I'm Just Sitting Watching Flowers In The Rain

I have slowly come to realise that, far from being a GOD I have become a DOG. This awakening isn’t down to dyslexia, I’m sorry to say, as I officially and undeniably became a DOG on Friday of this week. You see I used to be a TOG and I was OK with that but now, thanks to Gardener’s World on the telly, I realise that as sure as “wow” follows “bow”, time has run out and I can only sit up and beg.

A TOG, by the way, is a Trainee Old Git, and it seems to me that you know you’re one of them when you embarrassedly start watching the gardening programmes now and again on a Friday night instead of going to the pub with your mates or staying in with a curry and watching a horror movie on DVD. But then comes the next step which I took this week, the fatal, and final, step where I found myself programming my hard drive to record the gardening shows in case I might miss any. And that’s when I realised I had moved up the rankings from a TOG to become a Decrepit Old Git. A barking old DOG. What a sad, sad day.

When I was much, much younger, maybe a few months ago, the idea of going out and doing gardening would have been bottom of my list of priorities alongside smoking a pipe and reading the People’s Friend, or maybe buying a cardigan, getting a flat cap, putting my teeth in a jar and then sucking on boiled sweets before putting them back, unwrapped, in my pocket to finish later after picking the lint off. But now, almost as a final flourish before the care home calls, life has somehow forced me out in to the back garden like an obsessive, compulsive kid who rushes back from school to tidy his room.

I really have tried to fight this addiction, and if the local council had organised meetings, I’d unashamedly look for help by standing up and confessing “My name’s Paul Coia and I’m a keen gardener”. And before you tut and start to lose sympathy let me say I really have fought this but the dealers just get cleverer, even delivering plants and shrubs round the doors in my neighbourhood by van. I’ve tried going cold turkey several times over by getting away on holiday but it makes me come out in sweats and tremors. Even though the Portuguese doctor said it was sun stroke, I knew what it really was and recuperated by stealing cuttings from the hotel gardens to bring home and pot on.

Yet life’s surely too short for this, and having to spend every Saturday morning in garden centres while taking hours choosing rakes and spades or wondering whether peat free compost wins over the other stuff, is doing my head in. For me, bedding used to be for lying on lazily, late on a Saturday morning. Now it means colour coordinating petunias and nasturtiums.

And gardening is not just a question of pulling up a few weeds is it? Oh no. There’s a whole business built around us DOGs, and more tools and hardware are available than took America in to Vietnam. You want a Compost Maker do you? Well, would you like anodised aluminium or environmentally friendly timber sourced from sustainable B&Qs in Putney? Or how about lawn mowers that you ride on? “We’ve got them sir but would you prefer the petrol, diesel, or nuclear fuelled ones? Or how about solar powered?” I turned that one down as it seems to me that cutting your grass at midnight in the dark is a great way to unwind if you wake up needing a fix.

Then there’s what to wear. Wellies or just old shoes? Shorts or old jeans with a Batman utility belt for cutters, dibbers, slug pellets and a bit of chocolate to keep you going?

And then, worst of all, there’s the hours and days wasted as people seem to want to keep you talking over the fence about whether it’s time to bring in the banana plants before the first frost comes, or what treatment is best for weeds. Moss, to me, used to be a model called Kate but now it’s an hour long discussion on lawn control.

And I can’t see any upside to this oldie curse. Sure you get fresh air but you also get cold and wet. Of course you get exercise, but you also get a sore back and cramps in your knees. And yes, it’s nice when people admire the garden and say it’s pretty but they don’t see the pile of weeds hidden behind the bushes that you’ve got to get rid of, week by week, by sneaking them away inside corn flake packets so the bin men don’t notice.

So why don’t I simply pave over the whole place and have one great big patio? Well apart from the cost, if I’m honest I think I’d still get obsessive about the paving too, maybe rushing out each day with a pressure hose to clean it up, assaulting squirrels or birds that made a mess, or repointing between the slabs every hour. I could even see myself rearranging the patio furniture according to the laws of feng shui now and again.

