisoned in a manor house and attacked by a dwarf.

Oscar

Bollinger tells me she's thankfully not related to Oscar the cat despite the superficial resemblance.

Dogs having kittens? Cats having puppies? It's all very odd.

Nora

Nora's recital

Less impressive recital by plump German cat

During a (totally innocent) googling session this morning, I stumbled on a very odd website. Do not click on urinal.net if you're a prim, proper or shockable person. It features photos of eccentric and picturesque loos around the world. There are no human beings in the photos thankfully. Here are my three favourites.

Taj Mahal

Felix Club Hong Kong

Stockholm Airport

A grapefruit is a lemon that had a chance and took it.

Photos of books by Cara Barer.

You can now get married by double-proxy in Montana. In other words, you can get married via two stand-ins, so you don't have to turn up for your own wedding.

I assume you can also have a double-proxy honeymoon (or single-proxy one, attended by you and a stand-in of your choice), a double-proxy life together, double-proxy arguments and double-proxy affairs, rounded off with a double-proxy divorce.

I can't decide whether I find these photos sweet or sinister, but they're certainly intriguing. They were taken by Harry Whittier Frees (1879-1953) who used his own pets for the poses and made a point of treating them humanely, even if they don't look entirely comfortable. He had the idea when a party hat fell on his pet dog's head and the dog went on wearing it.

'Every subject was a living, healthy, active animal brought into position by patient kindness. No drugged animals, much less any that was artificial or stuffed, could give the results shown. Rabbits are the easiest to photograph in costume. The kitten is the most versatile actor. The pig is the most difficult to deal with.'

His puppies were called Wags, Tags, Rags and Obadiah. The kittens were Buzz, Fuzz, Suzz and Agamemnon. The rabbit models were Fluff, Puff, Muff and Algernon.

Here are some photos of unexpected friendships from Let's Be Friends

Shorpy is one of my favourite websites. It's a collection of old photos, mostly from a 100 years ago. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham - a child miner who was photographed in 1910.

What a gorgeous day!!! Isn't global warming fantastic???

Happy Easter from Boll and me. We're having a break but will be back soon.

I'm happy to announce that spring has officially arrived. For some, this is indicated by harbingers such as cuckoos or groundhogs. But for me, spring is heralded by my first hayfever sneeze. This year, it occurred at 3.17 pm on Sunday 25th. And the momentous event was captured for posterity, as I happened to be in front of an open microphone recording a programme. It was, in my view, a classic sneeze and I hereby offer it to anyone requiring an authentic sneeze sound-effect.

Listen to the First Sneeze of Spring

'Our stunning Egyptian themed room is draped with golden fabrics. Ancient relics, gilded sarcophagi and hieroglyphics envelop you throughout your dream' announced the website of the Talardy Hotel in St Asaph in Wales.

When I arrived on a short trip this week, I was alarmed to find a sphynx presiding over my kettle, hieroglyphs on the headboard, twin Tutankhamun death masks on either side of my bed and a sarcophagus next to my complimentary Hobnobs.

After checking the wardrobe for mummies, I almost felt safe. But I did worry slightly about waking up in the middle of the night and thinking I'd been buried alive in a pyramid.

The hotel was actually very good, with excellent food, and I'd thoroughly recommend it if you visit that part of Wales.

A friend of mine was in a shop recently and noticed they had some clangers for sale.

'Do you have any soup dragons?' he enquired.

'Yes,' replied the assistant. 'I think they're next to the casseroles.'

A Clanger

A Soup Dragon

Finally - something dramatic has happened Peterborough.

I've become addicted to the websites of lookalikes agencies like this one. My current favourites are Einstein, Hitler and Jesus (below).

It's good to know that Jesus looked like Johnny Depp.

But who hires him? Does he do theological conferences? Old people's homes? Hen parties?

I overheard the following highbrow conversation this morning in Starbucks on Piccadilly:

Bloke 1: 'I'm off to see Carmina Burana tonight.'

Bloke 2: 'Who's she then?'

Bloke 1: 'It's an opera mate. By Carl Orloff.'

I've just read a shocking statistic while researching a book.

On average, women spend six months of their lives on the loo.

That's frightening enough. But MEN spend THREE YEARS of their lives sitting on the toilet. What a terrible waste.

My Dad told me the other day other that he often wakes up in the night to find the time on the bedside clock reads 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55 and so on. Weird - because that also happens to me and happened several times last night.

The question is, of course: do I really wake up at those times in particular, or do I just notice and remember those times rather than others? I suspect the latter may be true.

