GOSS ARCHIVE

Spotted on the charity book stall at the GP surgery in the tiny village of  Caythorpe, Lincolnshire: Deadlier Than The Male — True Stories Of Women Who Kill —  by someone called Terry Manners. Matthew McConaughey decided to promote the launch of his new organic tequila called Pantalones by shedding his strides (geddit?). Then he and wife Camila made a moody ad video riding motorbikes through fields of agave naked from the waist down. As Danielle Cohen says in The Cut: ‘Watching them zoom through the dusty, dry desert wearing nothing but a shirt, I was overcome with concerns about chafing.’

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Boys’ Own Paper gadabout Sir Ranulph Fiennes, named by Guinness records as ‘the world’s greatest living explorer’, isn’t infallible. The 79-year-old gentleman adventurer once tried to cure his vertigo by scaling the north face of the Eiger. How did that go, then? ‘It didn’t work’.

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HeadsUp. Stuff subbed short

US Senator Chuck Grassley, 90, celebrates marriage of 20th couple who met while working in his office. Aaaah.

Airbnb names most popular holiday destinations this winter:  Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Maung Pattaya, Thailand and Mablethorpe.

Surfer off Sydney survives after baby whale leaps on him and drags him 30ft below surface.

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HeadsUp. Stuff subbed short

Brits currently eat just under two pounds of meat each a week, lowest since records began more than 50 years ago.

Survey finds 44% of Gen Z (age 11-26) ‘would rather clean the loo than go on another online date’.

Judge in Oz rules cruise line Carnival was negligent for not cancelling trip on which 663 passengers caught Covid- and 28 died.

Dolphin skull found in unaccompanied suitcase at Detroit Airport

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That George Orwell was a rum cove. Especially when it came to eating. Once, a new biog reveals, his wife went out 'leaving a shepherd’s pie in the oven and a dish of eels on the floor for the cat and came home to find that Orwell had eaten the eels’. Even after his books made him rich, he affected poverty, attending smart cocktail parties in a shabby, corduroy suit. Trouble was, everyone could see that the suit had been expensively cut.

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More on Dave Courtney, the Cuddliest Crook in Christendom (not), who has passed on to Fagin’s Kitchen in the Sky. Our Dave, whose challenging rap sheet included an incident involving six Chinese waiters, a meat cleaver and a Samurai sword, was asked by Stumpy’s pal, Reggie, to oversee security for brother Ronnie’s funeral. He dutifully recruited a phalanx of bouncers, bruisers and other assorted knuckle heads. ‘With this lot I could invade Poland,’ he was heard to muse.

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No further comment from me about allegations that Shadow Chancellor Rachel (Cut ‘n’ Paste) Reeves is guilty of plagiarism, except to mention that one of the themes in her book that sparked the controversy is ‘women not receiving credit for their work or ideas’.

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Where is the much-vaunted BBC Verify as terrorists peddle their ‘truth’? That beacon of impartiality, Mishal Husain, was challenged by an Israel spokesman to verify a Hamas claim, she had just repeated, that thousands of Palestinian children are being killed in IDF air strikes. Of course, she could not. 

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LetterOfTheWeek. Sam Williams, of London, to The Economist: ‘Brevity is important in exams. I am reminded of an old Oxford essay question: “Was Hegel a good philosopher? Be brief. One smug student wrote, simply: “Yes”. When the paper came back, the examiner had given a high mark but scribbled in the margin: “This was a good, brief answer. But a better, briefer answer would have been: “No”’.

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StatsLife: Young people are turned off by sex on screen, says a survey. Some 47.5% of 13-24-year-olds think it isn’t needed to move the plot along. And 51.5% said they wanted more content focused on friendships rather than romantic relationships.

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WankerOfTheWeek: Italian climate show-off Gianluca Grimaldi, who burnished his carbon cred by making the 14,000-mile, 35-day journey from Germany to Papua New Guinea on five trains, nine buses, two ferries, two taxis, one shared car, one police convoy and, when there were no other options, two flights. When he proposed returning in a similar way, his thinktank employers … sacked him.

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SportToday with Rockard Rambleshanks, our flanker rucking about in a rolling maul

The Sri Chinmoy 3,100-mile Self Transendence road race, just ended, involved athletes running an average 59.6 miles a day for 52 days. Crazy? Yep but it was also run around just one city block, thousands of times, in Queens, New York.

When a broken-down Land Rover blocked the All Blacks’ coach during the World Cup, players lifted it out of the way.

Japan Airlines laid on an additional flight for 27 sumo wrestlers because, at 19st each, they were too heavy for one plane.

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Spain’s Duke of Huescar has been told his baby daughter’s name is too long to be registered. There was no comment from Sofia Fernanda Dolores Cayetana Teresa Angela de La Cruz Micaela del Santisimo Sacramento del Perpetuo Socorro de La Santisima Trinidad y de Todos Los Santos. She was asleep.

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The Goss passes on, without comment, a report that ‘deeply disturbed’ BBC staff have been ‘crying in the lavatories and taking time off work’ because they say Auntie is being too lenient on Israel and is dehumanising Palestinian civilians. Now the weather: ‘The first snowflakes of winter have beenBobi, a Portuguese Rafeiro do Alentejo acknowledged by Guinness as the oldest dog ever, has died aged 31 years, 165 days. That’s 217 in dog years. His longevity is attributed to the fact that he only ate human food and had never been on a leash.

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Taking the piss: Chinese brewers Tsingtao had to accelerate into full damage limitation mode after a viral video appeared to show a uniformed employee peeing into a tank of ingredients. The company quickly assured customers that the malt involved wasn’t going to be used anyway. Nothing to see here. Move on — by order.