So maybe it’s not the gardening that’s the problem, perhaps it’s just me. I can see how some of you might think I possibly need to learn to be less obsessive and try to just chill out a bit, and I promise I will try. But I’m not sure you can teach an old DOG new tricks.

Living Right Next Door To An Angel

Neighbours are funny things, don’t you find? The problem is that, unless you live on an island in the Outer Hebrides that’s been cleared by anthrax, everyone has them and we’re all expected to get along in a perfect, fluffy, world where Postman Pat delivers our mail and the Teletubbies run the local Neighbourhood Watch.

I guess that even the Queen must have neighbours, but I bet they don’t call her up all the time to borrow things and complain that her hedge needs cutting or that she’s putting the bins out too early. “Liz, it’s Doris here. Got a “do” at the embassy tonight. Can I borrow that fabulous tiara? I can? Fabulous. I’ll send Jolyon through to get it. You and Phil must come round for supper one night soon.”

I’m lucky as I have some great neighbours who I see a lot and, as the difficult ones tend to hibernate over winter making poisoned potions or holding the paper boy captive for not closing the gate, I only have to put up with their moaning round about now. As the sun comes out, so do the unpopular people in the street as they start clipping their topiary, trimming the wisteria and digging out the common weeds – fancy ones being allowed to stay, of course, as they were probably brought back by relatives from the colonies before the words Call and Centre were even invented.

I swear some of my neighbours even put green food colouring down on their lawns and spray Estee Lauder on their roses. Oh yes, we’re a posh neighbourhood you know. Well, I say posh but really our maids and our chauffeur don’t think it’s that posh really, and my private jet pilot, John, reckons his swimming pool is bigger than mine so perhaps we’re not that well off after all.

A very nice man came to my door yesterday. He’s the caretaker of one of my neighbours, a primary school, and he wanted to warn me that they were having a sponsored run on Sunday so I might get up in the morning and see sweaty, well intentioned, weight watchers running past my gate, all in a good cause. It was kind of him to let me know and it all sounded fine, but I bet one of the difficult neighbours will object that the panting Spandex brigade will upset their dogs, or the pavement pounding will cause cracks in their lovely art deco walls. Some people love to be the centre of attention, even if it’s just by being difficult.

As the song goes “Everybody needs good neighbours” but it seems to me that it should be compulsory that we all get the tanned and beautiful examples that appear on Ramsay Street and that they come with a one year contract before they have to leave and release a pop song. The odd murderer on the run is fine to add spice to the area but even they have to get their comeuppance and move on to Home And Away after a while. Keeps things fresh.

When I was growing up I remember we all played together, had dinner in each other’s homes, built gang huts in our gardens, pelted other gangs with stones and smeared dog poo on our neighbours’ door handles. Where’s that sense of community now? Today it seems you have to ask permission just to walk up someone’s path, even if it’s to tell them that their house is on fire.

Let me pass on my experience of neighbours over the years so you can tell whether any new arrivals will be a problem or a life long friend. Of course this is all rational and well thought out and not at all based on anyone I currently despise and wish would be raised with their house in to the sky by a tornado and dumped on top of a wicked witch in Oz.

The ones to worry about are the garden freaks. They have the box sets of Gardener’s World DVDs, posters of Alan Titchmarsh, and kneeling pads for weeding. They don’t have kids but still call themselves Mummy and Daddy in front of their yapping dogs who are spoiled rotten and keep you awake all night as they roam around looking for romance with the neighbourhood’s mutts. Like spoiled kids, their little Fifis and Cupcakes try to impress the other canines with their Cartier collars and Burberry coats while showing off their pedicure from the local pooch parlour.

These neighbours will look like a smile has never visited their face, they’ll moan that the wind is blowing your leaves in to their garden, object to the noise your kids make, and generally make a nuisance of themselves before disappearing for winter to watch Countdown and write off for Asbos to be issued against whoever had a barbecue over summer. Their cars will always be gleaming and pristine and their houses will have names like Dunenjoying or Casa Betterthanyours.

My pal Will is very anti his neighbours just now, or at least one of them. After years of borrowing the usual cup of sugar, hedge clippers or bottle of shampoo, Will’s neighbour recently popped in and borrowed his wife. The worst thing is he forgot to give her back. Will has since discovered that the neighbour had been keeping an eye on his wife, and any other beautiful ladies in the area, ever since he moved in to the street.

