BOGOTA- Went to the market this weekend to buy an expandable cosh, but they didn’t have any colours I liked. I had a long chat with the salesman, to help find the right cosh for me, but they only had three varieties in stock, police issue rubbish from the United States. He tried to fob me off with a knuckle-duster, but knuckle-dusters are gauche whatever colour they are.

I don’t want a knuckle-duster, I want a cosh. And not just any cosh. I want the cosh that Harrods would sell me, if they had a branch in Colombia. A cosh that Princess Diana would not have been ashamed to club photographers with.

“You’re not going to see the Duchess of Devonshire wearing a knuckle-duster, you know what I mean?” I said to Pancho, the salesman. He didn’t have an answer to that one.

If a murderer comes round my house this evening I guess I’ll just have to make the best of a bad do and throw plates at him.

POPULAR MYTHS REFUTED

“Shutting windows when you go out makes it harder for burglars to get in,” says Bystander, citing Her Majesty’s Government.

This simply isn’t true.

According to rogue economist Steve Levitt, there is no correlation between a window being open and a toe-rag climbing through it.

Money spent on windows might be better spent on tennis courts, Levitt argues in his book Freaking Idiots, since people wearing tennis shorts are only one fifteenth as likely to rob houses as non-tennis players are.

Or perhaps a dog would defend your house from burglars? Nothing could be further from the truth.

“A cat is 37 times more likely to bite a burglar than a dog is,” Levitt refutes. “A dog is more likely to bite its owner.” Money spent on dogs might be better spent on roller-skates, Levitt argues.

Statistically, a burglar is more likely to tread on a roller-skate, fly through a window and fracture his pelvis, than he is to be bitten by a cat, Levitt points out in his paper The Impact Of Sandwich Fillings On Prison Population: A Response To Pappenhacker and Stoat.



Levitt, hard at work debunking stuff.

Fucking telephone gets on my tits, ringing and dinging all the time.

STOP PICKING ON THE STASI

The Stasi have been getting a bad press lately, especially in readers’ comments in The Guardian. They’re all, ooh, I got fined for feeding the ducks, the British police are turning into the Stasi. The Bitish police are photographing enemies of the party just like in East Germany.

This is absurd. As well as suppressing dissidents, the Stasi also suppressed wrongdoers and bad apples. They did some fine police work. Life in DDR wasn’t many laughs, but it was safe to walk the streets.

Say what you like about police states, but they do at least have low crime rates.

In Britain we have managed to combine Singaporean levels of mindless niggling harassment with South American levels of crime.

-“Help! Police! There’s an intruder in my house.”

-I’m sorry, we’d love to help. But all our officers are cunting around in a field in Wiltshire, talking photos of some hippies.”

That’s a word-for-word transcript of a conversation I had with them last week. I’m just glad I don’t pay my taxes.



Some bad apples recently.

I was cycling round London the other day when I noticed that someone has built a hulking great wheel by the Thames, right opposite parliament. Seriously, what will those arseholes think of next? Look out for it, next time you’re in London. It's right next to County Hall. You can’t miss it.

Is a huge wheel supposed to inspire us, or cheer us up? I never heard such nonsense.

Future archeologists will no doubt lump it with Stonehenge, Avebury and the chalk horses, as having some kind of cultural or religious importance. No one will guess that it signifies absolutely bugger all.

LITTLE VICTORIES

"A council today defended its decision to fine a young mother £75 for feeding bread to birds while visiting a park's duck pond with her 17-month-old son."

Man, I would love nothing more than for a warden with no powers of arrest to try to fine me. The sheer joy of taunting such a person would put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. If I could taunt a smoking inspector as well, sleep with the Russian women’s gymnastics team, punch Tony Blair on his ears and eat dim sum, all at the same time, that would be the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

I was on my bike in Hyde Park a couple of months ago and one of Blunkett’s scruffy twat-style police officers shouted at me that there was a £200 fine for not sticking to the cycle path. But she was on foot, and I was on a bike, so I just kept right on going. Didn’t even speed up. My spirits soared when I thought of the impotent rage she must have felt.

I even woke up in the middle of the night and felt a wave of euphoria as I remembered my victory. I jumped out of bed and punched the air in triumph, shouting, “Yes! Yes! One-nil!”

IRONY CAN BE PRETTY IRONIC SOMETIMES

The head of the Campaign for a Safe Caracas has been shot dead in Caracas.

Earlier this year, a team from National Geographic was in Colombia making a film about the country’s “secure highways” initiative. It almost goes without saying that they got carjacked.

Apart from getting robbed blind by its thieving inhabitants, the journalists found Colombia to be a country marvellous for its peoples, its customs, its festivals and its landscapes, the article says.