THE BIG THREE SEVEN

I helped an old lady with her suitcase the other day. She said, “Thank you. I’m 110.” My niece tells people with great pride that she is nearly 6.

But when I tell people I am 37, they are not interested.

Looking back on my life, I would say that there have been two great world-historical changes: the Soviet Union fell, and women started shaving their bits.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached and East Germans poured through to be met by cheering West Germans on the other side. The Cold War was over.

And look at this photo of Madonna from 1985. Shocking, isn’t it? Yet our homo erectus ancestors would not have raised an eyebrow at Madonna’s bush. They would have found it to be much as they expected. To them –and to the Victorians, and the Tudors– that was simply what it looked like, and always had. A design classic. Who could have forseen, when that picture was taken, that 100,000 years of history were about to come to an end?

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate.

I suppose the great sorpasso must have happened in the final years of John Major’s government*, when, for the first time in history, it became more surprising to see one that hadn’t been…

And, of course, Nelson Mandela got released, and South African grapefruit was back on the menu. Under the old apartheid laws, Mandela served 27 years on Robben Island for riding a bicycle without lights, whereas a white man would probably have been let off with a fine.

The Berlin Wall, Mandela, Madonna’s bush… Like a jigsaw, all the pieces fall into place as you get older. Then, just when you are finally starting to make sense of it all, you die.

*Correct me if I am wrong about the dates. God knows, I am hardly the go-to guy on this subject. You might want to double check with David Mellor or Heff or someone.

Like everyone else in my generation, I have no idea where I was when I heard the news that Edward Kennedy had died. I can't even remember what town I was in.

OPEN LETTER TO THE PEASANTS OF HONDURAS

Dear Peasants,
I don’t want to give you compassion fatigue or anything, but try to see it from my point of view.

I haul my weary carcass out of bed each day before I am rested, and get on a train with the other lame-os. Most days there are signal failures. I don’t know where they buy their signals, or why they can’t get some that work, but there you go. Some days the driver stays in bed with a bad back. No doubt you have such trains in Honduras.

Sooner or later the train will show up, if I stand there long enough, and I’ll waste the rest of the day in some stinking office up a tower, surrounded by oafs, scrotes, scrubbers, louts, buffoons, toadies, tossers, illiterates and football fans.

Mine is a pig’s life.

At lunch I sit in the shopping precinct and eat my sandwiches, washed down with five or six tins of cider. And as I eat my sandwiches and drink my cider, I open The Guardian, and see that there has been another military coup in Honduras. Or perhaps it’s the same coup as the one a couple of months ago. It is hard to keep track. Someone must know.

Either way, there doesn’t seem to be much that I can do about it, since Honduras is more than 100 miles away, and my influence there is limited. But reading about it has depressed me even more, and I was already as miserable as hell. The train, the office, the shopping precinct, Honduras… wherever one looks, this world is just a vale of tears.

Then I go back to the office, lock myself in the stationary cupboard and sob for twenty minutes, about Honduras and about my life.

I would be happy to donate £10 for the oppressed peasants of the Andes, or wherever it is, but I’m not going to read about it anymore.

I got my own troubles, Honduras.

Good luck!

How is it that NASA can put Americans on the moon, while in this country Sainsburys cannot even make a soup container that doesn’t explode like a ^#&*ing hand grenade when you open it?

As I type this, with tomato pulp all down my new suit, I do not love my country any less. But we have to be honest about our failings. As Benjamin Franklin said, the true patriot is the man who complains all the time.

On second thoughts, to hell with this country and its exploding soups. If Gordon Brown hasn’t sorted this by Christmas, I’m emigrating to Canada.

THE PANT-WETTERS OF GATWICK

A fire alarm in Gatwick airport. No one took it seriously. You’re dealing with people who think a tube of sun cream is a threat to the flight, so when they tell you there’s an emergency you think, "Yeah, yeah. Fuck off." I wanted to stay in the departure lounge and explain to someone in charge that I was ignoring their alarm, that they had blown their credibility when they confiscated my nail scissors, and that if I got I roasted alive it would be their fault.

But, of course, there was no fire. For the hundredth time, they were just dicking me around.

BLACKMAIL

If I worked for the Foreign Office in Russia I would probably spend half my salary on blackmail payments. My heart is bleeding for James Hudson, the British diplomat filmed with a pair of local tarts by Russian spies. Like most of these sex scandals it reflects terribly on everyone except the man at its centre.

Shame on the Russians, who still live in the same spy-infested tyranny they had in Peter the Great’s day. Shame on the smirking tossers who put the clip on the internet. Shame on his sanctimonious vindictive ratbag of an ex-wife. Shame on me, who searched for the clip on Google. And shame on Pizza Hut, who put my bodyweight in pizza leaflets through the door each month. They are not directly involved in this case, but damn them to hell.

What was he supposed to on his own on a wet afternoon in central Russia, thousands of miles from his friends and family? Read an improving book? Buy some fruit and learn to juggle? Apparently Yakaterinburg is known for its theatres, but how many gloomy Russian plays can one stand in a weekend? He’d have shot himself, sooner or later.

Were they underage? Did he mistreat them? Leave him alone, then.

CALIFORNIA'S CREDIT RATING SLASHED ON BRITNEY ENGAGEMENT

The state's debt rating was slashed to near-junk this week after the princess of pop was spotted with a massive sparkler on her wedding finger.

Californians should do what their forefathers did when times got hard: go west.