Now that really is a Neighbourhood Watch scheme I could work with.

Simple Simon Says

Like most of the world I’ve been enjoying Britain’s Got Talent or, as it’s known in our house, Simon’s Got Money. I found all week that I couldn’t sit through a whole show as they were very drawn out so, like a bored parent at an end of term school show, I sneaked in each night at the end with everyone thinking I’d seen the whole thing.

Although the final was full of fantastically talented people I think the heats were my favourite because, as we were frequently told, this year’s collection of pierced nutters, escapees, Women’s Institute helpers, flower arrangers and precocious kids were bringing back entertainment that the “whole family” could enjoy. Must have been the Addams Family then.

The finalists proved that those who make it in showbiz should count themselves lucky every day they wake up, because just being really good at something isn’t enough. All the talent in the world means nothing without a huge helping hand from Lady Luck, and that’s why the band I sang in years ago isn’t sitting on a pile of gold discs and asking U2 to support them just now on a world tour. Well, that and the fact we were tone deaf.

I haven’t ever actually taken part in a talent show, unless you count the school play when my twin Gerard and I were asked to sing a duet for the teachers at the last minute to see if a cute number could be put in as a finale. The idea was that everyone would leave saying how adorable the twins were. We sang Nellie The Elephant to a crescendo of silence, raised eyebrows and buck passing over whose idea it was, and they gave the song in the end to a little girl who used to chase all the boys for kisses. For us it was the equivalent of getting three red crosses from the judges and then a kicking from Ant and Dec.

At the first radio station I worked at in Glasgow, I was frequently asked to judge talent contests whether it was for largest marrow, silliest song, best dressed float in a parade or even, once, the most creative use of an empty Maxwell House coffee jar in a garden. The winner was a very large, red nosed, man who smelled like his compost heap and had filled his coffee jar with beer and jam to drown pests like bees, wasps and slugs. Judging by his waistline I think he ate them afterwards. And then the garden.

As I became better known in my home town I moved on to the talent judging that all my mates envied until Mr Political and Mrs Correctness came along and the wet T Shirt contests bit the dust. To give these competitions some sense of class the girls would talk about wanting world peace, a cure for cancer and respect for old people, but they also used to mention a lot their desire for more accessible surgery in underdeveloped areas to change lives. I later discovered this meant they wanted a boob implant so they could marry a footballer.

I was a judge in many Miss Scotland competitions which is not something I would recommend as someone always comes up wanting a fight because you didn’t choose their daughter and accusing you of secretly being related to the winner or, worse, sleeping with them. One parent even offered me a night of “unbridled passion” if I would vote for their daughter, but I tactfully pointed out that he just wasn’t my type.

My finest hour, and you may well have seen this on telly several times on the “It’ll Be Alright On The Night” type shows, was when I helped judge a TV talent show called Sky Star Search, presented by Keith Chegwin, where you would be forgiven for thinking that the only criterion needed to take part was that you were totally useless. That’s the contestants by the way, not the judges. Anyone who wanted to come was allowed on and we had comedians who weren’t funny, singers who sang off key, sword swallowers who stabbed themselves, a juggler who would have done better with his hands tied behind his back, a ventriloquist who was brilliant at everything except keeping his mouth still, and an escapologist.

This man said he would escape from a sack after we had put handcuffs on him and tied him up inside the sack. Well, he didn’t even come close to escaping and we dissolved in tears of laughter as his allotted time came and went while he struggled and the cameras tried to make a writhing sack look interesting. He carried on trying through the commercial break and the whole of the second half where the other acts did their thing with him struggling in the background. He was still there as the end credits rolled so I thought it would be funny to clear the studio and put all the lights out for when he finally escaped, but someone with much more sense cut the bag and set him free.

As that escapologist discovered, like Susan you can sometimes be off the Boyle on the night and lose your big chance, but I hope all the contestants this week went away having enjoyed their fleeting brush with fame and putting it down to a great experience. Some of them will make a few bob from opening summer fetes in their villages, others still have ITV’s money making tour to come, while the lucky few will get to make a record for Simon Cowell.