But it seems Dad and I aren't alone. There are some interesting discussions of this apparent phenomenon on the internet and one or two quite spooky stories too.

I'm intrigued by the notion that these numbers are connected to guardian angels, as I once had a session with an angel therapist (for a BBC programme) and was told that my guardian angel was standing behind me. I'm not prone to be affected by such things (quite the opposite), but I did feel a very strange physical tingle at the time and still get it whenever I think about the experience or the idea of having a guardian spirit.

There's even a book about the 11:11 angel connection, by George Barnard, who was apparently contacted by some 11:11 angels. He claims they spoke to him in French, saying: 'Nous sommes les Mille-Cent-et-Onze Esprits Gardiens ...'

'We are the One-Thousand-One-Hundred-and-Eleven Spirit Guardians. The name of our number, the number of our name. We share your space, not your time.'

By the way, if you haven't read it, Miss Garnet's Angel is an excellent angel-related novel, set in Venice.

Don't worry - I haven't gone mad. I just find angels interesting.

A man crying out to be sectioned

During a recent search for a spam filter, I accidentally stumbled on a website for Spam enthusiasts. I know it will give me nightmares. One of the products advertised was an outfit which ingeniously disguises you as a can of Spam. Perfect if you're out on the pull.

YOU WILL BE THE HIT OF THE PARTY claims the optimistic brochure AS YOU BECOME A LIFE SIZE SPAM® CAN.

NECK & ARM HOLE OPENING MAKE FOR AN EASY FIT.

I spent some time this week working in St James's in London - the home of England's most exclusive gentlemen's clubs. It was like being in a timewarp. I felt like Miss Marple on a trip to Claridges. I saw pinstripes, meticulously-folded handkerchieves in top pockets, buttonholes, pipes, and horn-rimmed glasses. Everyone looked and sounded like Leslie Phillips.

At one point on my perambulations, I encountered one of those narrow passageways under some scaffolding and gave way to an elderly gent.

"Eye of a needle, old chap," he said. "Eye of a needle."

I've just discovered The Bookseller Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.

This year's winner was:

People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What To Do About It

The runners up included:

Bullying and Sexual Harassment: A Practical Handbook

and

Ancient Starch Research

Previous winners include:

1980 - The Joy of Chickens

1982 - Population and Other Problems

1988 - Versailles: The View from Sweden

1990 - Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual

1992 - How to Avoid Huge Ships

1994 - Highlights in the History of Concrete

1996 - Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers

1998 - Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw

1999 - Weeds in a Changing World

2002 - Living with Crazy Buttocks

and

2004 - Bombproof Your Horse

A Stripper

It seems that funerals are no fun anymore in China.

Last night, I dreamt that the house was possessed by a poltergeist.

Then, when I went downstairs to make a coffee at about 10am, I heard a bang and the sound of glass shattering. A glass bauble had fallen off a bookshelf and was smashed to smithereens. The bauble's been there for months. It was also, interestingly, the bauble which seemed to identify the genders of friends at a dinner party a few weeks ago (see the entry Swinging Both Ways). Bolly the cat was with me in the kitchen and was nowhere near the bauble.

A couple of years ago, I presented a Radio 4 programme about people who try to record ghosts, which included alleged recordings of the Enfield Poltergeist. I interviewed psychical researcher Maurice Grosse about it. And, as soon as he walked into Studio 7E in Broadcasting House, all the reel-to-reel tape recorders started spinning on fast forward. He shrugged it off and said he tended to 'attract energies'.

A few days later, when I was editing the interview at home in Oxford, there was a deafening bang upstairs. The attic cupboard door had apparently been blown off its hinges.

Thankfully, nothing odd has happened so far while writing this. That would have been scary. I'm going to press 'save' and 'rebuild' very quickly now.

Maurice Grosse

Peacockshock has been Googlewhacked.

In case you don't know - the word 'Googlewhack' was first used in 2001. A Googlewhack is a Google search query consisting of two words (both in the dictionary and without quotation marks) that returns a single result - one solitary website.

Hence 'Googlewhacking' involves juxtaposing two (usually) obscure, unconnected words and typing them into Google.

Examples include -
squirreling dervishes
fetishised armadillo
quintupling zugzwang
netherworldly mugwumps
and...
blithering clops

So - back to me. I've just received an email from Sarah Kampel - a complete stranger, possibly from the USA, who entered 'ornithological cocopops'.