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The Slicker. City&Finance with Fred Needleshanks

Tech giants report big jumps in revenue. Google parent Alphabet: 11% ($77 billion); Microsoft: 13% ($56 billion).

$$$$$

Nokia sheds 14,000 jobs as profits sink 69% YOY in Q3.

£££££

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon reportedly stops moonlighting as a DJ because it causes ‘a distraction’ for the Wall St firm.

$$$$$

Chairman of Russian oil giant Lukoil dies, a year after last boss killed falling out of hospital window

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Can it be that, for the first time in its 238-year history, The Times has used the word ‘buggering’ in the head on its top leader?

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HeadsUp: News subbed short.

Lithuanian arrested in Spain for faking heart attacks 20 times in restaurants to dodge paying.

Crocs launches Croots, its Classic Cowboy Boots, at £98.

Women in Iceland, including premier Katrin Jakobsdottir, strike for greater gender equality.

Monmouth University in New Jersey names building after Bruce Springsteen. He played free shows there in sixties.

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Rent-a-Thug Dave Courtney, who has been found dead at 64, may have  been a serial ne’er do well said to have inspired Vinny Jones’s character in Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, but he wasn’t daft. Fed up with having his front door broken down in repeated, boisterous police raids, he gave the cops a key.

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BoffinQuiz: Q: Which is heavier, water or Butane? A. Water. Butane is a lighter fuel.

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It was said that one of the benefits of subbing on the Express was that ‘they let you stay up late’. Dr Johnson was a kindred spirit. Boswell tells how the original wordsmith was once woken at 3am by two over-refreshed pals who persuaded him to get up and join them roistering in Covent Garden. ‘I’ll have a frisk with you,’ said the good doctor, ‘whoever thinks of going to bed before 12 o’clock is a scoundrel.’

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Caine’sCorner: The Bayeux Tapestry depicts 632 men, 200 horses, 55 dogs, 500 other animals and birds, five women and 93 penises - 88 on horses and five on men. NMPKT.

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Hail, King Esunteros! A new ancient British monarch has been discovered after a detectorist unearthed a coin bearing his name in a Hampshire field. The coin, dating from 50BC, is smaller than a fingernail.

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A tongue-in-cheek rumour has resurfaced that Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau is the secret love child of Fidel Castro. While there are facial similarities, The Goss could not possibly comment. However, it is true that Trudeau’s father, Pierre, also a Canadian premier, was friendly with the Cuban firebrand who was a pallbearer at his 2000 funeral. 

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Heaven forfend that I jest but laughing gas will become illegal next month. Serial users of nitrous oxide, aka ‘hippy crack’, face up to two years in prison; maximum sentence for dealers will be doubled to 14 years. 

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WankersOfTheWeek: The international correspondents with the self indulgent, grandiose and preposterous job titles who knee-jerkedly assumed that Israel must have been responsible for the Gaza hospital tragedy. It’s ingrained in them, you know.

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Tel Aviv is awash with graffiti in these troubled times. But the message attracting most attention is: ‘End The War And I’ll Show U My Tits’. 

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Once, retired pro footie grunts enhanced their pensions by knocking out some hooky fags or doing a bit of driving for East End faces. Now, though, a former West Ham academy player has been arrested for (allegedly) trying to flog a rare Ming vase. The £1.9 million antique, stolen from a Swiss museum in 2019, was feared lost until one of the gang fired off an email to a Hong Kong auction house asking for a valuation. Duh!

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A mysterious pink light in the sky made people in Kent think the world was coming to an end (not a bad idea if you live in Thanet). Don’t panic, Captain M. The horror hue was artificial light from a massive greenhouse growing 400 million tomatoes.

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Jan Moir in the paper without a discernible revise system: ‘Lingerie company Victoria’s Secret is reverting back to sex appeal and raunch…’ Prodnose on a break then? (This is how they speak these days, for instance, ‘dancing’ is now called ‘dance’ — Ed.

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Who says throwing a wobbly doesn’t pay? According to Popbitch, Julia Hartley-Brewer, OTP, was so pissed off after being snubbed in TalkTV’s first birthday party Greatest Hits reel that she stormed out and hosted her own splinter drinkies in a nearby pub. Now she’s just been offered a prime time slot on her own on twice the money.

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HeadsUp.  News subbed short

NBC News ranks 100 spoons based on size, design, feel and finish.

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Hundreds of MEPs accidentally end in Disney, Paris, when points failure diverts their Brussels-Strasbourg express.

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Billie Eilish baffles fans with new mystery tattoo.
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What was it that Churchill was saying?  In a huge blow (sic) to India’s LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ+ community, the country’s Supreme Court has turned down a bid to legalise homosexual marriage. The ruling comes five years after the court repealed a colonial-era law outlawing same-sex intercourse.

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Former High Court judge Sir Nicholas Stadlen, who has died at 73, takes with him a court record which will probably never be broken: as a leading commercial QC he once spoke for 119 consecutive court days opening the defence case on behalf of the Bank of England against a compensation claim brought by the liquidators of the collapsed bank BCCI. He started his speech in July, 2004 and finally sat down the following May. His opponent, Gordon Pollock, QC, took 79 days setting out the case for the liquidators.

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Slicker: finance&city by Fred Needleshanks

The US government is one of the world’s largest holders of bitcoin, says the

 WSJ. It holds more than $5 billion worth, seized from cybercrims and darknet markets.

£££££

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert film pre-sold more than $100 million worth of tickets, sending stock in cinema chain AMC soaring.

$$$$$

Ferrari starts accepting cryptocurrency as payment

£££££

Bad news: the pandemic forced 179 businesses in the Times Square area of New York to close. Good news: The 180th business in the area since Covid has just opened.