Britain’s Got Talent, and Simon’s Got Money. And now he’s got even more.

When a man loves a woman

I was looking at a new survey the other day which says that women may be getting more masculine. The report wasn’t intended to suggest that ladies are now picking up the great and unique habits that we males have been refining over centuries like always being tidy, and never, ever, being wrong. It suggested, though, that women were more interested in football and going to the pub than they used to be and are more likely than ever to get out the overalls and take up DIY.

I can only assume this survey was carried out at a drag artists convention, or perhaps an away day for pantomime dames, or maybe the survey was done on a fictional street like Wisteria Lane where the Desperate Housewives do everything from rebuilding hurricane damaged houses overnight to taking on armed lunatics, before checking their make up and baking scones for the church fete.

Wherever it was done I can assure you that no one in my house was consulted for the research. There are no signs of this new order of masculine girls amongst my kids who I had assumed years ago would grow in to youngsters with a Macauley Culkin take on life, getting left alone at Christmas but having the time of their lives battering baddies. The reality is that pink is still the colour of choice here and any ideas of electrifying door handles or swinging paint pots at burglars while defending their home would come way after buying perfume and bath salts. My girls are less Home Alone and more Jo Malone.

As the only bloke in our house I’m banned from watching football but, lately, I think I’ve hit on a solution to my problem by mentioning two words that send my wife running out the door screaming. The words are Science and Fiction, and if I lock myself away in the TV room saying I’m going to watch a Star Wars movie, the effect is like saying I have swine fever. It clears the house straight away leaving me free for the footie.

As the gentle sex is so off the scale alien to me, despite the lack of enthusiasm for tackling robbers in a toyboy fashion I’m relaxed about our house getting broken in to because of the little habits of the females who live here. I’m sure I could tell if we had been burgled before I even stepped over the threshold. Opening the door I would notice strange footprints in the talcum powder that spreads like a plague over our floors, I would see the blood left by Kirby grips sticking through the soles of whatever soft, quiet shoes villains use when they’re turning over your house, and I know that any burglar would have to tidy up in our house first before finding anything worth stealing.

At home I’m hopelessly outnumbered by women, three to one. My wife Debbie has passed on to our daughters the magical tricks of being a real woman which we men will never, ever understand. So far as I can see, these involve being able to “turban” a towel round wet hair without it unravelling, learning to decorate surfaces with cotton wool, and putting talcum powder on after a shower by throwing it up in the air and then running round and round naked underneath as it fall to the floor and spreads to the walls.

It seems to me it’s also necessary if you want to stay in the girlies club that you never, ever put things back where they belong, you must talk to people only if there’s a mirror behind them that you can use at the same time, and remember to always leave your undies hanging up on the floor.

When we moved in to our house we bought a cream carpet for our bedroom. I remember fondly how clean and chic it looked and, if I dig out old photos of five years ago, I can smile with the memories of that carpet, an old friend long gone. Now it has abstract patterns all over it, a mix of dropped eyeliner, sparkly foundation and widespread multi coloured hair bands. Do these bands just fly off their head without women knowing? Am I likely to be hit in the face in a crowded Top Shop by hair bands spontaneously pinging off and jumping everywhere? No wonder people look bruised after the January sales.

And, of course, since time immemorial there have been complaints about men leaving shaving bristles in the sink. Well, what about the bath after a lady, of any age, decides to shave her legs? That’s got to be the worst of all as it’s usually mixed in with conditioner and bath oil in a gooey mess that could clean graffiti off the Great Wall of China. Our bath used to be white until it discovered the delights of multi coloured fizzing bath bombs from Lush. Now, like a girlie at her first disco, it has a permanent pink flush.

Girls also seem to come with an extra chromosome which I call the cat chromosome where everything from a moggy to a herd of stampeding rhinoceros have to be welcomed in to the house with open arms, adopted and fed, and perhaps even given Dad’s dinner if he’s late home.

