A Week in Politics

I'm dipping out of the 'past life' and into this one for a bit. Last weekend, a whale swam up the Thames splashed around for a day and then died, largely (I suspect) to piss off those lovely people trying to haul its onto a floating platform to get it out of there (a bit like my friends trying to get me into a cab after a night on the lash). So, then the press begins to speculate why the whale died.

Durrr - it was swimming in the Thames! With the needles and used rubbers and the poo!

Then we had Celebrity Big Brother, where the winner was a non-celebrity who two days in was already more famous than four of the other eleven. He might be cruel, grotesque and merciless, but for my money Pete Burns was an absolute winner. The first evictee ever to *get* that the boos should be encouraged, not feared; who knew that being funny and dramatic made for better television than being 'a nice person' (catch yerself on, Traci Bingham); and who gave us such wonderful phrases as '[Traci's extensions] look like Tina Turner's arse hairs' and '[to Rula Lenska] You're just a dried-up old husk' and '[to pretty much everyone] You get right up the crack of my arse' (meaning 'you're a little annoying today'). Pete, we love ya, and we agree that You Spin Me Round has been done to death. But Lover Come Back to Me and In Too Deep should be rereleased NOW!

And then this morning I received a lovely DVD box-set through the post - Doctor Who: The Beginning. 13 episodes of lovely, restored black-and-white clunky TV that kick-started the most important cultural event to have touched my life.

Or to put it another way, we're still trying to work out whether this was the cause of my degree of autism or just a symptom of it.