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Who knew? Shadow Environment Secretary Steve Reed is obsessed with making perfect roast potatoes, confides the Sunday Telegraph. He once spent a week off work to find the perfect roastie, cooking  two different varieties a day. His top recipe: boil two Maris Pipers for 14 minutes in salted water. Then roast for 90 minutes at 190C, ‘turning them exactly twice’.

HeadsUp: Latest news subbed short

Booze boffins say climate change is hitting hops production, affecting taste of beer

Zoom to release own version of Google Docs; Google acts to cut spam 

Nearly 70% of Kenyans say ‘most’ or ‘all’ police are corrupt

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This Paris bedbug panic has got out of hand, don’t you think? Trust the Frogs. It’s a big fuss over fuck-all, says the New York Times from a safe 3,625 miles away. Numbers of the blood-sucking pests are only ‘modestly higher’ than usual in the French capital and as many as two-thirds of calls to pest control are from people mis-identifying other bugs, it says.

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Nudity is in vogue on the catwalk/runway as fashion showcases what gels will be wearing next spring. ‘The most consistent trend isn’t clothes but, rather, the lack of them,’ says Jo Ellison breathlessly in the FT. ‘Everyone’s letting it all hang out.’ It’s bums and boobs and anything in between. Jo confides: ‘At Stella McCartney the shorts were so short I could have offered some models a full gynaecological report.’ Ooh er, Matron.

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Former colleagues rightly queue to praise the contribution David Laws, LOTP, made to both the Daily and Sunday Express over decades. They include some who held high office on both papers. A question occurs: Why was David never given a title (Assistant Chief Sub, say) to recognise his commitment and dedication? Just askin’.

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CourtWatch: A 76-year-old man has pleaded guilty to stealing a pair of ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz from a museum in Minnesota in 2005.

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Criminal gangs are the fifth-largest private sector employer in Mexico, advises The 

Economist. They have 175,000 members, a quarter of whom work for the two big drug cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation. Mexico’s National Guard, a militarised federal police force, has 100,000 officers.

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South Korea is fast becoming one of the world’s largest arms dealers, says The Economist. Sales were $17 billion last year, more than double 2021. It aims to be the fourth largest exporter by 2027. Biggest customer is Poland: 1,000 tanks are on order, more than are operating in the armies of Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined.

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LetterOfTheWeek: Geoff Jones, of Ross-on-Wye, in the Telegraph: I went into WH Smith and asked to order a book advertised as ‘ready to pre-order’. I was told I couldn’t order it but had to pre-order it. I said I just wanted to order it. This flummoxed the assistant so much that I took by custom elsewhere.

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WankerOfTheWeek: John Simpson, World Affairs Editor who doesn’t go anywhere, pathetically trying to justify the BBC’s weasely woke policy of not calling terrorists terrorists.

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G’DaySport with Rockard Rambleshanks, who dreams  of being very big Down Under but can’t get a visa

AFLW is celebrating the heritage of indigenous Australians and some of their long-held traditions. All 18 teams will wear specially designed Indigenous Round guernseys; umpires will turn out in uniforms designed by Nowongar Wandandi Boodja man and umpire Joshua James.  The artwork is called Moorditj Koondarm which means strong dreams in the Noongar language. Nope, me neither.

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Elsewhere, Juventus player Vucinic avoided a yellow card for taking off his shirt after scoring — by removing his shorts instead.

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Great balls of fire! The Drone’s self-proclaimed pop historian Billy-Jo Rambleshanks (he of the stepped-on blue suede shoes and unruly sideburns) has unearthed a chart-topper from 1949 titled ‘The Old Master Painter from the Faraway Hills’, by Frank Sinatra et Al (Who Al? — Ed). Chortles Billy-Jo: ‘It’s impossible to sing or say it without it sounding like an tale of self-pleasuring behaviour of the kind our grandfathers warned would send us blind!’

I’m afraid I shall have to confiscate his laptop.

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A fierce mother bear is winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week in Alaska. Grazer, only the third female champ, won over fans with her ‘gutsy’ willingness to challenge bigger rivals.

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San Francisco 49ers struck gold when they signed Brock Purdy, the very last 2022 NFL draft pick. Since the 23-year-old took over as starting quarterback, his team are undefeated. Yet Purdy is the lowest-paid starting QB with a $930,000 annual salary which can’t be renegotiated until next season. Contrast Cincinnati Bengals QB, Joe Burrow, the highest paid in the league, on $55 million a year.*****

Gossip columns aren’t what they were. The Mail’s leads on Giles Coren and wife involved in a parking row. Eh?

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Eco warriors Harry and Meghan took a seven-car convoy in New York to go to a venue 200ft away. They left a garage near the Equinox Hotel and had to negotiate a one-way system to reach their destination, a few minutes’ walk. Their seven fuel-guzzling blacked-out SUVs were flanked by police escorts. The preposterous pair hosted an event at the World Mental Health Day Festival.

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An online rumour that our (awards-pending) Country Boys column was axed to make way for overmatter from other so-called columnists has been denied by Lord Drone. A spokeslady said: ‘It’s true we are concerned about the sheer volume of words from contributors: the subs are overwhelmed. But we have the capacity to contain this torrent for now.’ Farrer & Co, solicitors acting for Teddy and Oliver, declined to comment.

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Ulez? Piece of piss. Try driving in Singapore. In 1990 the city state limited the number of vehicles on the road to 950,000. To become one of those drivers you had to buy a 10-year ‘certificate of entitlement’, prices for which have quadrupled since 2020 to £88,000. Once you have factored in registration fees and taxes, buying a Toyota Camry Hybrid would cost £151,000.