What did she get? One hit. And that hit was this site - Peacockshock. That's because I must have used the words 'cocopops' and 'ornithological' quite near to each other at some point.

Peacockshock is proud to have been the recipient of a Googlewhack and extends pavonine congratulations to Sarah upon the occasion of her successful whacking.

I had some friends round for dinner the other night and we noticed a glass bauble on a bookshelf. I've no idea why it was there.

Anyway - Henrietta said she'd heard that, if you suspend a bauble (or pendulum of any kind) above the palm of a man, it swings back and forth in a straight line. But, with a woman, it revolves in a circle. So we tried it, and it worked - quite spectacularly.

Henrietta then disappeared and returned with folded bits of paper on which she'd written male and female names. The pendulum managed to sex them too, with 100% accuracy.

But it went a bit berserk with one name, circling, then swinging back and forth randomly. We unfolded it, and it was the name of ... a transsexual.

Spooky. I've since researched this phenomenon and discovered that pendulums can identify the gender of unborn children too.

www.picturesofwalls.com

Cats that look like Hitler

More

I got into a terrible flap about my health today for various reasons and went to the gym to get it out of my system. As I approached the normally unspooky Cannons in Hertford, I bumped into an old lady in a strange hat. She stopped, looked me up and down, and said: 'You don't need treatment.' 'Pardon?' I retorted, thinking I'd misheard. 'Look at you,' she replied. 'You don't need treatment.' Then she scuttled off round the corner, never to be seen again.

I had occasion to google the word 'blackberry' the other day as I'm thinking of getting one to collect my emails.

Naturally, I expected to find lots of entries about actual blackberries first. (For young people - a berry is a juicy thing that grows on a bush). But I was shocked to the core. The first 17 entries were for handheld wireless devices. Even on Google Image Search. It was like something from Dr Who. Fruit possessed by technology. I was apopleptic and stormed out of the room.

The blackberry (berry version) is also, by the way, known as the bramble, cloudberry, dewberry, thimbleberry, and bumble-kite. And it was associated with Pagan gods such as Brigit.

In fact, if you scald yourself, you can invoke Brigit using a blackberry and cure yourself by dipping nine blackberry leaves in spring water and then laying them against the burn gently, while saying the following chant three times to each leaf (27 times in total):

Three ladies came from the east.
One with fire and two with frost.
Out with fire, in with frost.

It's good to see the cat photos of Satoru Tsuda are in fashion in the UK. And it's difficult to avoid comparisons between his models and the highly photogenic Bollinger.

Tsuda took up cat photography in 1980 when he found an abandoned kitten at the dry cleaners next to his home in Nagoya. He named it Matakichi after the dry cleaners and adopted it, despite not liking cats much at the time.

The kitten joined his large collection of pets, including dogs, rabbits, ducks, sparrows and marmots. More cute cats followed, resulting in more photos and a craze for collecting his catpix in Japan.

Tsuda loves animals and he's very careful not to harm or upset them when they pose for him.

Me, earlier this morning

Here are some things I learnt this weekend while flicking through a frightening skyscraper of unread newspapers in the corner of my bedroom:

Preston, from The Ordinary Boys, is the great great great great grandson of Earl Grey - from Newcastle - who was Prime Minister and invented tea.

Paris Hilton has a diamond-encrusted Blackberry.

Manchester has been named as one of the top seven 'most intelligent cities' in the world by the US Intelligence Community Forum.

There's a 'playground for the elderly' in Finland.

Drinking four or more cups of coffee a day can increase your chances of having a heart attack by 60%, if you carry a particular gene.

7,000 lives a year would be saved if we swapped crisps and chocolate for dried fruit and nuts. On average, Brits eat 3 unhealthy snacks a day.

This week's pin-up is Dexter from Waltham Abbey.

A friend of a friend's dog died recently. The friend of a friend's toddler answered the phone (to a friend of my friend's friend) and announced:

"Dog dead. Dog gone. Bye Bye dog."

Then promptly hung up.

Meanwhile, another friend visited Hertford avec toddler the other day and he asked where Mo was. On being told that Mo had died, he declared that people become stars when they die, and pets become clouds.

Why do old men have such big ears? Do their ears get bigger? Or do their heads get smaller? Or both?

This week's pin-up is Todd - a very fetching Fell Terrier.

Ivor Cutler died last week. I'm a big fan of his. But it didn't go well at all when I met him a couple of years ago in his messy attic.

"Hello. Is that Ivor?" I said on the phone when arranging my visit. "No", replied the familiar clipped Scottish voice. "It is Mr Cutler." He didn't hold with first names.

