My younger daughter, Hannah, kindly brought me a Daily Telegraph from London yesterday but I rather wish she hadn’t. Although it puffs itself as the UK’s leading ‘quality newspaper’, it’s even more of a tabloidised comic than it was when I left England 5 years ago. Two major news stories and a few snippets comprise only 45% of the front page, whereas a picture of Mick Jagger takes up a massive 32%. Advertisements account for the rest. Inside, things get worse. 61% of one page consists of a picture of a male backside. This turns out to be an ad for bum wipes, with the deathless line ‘to leave you cleaner and fresher than ever before’. Of course, if you were ‘clean and fresh’ in the first place, you wouldn’t need the bloody product. Can anyone blame the Continental Europeans for resisting the encroachment of what they see as over-commercialised Anglo Saxon ‘culture’?

Confused as they are by things British, these same Continentals will have been astonished to hear today alcohol consumption is rising in the UK, when it’s falling in France and Germany. Given that the image of drunken football hooligans is entrenched in European minds, they will be as dumbfounded as the British police appear to be about the government’s intention to permit 24 hour drinking. Especially when they read of the 18 year old found dead of alcoholic poisoning after a night out to celebrate his birthday.

Bringing all this together, I suggest we all pray to our respective Gods that Rupert Murdoch and his managerial team are tempted to indulge in a fatal bout of communal binge-drinking.

On a lighter note …. I saw a flier today for a course here in September. This is entitled ‘Therapeutic Striptease’ and aims to ‘give you the opportunity to remake the geography of your body, to explore its hidden content and to be able to make more beautiful journeys without fearing anyone’. Very Latin. Sadly, the woman offering it doesn’t seem to have a web site. I shall be forced to do some empirical research.