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Strange People, The Yanks: our cousins across the pond are going bonkers over new pasta shapes. Novelty designs help brands and restaurants to gain traction on TikTok (inevitably). But now it’s getting silly: hearts, dinosaurs, tennis racquets and, even, zebras anyone?

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Former US Army sergeant Joseph Schmidt, charged with trying to pass military secrets to China, is obviously no George Smiley. His internet history reveals searches for ‘countries with the most negative relations with the U.S.’, ‘what do real spies do?’ and ‘can you be extradited for treason?’ Oh dear: he also allegedly created a 22-page document entitled ‘Important Information To Share With The Chinese Government’.

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The sight of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford sailing into the eastern Mediterranean in response to the Hamas terrorist outrage causes some to trot out the line that the U.S. defence budget of $800 billion is larger than those of the next 10 countries combined. It’s probably not true, though. China’s defence budget is thought to be $700 billion and, because wages and other costs are lower, the money goes a lot further.

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Luxury hotel. In Afghanistan. Run by the Taliban: not a confluence of words one often sees. Yet the Intercontinental in Kabul, is still operating — up to a point, Copper effendi. Check-in requires handing over Kalashnikovs and sidearms. No credit cards: best bring a carrier bag of cash. Half the lights switched off to save leccy. A fifth of the 198 rooms occupied: some by the UN running a course on ‘interpersonal conflicts’, others by secretive Russians. A picture on a wall shows guests relaxing by the pool in the hotel’s glory days: all the women have been painted over.

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HeadsUp: Latest news subbed short

BBC militants in Hamas terrorism denial outrage

Netflix to hike prices on ad-free offering when actors’ strike ends

Mini tornado, 200ft wide and a mile high, spotted on Mars by NASA

An amazing 690 words have been added to America’s Merriam-Webster dictionary this year. They include ‘thirst trap’: trying to gain attention online by posting sexy pix; ‘doomscrolling’: trawling gloomy news sites excessively; ‘jorts’: jean shorts and ‘rizz’: charisma.

Sometimes it pays to live in the Alaskan tundra, home to the biggest oilfield in North America. Residents are standing by to receive this year’s divi from the state’s oil earnings fund — a cheque for $1,312. 

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Never say we don’t  keep you up to speed: the elusive African dwarf crocodile communicates by mooing. Boffins from a Polish uni recorded 97 different sounds from the reptiles, unlike anything from other crocs. Drums, rumbles and gusts were on the list as well as an utterance ‘uncannily reminiscent of a cow’.

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Caine’sCorner: Names of asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter include Mother Teresa, James Bonds, (political activist) Ocasio-Cortez and Lancearmstrong. NMPKT

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A painting valued at $15,000 two years ago is to be offered at, wait for it, $18 million. It’s a ‘work of great significance’ by Rembrandt, say Sotheby’s.

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WankerOfTheWeek: ITN’s Robert Peston interviewing the prime minister wearing a dark suit, tie and…adidas trainers.

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My crumb about Michelin’s plan to start awarding ‘keys’ to top hotels prompts my skivvy up to his elbows in greasy washing-up water to recall that the purpose of the eponymous Guide, launched in 1900, was to entice the guzzling classes to take long drives to restaurants it recommended. Pourquoi? Help wear out their tyres, of course.

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Seen the Beckham documentary on Netflix? Delicious moment when Victoria is trying to big up her ‘very working class’ roots. Becks pops his head round the door and challenges her to say what car she was driven to school in. ‘OK,’ she finally admits, ‘in the 80s my dad had a Rolls-Royce.’

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Strange People, The Yanks: Speed dating is speeding up in the States, says the New York Times. ‘Courtship entrepreneurs’ have launched a group night that ‘fast tracks intimacy’. Breathless lovelorn gather in a candlelit loft, forget the getting-to-know-you preliminaries and immediately address the question: Where are you at this moment in this wild human ride that is your life? Bless.

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Letter of the Week Simon McIlroy, of Croydon, in the Telegraph on Rishi’s new smoking ban: What will young people do in future when they meet behind the bike sheds?

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Michelin, famous for the stars it awards to restaurants who serve lovely grub, will next year start awarding ‘keys’ to grade top hotels worldwide. It’s part of a move to grab a larger chunk of the rapidly growing travel and hospitality industry.

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HeadsUp: Latest news subbed short.

Netflix stops sending out DVDs after 25 years

Costco offers 24-karat gold bar ($1,900 to you, squire) on its website

Gulf of Mexico saltwater seeping into Mississippi polluting drinking water

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Caine’sCorner: Researchers, who studied 125 mammal species, including cats, bats polar bears and wombats, found all showed forms of fluorescence: 86% actually glowed under UV light. NMPKT

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Inglese farlocco, or fake English, is becoming popular in Italy, my FT tells me. For instance, WFH or smart working is partially Italianised to lavaro in smart. Italian verb endings are added to English. Schedulare (schedule a meeting) or ti brieffo (I’ll brief you). There are plenty of hybrids from boomerata (things a baby boomer will do) to cringissimo (the ultimate in cringe).

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Poor old Joe Biden.  If an upcoming election campaign isn’t enough, he’s got to learn to stand on his own two feet. Aides are paranoid that a ‘bad fall’ in public would scupper his re-election chances and are secretly working on a ‘don’t trip strategy’. The 80-year-old has started wearing tennis shoes to avoid slipping and has regular balance-enhancing exercises with a physio. The steep steps of Air Force One are a challenge: now he boards via a lower deck so he may use a shorter staircase.

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ThisIsSport with Rockard Rambleshanks, our Roue of the Rovers

FC Barcelona have been charged with sending more than €7.3 million in bribery payments to companies linked to the former vice president of Spanish football’s refereeing committee.

