Loss on day £80
Nottingham sucks. Under my new methodology, it’s easily my worst performing course (chased hard by Redcar, no wonder this week’s been hard). I’m down £525 there this year. I might decide to omit courses next year. I might not. Pontefract is my best performing course and I would never have predicted that. I think I probably need a larger sample size than one year.
Carol Vorderwoman has been a surprisingly large part of my life - not least in the Dashing Des Kelly years - and I couldn't help noticing on tonight's One Show that her breasts seem to have taken on a life of their own. And her arse. In fact, much like Trigger's broom, I'm not sure how much is original.
Which is fine - go your own way - rage against the dying of the light. Write your own history. Which she also managed to do - on a sofa with Peter Andre and Graeme Swann, and that there Oti (swoon), plus Alex and Matt, all of them talking about the wonder of their times on Strictly Come Dancing without ever mentioning Carol's own less wondrous experience of said event.
I'd still watch her doing sums, mind..
Apparently, Paul Dacre spent 15 minutes of his farewell address lambasting The Guardian. Dacre, who plainly attended the same performance management training as Philip Green – his staff talk about being dressed-down as being given a “double-cunting” – seems to have limped off the field at a strange time, given the world is tilting more towards his socially illiberal stance with every turn.
But he certainly prevailed over the monthly phone calls of the last twenty years between the Guardian me and the Mail my mom. In the last couple of years alone my mother has railed about a tsunami of Syrian refugees getting preferential treatment; about doctors “they’ve been agitating forever”; about how our young are a bunch of softy do-gooders – “because the teachers are brainwashing them”; and that without the royals, we’d lose gazillions in tourism as Windsor Castle fell into loneliness and disrepair (like, say, The Palace of Versailles). She’d always win these battles. She’d goad me to say equally stupid things, or to put the phone down. A needle stuck in a groove.
The closed-mindedness and the hatred drip, drip, dripped daily into her, corroded her senses and rusted her heart. The truth is, whatever else is our relationship, we no longer like each other very much. Well done Mr Dacre, look on your works ye mighty. In your honour I’ve knocked up a title that honours your way with headlines and truth.
No poetry.