Over in Argentina, it seems that the country's dire economic circumstances have forced little old ladies to take up the oldest game in the world.

Come retirement, and a laughable pension, it's nice to know that there's hope for us all. See you in the back-pages of the fag mags in twenty years' time then, boyz.

Apart from Wednesday/ Thursday's tube strike, this has been something of a nothing week for me. For some reason or other I've just been feeling tired and drained.

Yesterday, for instance, I did a half-hearted session at the gym, achieved hardly anything all day, and after work the most exciting sentence anyone could get out of me was 'A pint of Stella', please.

Back home I couldn't even be arsed to watch the Street(which is actually starting to improve again), nor tonight's episode of Will and Grace.

Memo to Self: Must get Monday's edition of the Times to check that I am not, in fact, dead.

"Everyone is advised to leave central London by eight o'clock this evening."

The way the BBC announced it, you'd've thought the Marauding Hordes were just miles away from Zone One, ready to tear down the barricades and rape and pillage all our women-folk.

Relax. It was only the beginning of a tube strike.

Which meant that last night most of central London was a ghost-town, as people struggled to leave the West End before the Big Shut-Down at eight. Which also meant that Masterchef and myself were able to sit outside on the pavement and enjoy an evening bottle or three of Côtes de Provence without having to put up with car-exhaust fumes, police sirens, or charming-young-people-trying-to-sign-you-up-for the-latest-charity-and-will-you-please-f**k-off-because-if-you-saw-the-state-of-my-bank-balance-then-you-wouldn't-want-to-have-my-bank-details-anyway..

We had a cheery chat about death, drugs and prostitution and what I was going to wear for his wedding to the lovely Angie in October. And then I walked home at Closing Time, slightly tipsy, with the streets refreshingly clear of tourists, winos, and People From Zone Three. (And before I'm accused of being a snob, I used to live in Zone Three, I know what we're like.)


More tube strikes please.

Thanks to the Bread Monster for this, which has finally shown where my political and economic allegiances really do lie.

I'm a minus 3.88 on the ecomomic left-wing/ right-wing scale, and a minus 4.51 on the authoritarian/ libertarian scale.

Which apparenly makes me the illegitimate love-child of the Mayor for London and the Liberal Democrat MP for Bermondsey.

Now I really am depressed. . .

I tell you, it's the thin-end-of-the-wedge, the start-of-that-slippery-slope, a shameful-example-to-the-youth-of-our-country, an insult to all those-traditional-values-that-we-hold-dear-and-which-have-made-our-country-great.

No wonder that the tabloid press on this Island has exploded into a paroxysm of moral outrage at the news that a seventeen-year-old boy has gone and knocked back a few alcopops, smoked a couple of spliffs, and may just have friends who are partial to the odd line or two.

A member of the Royal Family who is actually normal?

Ooh. That will never do.