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Man United have been drawn at home 12 times in a row in domestic cup competitions. The chance of that happening is 0.02%.

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Jose Mourinho has received payoffs totalling £80 million after being defenestrated at Chelsea (twice), Real Madrid, Man U and Spurs. Mind you, he has won the league title in four different countries as well as sundry other silverware. 

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They all laughed when the Washington Post unveiled a new slogan — Democracy Dies In Darkness — in 2017. But it wasn’t actually the first choice, former editor Martin Baron tells The Atlantic. Post owner Jeff Bezos insisted on being involved in the decision-making and after two ‘tortuous, torturous’ years they agreed a different option: A Free People Demand To Know. But when Bezos ran it past his then-wife, novelist MacKenzie Scott, she said it was too chunky, a ‘Frankenslogan’. So, back to the drawing board.

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An intrepid old duck from Chicago has become the world’s oldest skydiver - at 104. Dorothy Hoffner says she wasn’t nervous before the 10,000ft descent and had no idea she was breaking a record. ‘All I thought about was: What’s for dinner?’

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My sombre note about Thomas Midgley, whose introduction of lead to petrol was said to have caused 100 million deaths worldwide, prompts a boffin at one of our more obscure universities to remind me that Midgley also invented CFCs, the chemicals which punched a huge hole in the ozone layer. Tom seem to hover ever closer to the Vortex of Doom (sic, Dick). In 1940, after contracting polio, he created an elaborate system of pulleys and ropes to lift himself out of bed. Alas, he became entangled in the contraption…and died of strangulation.

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Peter Hedley was definitely a superstar of the subbing world: who can forget his intro on an itinerant salesman who survived a night trapped in a blizzard ‘because he travelled in ladies’ underwear’? But was he the best? Some say that Cliff Barr, who decamped to Canada, was the real deal. Now we’ll never know.

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The Goss’s offer of a Crisp Fiver as a contest prize prompts a correspondent to ask whether one is still available to the first reader to name the Express exec who exchanged bodily fluids with actress Janet Munro behind The Old Bell during the shooting of The Day The Earth Caught Fire. Indeed it is. But, like Ms Munro, I am not holding my breath. 

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Who’s responsible for, the most deaths in history? Mao? Stalin? Hitler? In fact, says Brian Klaas on Substack, it’s probably Thomas Midgley Jr. In 1921 he discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol prevented a common fault in combustion engines. Although it was widely known that lead was dangerously toxic, the economics of motor manufacturing triumphed until the U.S. government banned it in the 1990s — about 100 million deaths too late.

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What did the Romans ever do for us? Well, engender envy for a start, says Thomas Mitchell in the Sydney Morning Herald. Two thousand years ago all Romans drank red wine all day, wore sandals at work, enjoyed 135 public holidays a year and had deep thinkers, such as Seneca and Cicero, running the place.  And then there were the orgies...

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A last minute agreement after one of those inexplicable political point-scoring feuds between Democrats and Republicans means the US government has avoided shutdown. Whoopee, exclaims my snowshoe-clad contact at the State Capitol in Juneau breathlessly. Fat Bear Week at the Katmai Park in Alaska, which was under threat, can go ahead.

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Woe, Venice. The main islands now have more beds for tourists than residents. Many fear the fabric of the city  is on the brink of collapse. 

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Commander, a German shepherd belonging to Joe Biden, has bitten yet another of his bodyguards. The two-year-old mutt has now nipped members of the security detail 11 times. It’s all down to the stress of living in the White House, explains a spokeswoman. 

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A new de luxe Sound of Music album is to be released featuring the voice of Christopher Plummer. The Canadian actor, who died aged 91 two years ago, was incensed when he learned his voice was to be dubbed for the original release in 1965. At least he was told. Poor Natalie Wood only discovered that West Side Story producers had used Marnie Nixon’s voice and not hers as she watched the film at its premiere.

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Mention of Peter Hedley recalls that he had a distinctive casting off system. Peter routinely did not sub on copy. He preferred to do a total write-off in tiny, neat handwriting. He’d put about five or six words a line on his copy paper before starting another. Thus, he replicated a line of type s/c nes: in min that equated to 10 lines an inch. Simps!

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What will the world look like in 250 million years? Bristol University boffins have been having a think. They say the present seven continents will fuse together into one supercontinent. Extreme weather will be routine with huge amounts of volcanic activity. Think the expected toasty temp of 60C will be too much for you? Fear not. All mammals will have died out long before that.

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As the US celebrates National Coffee Day, let’s reflect that three million cups are consumed around the world every 24 hours. The number has doubled in the past 30 years, says the FT, and is expected to double again by 2050. And if you’d like another shot of stats: over the next two years Starbucks aims to open a new outlet in China every nine hours.

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So fuck off, Country Boys. Like Ashley Walton, LOTP, I didn’t understand it. Do you think Oliver ever realised that some of the things he said could be taken the wrong way? Anyway, on the bright side: there will now be more space for other loquacious Drone columnists’ overmatter. Or at least some of it.

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Dental whizzes in Japan are developing a drug that could allow people to grow new teeth by stimulating dormant ‘tooth buds’. Toregem Biopharma, of Kyoto, says there have been encouraging results involving dogs and ferrets. Testing on humans starts next summer.

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Pathetic (ie: zero) response to my crisp fiver challenge inspired by the TikTok hashtag about cleaning loos. My mention of ‘Anita, my streetwise sanitary reporter’ refers, as any Ancoats grunt should know, to Sanitary Street behind the Express building. Its back-to-backs were the first to have their own sinks and lavatories. Highfalutin Mancunians pressed for the street’s name to be changed to Anita in the 1960s.