So, surveys are all very well. But girls getting more masculine? I don’t think so. Next thing you know we’ll have a survey saying men are getting more feminine. I bet you all my moisturiser and hair products that it will be a lie.

Art For Art's Sake

I’m not a big fan of pain so I don’t understand why people volunteer to have someone stick needles in them and squirt ink under their skin. To me tattoos are a bit like big, hairy warts – fine on others but I wouldn’t want one myself, though they make for great reading in T shirt weather when I’ve forgotten my newspaper on the train.

I’m against body art as, apart from the pain, I also worry that I would get the same dyslexic tattooist who did a friend of mine a few years ago. He is a huge fan of Disney, and Simba the lion in particular, and he loves the morality tale of good triumphing over evil, but every summer he is aware of pretty girls avoiding him in the street when they see the tattoo on his bare arm proclaiming him to be The Loin King.

And, as my pal now realises only too well, a tattoo is for life. The BBC recently reported on a girl called Joanne Raine, a teenager who wanted to tattoo her lover’s name on her stomach and paid extra to have it written in Chinese. She had the tattoo for months before learning that her local parlour had mistranslated some symbols when she had the artwork done. Instead of having I Love Roo across her belly button she now has the Chinese word for “supermarket”.

I guess poor Joanne could have got away with it by telling people that it was his nickname but unfortunately Roo binned her soon afterwards and she’s stuck with it. So I’m hoping she’s currently looking for a new boyfriend who is reliable, great sense of humour, own car, and answers to the name of Tesco.

This week I read of a guy in Australia who has devoted the last fifteen years of his life to getting tattooed all over (his body that is, not Australia) and has just written his will leaving his skin to the Australian National Gallery. He’s deadly serious and wants them to flay him after he kicks the bucket and then show his epidermis as a work of art on the gallery wall. I’m not sure which bit of dangly skin they’ll use to hang him on the picture hook but I only hope it’s long enough!

Another American guy this week tried to get in to the Guinness Book of records for having the most body piercings but decided that he would get them all done in one sitting. He managed to have over a thousand holes put in him in five hours before passing out with the pain.

So, what I want to know is, is all this nonsense really art? If it is then I confess I’m just not getting it, but then I can’t tell the difference between a Van Gogh and a Van Halen. If art’s in the eye of the beholder then my eyes have cataracts. But I do wonder if art is all a con anyway. I was once told by an artist I interviewed that she had recently lost her temper and had thrown a wet painting in her bin out of frustration. After calming down she pulled it out and was about to remove the cat hair and baked beans from the canvas when her client turned up early and hailed it as great conceptual artwork.

Two years ago I was in New York filming at MOMA, the Big Apple’s Museum Of Modern Art which is where Madonna chose to wear her bunny ears to a party a couple of weeks ago. The place is magnificent, but my director placed me in front of wall sign that said something like “In Case Of Fire, Panic” in a dozen different languages and prepared to film me. I pointed out that a health and safety notice was perhaps not the best background but our guide told me it was worth several million dollars and was a statement about our frenetic world by some Sixties hippy artist. In the end I did my piece standing under an aeroplane which dangled from the roof and was probably an Airfix model by Hockney and worth more than the whole Boeing Corporation.

These large “installation” pieces really pass me by. I just don’t get how slicing a shark in two and putting it in a case warrants someone paying several million dollars. A gold star maybe, some new crayons and a week off the naughty step perhaps, but that’s all. Now it seems that the guy who bought Damien Hirst’s shark has had it replaced as it keeps decaying and he’s now on the third one. No wonder marine biologists are worried about species disappearing.

Then there was the diamond encrusted skull Hirst made which sold for fifty million dollars. It turns out he didn’t make it at all but told his workforce to weld it together in a loft somewhere. Do you think if I wrote down a few “gems” and handed them to some friends asking them to present my radio show for me while I sat at home I’d still get paid?

I’m not quite saying let’s all put flying ducks and posters of Che Guevara on our walls but I do think it’s all got a bit out of hand. Even if it’s a masterpiece, I am sure that walking in to a gallery and seeing a dead man’s tattooed bottom staring back at me from a wall probably isn’t going to make me want to buy a print of it for my office.

