Not a great few days

April may have been the cruellest month for that poet so beloved of pseudo literary types everywhere, T S Eliot (personally speaking, the only thing he wrote of any note were the cat poems), but for me March has been a right sod.

First of all, the Sunday papers come crashing through the letter box, nearly crushing Barkles, and I find I have made the headlines in one of the more downmarket titles. "Illicit fumble-rella fella" screams the front page. Apparently, I have been photographed leaving some dodgy flat in Hoxton after partaking in a sordid finger pointing orgy. I admit I was at the address in question but did at no point, point the finger or anything else. I never would but can happily list several others who were there and did (eh, Hubert?).

To try and take my mind of things, I settle down in the favourite armchair to listen to my Desert Island Spokes performance on Radio Blacbury ("104.5 FM - putting the juice into Blacbury"). But they only go and cancel it to air a tribute to Trudie Hood, some reality TV star who had tragically passed away overnight, and apparently the people's princess for the chav generation. While I have every sympathy for the plight of Miss Hood, who right til the end tried to milk every last drop of media coverage out of her undeniable mediocrity, and my heart goes out to her young children, the whole episode is just plain bizarre. And the fact that news of her death hits most people on the very day they are frantically gathering overpriced blooms or dragging Mum off to the local carvery whether she likes it her not just smacks of one last final attempt to take centre stage.

Even more nauseating was Gordon Brown's latest Blair-lite moment, when he leads tributes to Hood in a desperate attempt to engage with his broken public, in an act redolent in the worst possible way of the attempt Blair made to accumulate political capital after Princess Di's murder.

Glad I have got that off my chest - don't know what came over me. It was almost as if someone else hijacked my persona...