Dumpster is economic with the actualité. There was one suggestion — from me: Anita ‘Arris, rhymes with Aristotle, rhymes with Bottle, Bottle and Glass, Arse. — Ed

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The Goss’s improbable revelation that a TikTok hashtag about cleaning loos had 84 billion views leads Anita, my streetwise sanitary correspondent, (a crisp fiver to the first who gets that allusion) to report that Unilever says it would pay 100 ‘cleanfluencers’ to feature its products on their vids. Apparently, to Gen Z, staying home cleaning is the new going out. 

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Suella Braverman may be the longest-serving Home Secretary in the history of mankind but she does say the oddest things. Such as ‘multiculturalism has failed’. As The Times’s Hugo Rifkind says on X: ‘She’s British, descended from Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband in a government headed by Britain’s first Hindu PM. What would successful multiculturalism look like?’

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Letter of the Week from cellist Jane Cutler in The Times: ‘I was once stopped by an airport check-in agent for having a tuning fork in my bag. He asked: ‘Is it sharp?’ I was pleased to be able to answer: ‘No - it’s bang-on!'

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SportScene with Rockard Rambleshanks, our coach showing the St Drone Academy for Girls sixth form how to be good at handball

Brazilian midfielder Paqueta has quickly become a favourite at West Ham. So fans were baffled when he was substituted during a televised game and a caption on screen named him as Tolento Coelho de Lima. Apparently, Paqueta is just a nickname, a reference to his birth place, Paqueta Island, off Rio de Janeiro.

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Thought you ought to know: Lazio goalkeeper Ivan Provedel was born in 1994, is 1.94m tall, wears the shirt number 94 and scored a 94th minute equaliser in a European match. It was Lazio’s 94th Champions League goal.

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Former Scotland hard man Duncan ‘Big Dunc’ Ferguson, appointed manager of Inverness Caledonian Thistle, was introduced as ‘a box-office attraction second only to the Loch Ness Monster’.

Most drivers were upset when speed limits were introduced on motorways in 1965. When the trial was announced, one miffed motorist told the Beeb: ‘It’s quite ridiculous. You’re expected to sort of dawdle along at 70 miles an hour.’  So what happened? There was a sharp fall in accidents; the trial was made permanent two years later.

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Congrats to Jimmy Carter, the longest-living American president, who is about to turn 99.  The undistinguished but amiable former leader of the western world caused a surprise when he turned up at a peanut festival in his home town of Plains, Georgia because in February he was taken into hospice care with only days to live. He was joined at the festival by former first lady, Rosalynn, who is 96. They have been married for 77 years.

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Popette Taylor Swift breaks off from her billion dollar world tour to watch her rumoured new boyfriend, Kansas Chiefs’ tight end (sic) Travis Keice, play an NFL game. Interestingly, Swift has played in more football stadiums this year (17) than Keice will this season (12 max).

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NMPKT —  The Garrick Club, beloved of London's luvvies and their arty chums, was founded in 1831 by, er, the Duke of Sussex, whose brother was, er, William, the king at the time. One of its aims was ‘to promote easy intercourse between artists and patrons’. Hmm. Oh, and there's only been one other Duke of Sussex — Harry.

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StatsLife: There are more than 40 million miles of roads on earth. That’s bad news for animals and birds. More of the latter are killed on America’s roads than were victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2015 (about 82,000). More deaths of vertebrates are caused by roads than dams, poaching or wild fires. It’s getting worse: 50 years ago the toll was just 3% of land-based mammals; by 2017 it was 12%.

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Extinction Rebellion loonies in France have scored a spectacular own goal, it pains me to report. They protested about a new toxic waste dump near Colmar, in Le grand est, by dying the city’s river green (geddit?). They claim they used fluorescein, a harmless organic dye. But the mayor is pointing to the dozens of dead fish floating on the surface.

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Guess how many want to watch someone else clean a loo: 84? 8,400? 84,000? TikTok’s ‘Cleantok’ hashtag has attracted 84 billion views, says the Wall Street Journal. It’s the most viewed hashtag on the platform. 

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Pioneer female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, who has died at 70, celebrated winning the inaugural Women’s World Pro Bodybuilding Championship in 1979 by hoisting Arnold Schwarzenegger on to her shoulders. (It’s usual at this juncture for The Goss to utter an Atta Girl, in memoriam

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HeadsUp: This week’s news summed up short.  

●Vicar slammed over beer pumps in church. 

●Stonehenge built by black people, says kids’ book. 

●University, listed 814th globally, told to drop words ‘world leading’ from ad. 

●Armed Met officers refuse to carry guns.

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LitBit: This year’s six-strong Booker Prize short list includes more men called Paul (Harding, Lynch and Murray) than it does women.

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Letter of the Week from David Staples, of London N10, to The Times: ‘Sadly, as an author I was never offered a book signing. I approached my nearest bookshop in Muswell Hill to ask if they’d be interesting hosting a launch, stressing that I was a local author. The manager wearily replied: “Sir, everyone in north London is a local author”.’

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The Slicker.  City and finance with Fred Needleshanks

The booming sales of weight-loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy have so boosted the profits of Danish manufacturer Novo Nordisk that its $419 billion market value has eclipsed the nation’s $406 billion GDP.

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Disney plans to spend $60 billion on its global parks and cruise line over the next 10 years. This is double its investment in the last decade. The parks have bounced back, post Covid: they expect to generate $10 billion profit this year, almost five times what they earned 10 years ago.

