I’ll never forget the time I went into a bakery in Rome to buy a pastry.

Well I’ll be damned:

“A new guide to the world's most awful airports, by Foreign Policy magazine, doesn't even include Heathrow in its top five.”

The place does have one redeeming feature, which is that tycoons and celebrities who pay $8,000 for their tickets get treated as badly as everyone else. Even Snoop Dogg must take his shoes off and stand in his socks boiling with impotent rage, before being herded like a pig through the metal detectors.

Today I leave for Chechnya on a bungee-jumping holiday. I'll update the minute I get back.

Halloween party tonight. I just bought a beard and a herringbone jacket. Going as a member of the Sinn Fein executive.

COLOMBIA

Elections this weekend, which means the bars and whorehouses were all shut, and none of the shops would sell drink. All over Latin America they ban alcohol during elections in case people get drunk and vote for the communists.

I’m not allowed to vote or get drunk, which strikes me as bleeding monstrous, if not an abuse of my human rights. But they do it to try to keep the violence and looting to acceptable levels. All it takes is a small sherry before luncheon and they’ll come pouring down from the slums in an enraged mob, hacking up the middle classes with machetes. They always try to pass it off as Latin exuberance.

You would think the mobs could simply go to the supermarket a day early and buy Saturday's sherry on Friday, but that would require a level of organisation which in our case we have not got.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"There's so much shit to do. But really, why bother with any of it? You're going to die eventually. Then you're going to wonder why you bothered with all that shit."

Sir William Gladstone (1809–1898)

SAY IT WITH HADDOCK

"Sniek up an slip id down teh back of is neck or levae it on his chaire — its up to u!"

It just occurred to me that I haven’t sewn a herring into anyone’s curtains for nearly a decade. Getting old.