When I turned up to interview him, he accused me of being Australian. He also objected to my 'staring antipodean eyes' and asked me not to look at him while we were talking. Then he asked me if I was wearing aftershave and left the room, returning with large chunks of cotton wool projecting from his nostrils.

The interview went OK but was punctuated by very long silences.

Later, I heard from a friend who knew him that he'd been frightened of me. Oh dear. I still have no idea why. I wish it had gone better. But it was good to meet him nevertheless.

Some quotations from Mr Cutler:

I have avoided competitive situations, because I am not a baboon.

What happens to sharks when they're old?
They don't just fade away.
What happens to sharks when they're old?
I'd rather not say.

Add 15 inches to your stride and save 4½ per cent of insects.

I've been listening to BBC 5 Live today and I've heard about ten contributors at different points saying: "I'm not going to beat myself up about it."

Have you ever tried to beat yourself up? It's very difficult.

Why is this ludicrous metaphor so popular? I guess I shouldn't beat myself up about it, but I'd take great pleasure in beating up the halfwit who thought it up in the first place.

I've just been reading a paper about the correlation between country music and suicide. It claims:

'Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work.'

To test this out, I tuned into a country music station on iTunes.

The song they were playing was called, if I'm not mistaken: "I Lost My Baby In The Portaloo Line."

I'm now treating myself with an extra Prozac.

I forgot my online banking password this morning and tried to re-set it.

This all went terribly well until my bank asked me for a new security question, which only I could answer. It accepted the answer ("26 omlettes") but absolutely refused to accept the question. So I phoned the helpline.

"Oh, that happens a lot," said the helpful northern person on the line. "Did you put a question mark at the end of the question?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Thought so," sighed the northern person. "It won't let you do that."

So now my question has no question mark. Isn't that ridiculous?

Sorry - "Isn't that ridiculous."

I sent my friend Danny a birthday card this week. Danny is married and is straight in the best possible sense. He's also a budgie expert. The touching card featured two yellow budgies kissing eachother. And Danny liked it. But it turns out that the budgies are gay. Both male. I wonder whether the card designers knew this. I like to think that they did and simply didn't care.

This prompted me to urgently investigate the gay budgie scene - whereupon I discovered that the subject pops up a lot on budgie-fancying chatrooms. I also learned that there's an unperformed Monty Python sketch featuring a gay budgie, entitled 'Who's a Pretty Boy Then'. And gay Australians apparently refer to Speedos as 'budgie smugglers.'

I've developed an odd fascination with Komondor dogs over the last few days. I particularly like photos of them jumping.

Picasso Getting Dressed In The Morning

© Shani Solomons

If you want to contact Shani (who, as you can see, is a brilliant cartoonist) just email me via ian@peacockshock.com

Kevin Maguire (left) and Arctic Monkey (right)

I can't help noticing that the singer from Arctic Monkeys is in fact also the Mirror journalist Kevin Maguire.

All eyes were on Gobbler's Knob this morning when Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his burrow and failed to see his shadow, confirming we're in for another six weeks of winter. The last time he saw his shadow was in 1999.

He and his ancestors have been meteorologically prognosticating in Pennsylvania since 1887, when German settlers brought the Candlemass tradition over to America. They used to monitor hedgehog shadows back in Germany, but they couldn't find any, so local groundhogs stood in.

Groundhogs are also known as woodchucks (as in: 'how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?') and whistlepigs.

Other states have groundhogs too, such as Staten Island Chuck in New York. And the Canadians have their own weather-predicting woodchucks, such as Shubencadie Sam.

If you think the BBC's dumbing down, go to Avon and Somerset, where the police have put up textspeak placards in areas frequented by teenagers.

Here's one of their messages:

d bil cum arnd hre n wl vzit ur olds if ur messin bout

copyright 1999 Trengove Studios, Inc.

What's happened to icicles? Why don't we get them anymore? It's wrong.

I just emailed an acquaintance who has - um - one or two psychological challenges. And I did a typo which I only spotted AFTER sending the email. It said: HAPPY CHRISTMAD. Oh dear.

Skarajeb is an online museum of old family photographs, found in fleamarkets around Europe. It's very poignant and well worth a visit. Thanks to my friend Laurence from Århus for recommending it.

According to the headlines, a starling has won the Turner Prize. I know the Turner's well known for being pretty extreme, but I'm astonished that it's gone to a garden bird. What next? Chaffinch Wins Booker? Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Curlew?

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