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Stock in ARS Pharma in the States took a hit when the Food and Drug Administration unexpectedly refused to approve its nasal spray, developed as an alternative to EpiPen injections for treating severe allergic reactions. 

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Danish conceptual artist Jess Haaning was commissioned by a gallery to recreate two of his early pieces which used bank notes to represent average incomes.  But, after sending him notes worth £60,000, they received two empty frames in return. They were entitled Take The Money And Run. Despite his protestations that this was a valid artistic statement, a court has ordered him to repay the cash.

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Since being crowned ‘global pizza-maker of the year’ Michele Pascarella, who operates in Chiswick, not Naples, has had to turn away 2,000 customers from his pizzeria, Napoli on the Road. They included a member of the Qatari royal family who wanted two tables — one for his party and the other for his security team.

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To the Garrick where women are still being denied membership after nearly 200 years. Joanna Lumley was put up about 12 years ago but the salmon and cucumber-tied brigade turned her down. Strange chaps. Who wouldn’t want to have the fragrant Joanna on the Long Table?

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France has halted the sale of iPhone 12 after the country’s radiation watchdog raised fears over emissions in excess of European restrictions. Belgium is now looking into potential health risks and other European countries are bound to follow. Apple disputes the findings.

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The Tank Museum at Bovington in Dorset is considered a bit of a niche attraction, welcoming only a few hundred thousand to its collection of 300 armoured vehicles. But on YouTube it’s stellar. The museum’s total of 550,000 subscribers is just behind the British Museum’s 580,000 but beats New York’s Museum of Modern Art (520,000) and the Louvre (106,000). 

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The world’s biggest onion, 21ins long and weighing nearly 20lb, won its category at a Harrogate show. It was grown in a polytunnel with 24-hour lighting and automatic irrigation by Gareth Griffin from Guernsey.

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Who’s counting? Labour’s conference slogan, Give Britain Its Future Back, is the party’s 14th in three years.

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Kevin Beresford, known as ‘the dullest man in Britain’, has just spent months taking pix for his 2024 calendar, Allotments of Redditch.

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Can it be that the readers of Prospect magazine, which boasts it ‘offers independent, balanced analysis and long-form journalism taking readers to the heart of the biggest stories, ideas and issues of our time’, voted Russell Brand ‘the world’s fourth most influential thinker’? Oh, dearie me, it surely can.

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FT opera critic Richard Fairman (sic) thought it fair enough to have a go at the octogenarian actress Rose Knox-Peebles, playing Erda, the Earth goddess in Das Rheingold at the ROH. He commented that she was ‘made up to look quite a fright’. Rose, acclaimed for the role in which she spends most of the time naked, wearily wrote to the Pink ‘Un: ‘I wore no make-up. The “fright” look is naturally mine.’

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The American Senate is ditching its dress code and allowing its 100 members to go casual. Majority leader Chuck Schumer insists he will continue to wear a suit but expect controversial 6ft 8in senator John Fetterman to let it all hang out in trademark shorts, trainers and hoodies. Meanwhile, Republican Susan Collins, 70, threatens to wear a bikini. Is this the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it?

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StatesSnips: Talk Like A Pirate day has been widely celebrated in the U.S.

Magic Kingdom at Disney World, Florida, was partially closed when a wild bear was spotted in the park.

A well-preserved dinosaur skeleton, known as Barry, is being offered at auction. Bidders will need an estimated $1.2 million and a very big room.

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There has been much unfair criticism over the $100m F-35 jet fighter that ‘went missing’ after the pilot was forced to eject over South Carolina. Nitpickers, who complained that no one knew where it was, are missing the point. It was fitted with anti-radar to make it undetectable which, after all, is the whole point of a stealth fighter.

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Poor old thesps: they really suffer for their art. Take Sarah Lawson, who has just died at 95. She starred in a Hammer version of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out. Not only did she have to swoon, scream and be covered in fake blood like everyone else but she was hypnotised, possessed by a dead friend and was attacked by a giant tarantula summoned up by evil forces. She also had to stand up to a sinister cult leader and save her daughter from being sacrificed to the devil.

TopSport with Rockard Rambleshanks, our hunk playing keepy-uppy with the Daily Drone Ladies team

Hard-up Czech third tier footie team FK Usti nad Labem has sold a place in its squad to the portly son of a local millionaire. Law student Michael Podhajsky, 22, will replace the club captain for 10 minutes in a forthcoming league game. A club spokesman admitted: ‘He has never played football. However, you don’t see 500,000 Czech crowns (about £17,500) rolling on the floor every day. If someone gives us this type of money, we’ll let anyone play.’

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Peruvian shamans placed a curse on Brazilian superstar Neymar ahead of their country’s crunch World Cup qualifier in Lima. They stabbed a voodoo doll of the striker with tiny swords. Final score: Peru 0, Brazil 1.

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College football coach and Hall of Fame hero Deion Sanders was heavily criticised for insisting on wearing the Coach Prime designer sunglasses he promotes in media interviews before an important game. He’s not daft. The next day $1.2 million worth of the shades were sold.

DNA may have revolutionised forensics but it has its eccentricities, admits my German police contact. They were offering a €300,000 reward for info about the so-called ‘Phantom of Heilbronn’, a woman whose DNA had been identified at more than 40 crime scenes over 15 years. Was there a Gotcha moment? Not really: it transpired she worked in the factory that made cotton swabs France, home of haute cuisine, has more McDonald’s per head than any other country in Europe.

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Don’t say The Goss doesn’t keep you in the know.  Americans are buying so many laxatives that there is a national shortage. Searches for the drugs on Amazon have tripled in the past year; makers of fibre supplements report double-digit sales growth. What’s going down? Post-Covid surge in travel plus hybrid work schedules disrupting routines and meal times, say ‘bowel experts’.