And if Damien Hirst gets anywhere near it I have a feeling I know where he’d place his diamond.

Pant Music

www.paulcoia.com

A peek around my underwear drawer would be a strange and wonderful trip indeed for those who are in to looking at ruins and ancient memorabilia. It’s perhaps not up there with a weekend in Rome exploring the Coliseum or a trip to Greece and a wander round the Parthenon but, as I tend to keep my favourites from years ago, my boxer shorts drawer would still allow for happy photographs and memories of historical exploring.

I keep all sorts of things in my underwear drawer because it seems a safe place so you will find receipts, chocolate bars, pens and the odd bit of change as well as the garments themselves which will be the most interesting to historians of the future.

Even though I no longer wear them, the under crackers of my past still sit with my current, day to day, favourites as if, one day soon, the Victoria and Albert costume curator will call and ask me to exhibit. I know deep down that won’t happen so I have to admit that I have no idea why I hang on to these threadbare old rags so long, other than that there’s some half formed relationship and bond with them that the ones I now use as car cloths didn’t have.

I know some people have what they call “lucky pants”, those that remind them of great moments in life when they wore them for a great job interview or when asking successfully for a pay rise, or on that day they finally got that supermodel in to the back row of the movies. I had to settle for the Glasgow Odeon and a girl whose dad had a great chip shop in Springburn. Smelling her hair was always a treat as I got a kiss and a feeling of having had a great fry up all in one. A great double dipper.

But, the reason I’m getting a bit worried about my underwear drawer now is the announcement last week that Marks and Spencers were targeting ladies with bigger chests who must pay more for their bras than those who are less well endowed. Granted, M&S backed down saying they’d made a mistake and those with double G sized inflation busters will pay the same as those with the credit crunch economy sized ones but I bet the High Street retailer still gets its money back somehow.

And that’s why I’m worried. What if they decide to make guys who need bigger underpants than others pay more?

Before you think this is my way of boasting, what I’m really anxious about is that I will get caught in a store changing the price tags on the packages when I next buy. Just think it through. If a price hike on pants for larger guys goes ahead then we men will be peeling off the more expensive labels from the ghetto blaster sized shorts and putting them on our little iPod sized purchases so that they get admiring glances, rather than sympathy, at the till. I’d definitely be tempted in to that.

Of course this worry I have is a bit premature as, having renewed my underwear three years ago I’m not due to renew them for another ten or twelve years, but the thought still bothers me.

And, in truth, I’m glad I don’t have to replace my relics just yet as I admit I have no idea what is currently fashionable in the downstairs department. Is it a la mode just now to wear boxers, briefs, Y fronts or go commando? The normal way I have of judging these things is much cheaper than buying fashion magazines and is quicker than sitting through Gok Wan’s fashion fixes on telly. I simply look around the changing room at the gym but, as I haven’t been for a while, my fashion compass is hopelessly spinning in all directions.

Perhaps I should just watch Britain’s Got Talent which seems to consist of one guy after another stripping off and showing his brand new pants while eating fire or juggling. I couldn’t watch the sword swallower without wondering if he has a lot of underpants with holes in them.

Not only is men’s underwear big on talent shows just now, even Nicholas Bendtner the Arsenal footballer is so keen to inherit Beckham’s “soccer player is pants” modelling gig that he decided to show off his assets this week when he fell out of a nightclub with his trousers at his ankles after his team had been beaten by Manchester United.

Perhaps it was Nicholas’ clever way of telling us was upset and felt that he was to blame for the defeat as he had poor ball control. Still, like all good teams and footballers, he would be grateful for his supporters which seemed from the photographs to be called Emporio and Armani! Being a less than prolific goal scorer I’m sure he’s not worried about being a world class dribbler.

Now Ledley King who plays for Tottenham has been arrested with his trousers down and went defiantly to the cell shouting how rich he was and that his undies cost more than the arresting officer’s house. He then bravely marched in to isolation, heard the door bang, cried his eyes out and wet himself. Class!

So, this week my thoughts are all about underwear. And then I saw Victoria Beckham posing in hers for a newspaper shoot.

I never want to see underwear ever again.

Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Judging by my email inbox this week people seem determined to have a laugh despite us all being flushed down the pandemic with swine fever, recession, bent politicians and age defeating injections paralysing our facial muscles. Was it Einstein, or was it Galileo, who said Botox = Skin - Time – Emotion?

Like you I tend to get inundated with jokes that do the rounds so much that I see the same gag seven or eight times and usually delete it unread, depending on who sent it. I’ve started a ratings system based on the jokes people send me and if they haven’t got at least a three or four star rating based on past performance then I bin them unopened.

However, I have never had so many jokes and cartoons appear in my in tray as this week, along with funny stories and pithy sayings, a sure sign that, at last, we are waking up to the fact that we have to be cheerful if we’re going to get through this gloomy time and financial Armageddon. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse may be riding across the sky but they’re wearing comic red noses and funny hats.

You would think that swine fever is no laughing matter – I almost said not to be sneezed at - until you see street loads of Mexicans with face masks looking like Michael Jackson, some even painting false noses and moustaches on their masks, while others just thank God for the chance to cover up their real noses and moustaches. I’m guessing that Mexican beauty salons are not doing a roaring trade just now in bleaching the top lip area.

But, awful as it is, this swine fever has led to the jokes appearing thick and fast. “I called the swine line for advice this week and all I could hear was crackling” being one of the first out of the blocks. Then it was “my family must have swine flu otherwise how do explain all these rashers on our skin?” I also received a drawing from the Winnie The Pooh stories with Piglet and Pooh walking side by side. Piglet is thinking “I’m glad I have such a good friend as Pooh” while the bear is thinking “one sneeze from him and I’ll kill him”.

Another pal decided to cheer me up by sending a list of gags used by the inimitable Tommy Cooper. There were pages of them including ‘I went to buy a watch, and the man in the shop said 'Analogue?' I said 'No, just a watch.' Then there was the cowboy who walked in to the car showroom and shouted “Audi”. Or what about the man who goes to Blockbuster and asks to borrow Batman Forever. He’s told “No. You bring it back tomorrow like everyone else.”

My favourite Tommy Cooper gag was about the bloke who bought a theatre. He told his mum of his purchase and she said “You’re having me on”. He replied “well, I’ll give you an audition but I’m not promising anything”.

Even The Sun newspaper gave over a page a day last week to comedians making light of the problems we’re all facing. So, amidst the gloom, we’re finding the first shoots of our sense of humour returning. In Washington, folk who are having their houses repossessed have started to copy Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and have balanced paint pots on top of doors, wired their car batteries to door handles and put dog’s muck all over their door mats to have one last giggle as the mortgage company representatives enter their homes.

My favourite email joke that I received this week came from a long standing friend who works on the X Factor and, like me, is Scottish. I’ve told the joke to many English people this week and all have laughed, with no one taking offence, so don’t you be the first. Just enjoy.

A farmer in Scotland is walking across his land when he spots a man using his hand to scoop water from a stream that flows through his land. He shouts to the man, "Dinnae drink tha waater! It's fu' ae coo's shite an pish!" The man replies, "My Good fellow, I'm from England . Could you repeat that in the Queen’s English for me?" The farmer replies with a smile, "I said, use two hands - you'll spill less that way!!!"

And to round off a perfect week, I’ve discovered that Bono, the world saver, faith healer and miracle worker, has made me laugh too. It’s not often I can say that but the blind Irish singer (what do you mean he’s not blind?) has written a poem about Elvis Presley which goes, and I quote verbatim, “Elvis wore a gold suit and trained his lip to curl/ Elvis was macho but could sing like a girl”.

He then goes on “Elvis, white trash/ Elvis the Memphis flash/ Elvis didn’t smoke hash/ and would have been a sissy without Johnny Cash.”

You want more? How about “Elvis with God on his knees/ Elvis on three TVs/Elvis, here come the killer bees/ Head full of honey, potato chips and cheese.

And what makes this an especially funny poem is that Bono wrote it as a tribute to the King and is very proud of it. Which brings me back to my senses and an acceptance of how serious things are. I mean, how will they ever tell if Bono catches swine fever and starts talking nonsense?