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That Meghan Markle’s a fashion icon isn’t she? Within hours of her wearing a J.Crew white blazer at the Invictus Games in Germany, the company’s website crashed as wannabes tried to buy one. It’s currently sold out. Don’t worry, gasps Fru-Fru, our gender-fluid fashion intern with a City and Guilds in cross stitch, Prince Louis’s shorts are now available in adult sizes. Good to know.

How thoughtful of Clive Myrie to warn viewers that a report on Russell Brand’s alleged sexual proclivities contained ‘flashing images’.

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Askin’ For A Friend: Why does the Beeb, reporting on Wales’s new 20 miles per hour speed limit, give stopping distances in metres?

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So farewell, Fraser Island. The world’s largest sand isle was named after Eliza Fraser, shipwrecked there in the 1830s. The 76-mile spit of sand off Australia’s east coast has been the subject of a decades-long campaign by the Butchella people, who have lived there for more than 5,000 years. Now it will be known by its traditional Aboriginal name, K’gari. 

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StatsLife: Trump’s political action committee Save America spent $40.2 million in legal costs in the first half of 2023 defending him and his associates, says the Washington Post.

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The new whizz among celebs is ‘compression pants’, massive inflatable trousers which stimulate the body’s lymphatic system and are celebrated for cellulite-busting qualities. ‘They may look silly,’ says Edwina Ings-Chambers in the Standard ‘but they’re a little piece of body makeover magic.’ Legs and ankles look less puffy and the body feels ‘lighter and freer’. All fine then? Up to a point, Lord C: they cost £10,000 a pair.

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Floating on the Prinsengracht canal past Anne Frank’s house, I am reminded of a, maybe apocryphal, tale about the hapless American actress Pia Zadora playing the tragic diarist in a Broadway play. So awful was Zadora that when German soldiers raided the house, roughnecks in the audience shouted: ‘She’s in the attic!’

Strange People, The Yanks: Texas, hardly a beacon of enlightenment, made 93 attempts to ban 2,349 books last year, according to the American Library Association.

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Following my scoop (I’m sure I read it in Lepidoptery Today — Ed) about healthy numbers for red admirals, I can add that, overall, the UK butterfly population is at its highest for four years. Volunteers counted 1.5 million in July and August. It’s a 34% increase on 2022

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WhoKnew? Mating anchovies cause turbulence in the waters off Galicia at night, a university study has revealed.

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StatsDeath: A huge epidemic is growing in China. Not Covid but cigarette smoking. The country has one fifth of the world’s population yet buys half its cigarettes. A total of 2,459,569,900,000 were sold in China last year, more than the next 67 countries combined. There are 300 million smokers; one million die each year of smoking related illnesses.

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Pilton, our inactive drama critic, sharpens his HB as the admirable Tracy-Ann Oberman heads for Stratford-upon-Avon where her re-imagined RSC production, The Merchant of Venice 1936, begins previews at the Swan.  A campaigner against anti-Semitism, Oberman, who plays Shylock, had to tone down publicity for the show. She says: ‘It was Hitler’s favourite play. I wanted to put that on the posters but was told it probably wasn’t a selling point.’

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Don’t worry — be hoppy. That’s the message from Belgian Beer World, the world’s largest interactive experience centre concentrating on beer, which has just opened at the former Brussels Stock Exchange.  Belgium spent nearly €100 million to showcase its brewing history and the 1,600 beers its producers make. 

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WatchThisSpace: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has identified carbon-based molecules on a distant exoplanet suggesting it could have water and, consequently, life.

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I don’t usually lift stuff from the Mail’s excitable Hibernian scribe, mainly because it’s usually been here first, but a tale about Hugh Grant is worth passing on. The grumpy thesp is giving voice to an 18in, green-haired, orange-hued Oompa Loompa in director Paul King’s new film Wonka (sic). How did he land the part? King says: ‘I was thinking about the character, someone who can be a real shit, and I went: ‘Ah — Hugh!’

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Labour is denying that Sir Sir Keir (less to him than meets the eye) Starmer is suing Penny Mordaunt for saying he has ‘zero balls’, just like Barbie’s Ken.

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Downing Street’s iconic sooty look isn’t real, you know. It used to be back when Dick Van Dyke was sweeping London chimneys. But, during the restoration of No.10 etc in 1954, workers discovered that beneath the dirty facade the building was, in fact yellow brick. ‘The shock was considered too much for the country to take, says Jay Owens in The Guardian, ‘so the newly clean building was painted black to maintain its previous, familiar appearance.’

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America’s largest newspaper company, Gannett, is hiring two reporters, one just to cover Taylor Swift and the other Beyoncé. The move reflects the popularity of the chanteuses: Swift’s Eras tour expects to take $1.6 billion while Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour could eclipse that with $2 billion. Incidentally, both tours have done wonders for the sparkly cowboy hat industry, say Drone business analysts.

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Half of the current Billboard Hot 100 songs are in a minor (ie: sad) key. This compares with 30% at the millennium and 15% in the sixties. Even the Pharrell Williams song, Happy, is in F minor. The reason? Gen Z is perceived to be sadder than previous generations. 

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Instead of aiming for 100% in what you do —work, sport, pub quizzes, sex — and feeling dejected when you fail, it’s better to put in 85% effort, scientists have found. Or, as that well known scientific journal the Daily Star puts it: ‘If at first you don’t succeed try, try, try again until you hit 85% — then give up.’

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A reader writes: ‘I was tickled by the Yesterday Once More story of Roy Wright being unable to tell what Andy Carson was saying. Who could? I understood only two things he said to me: “That headline is crap” and “If you’re buying, I’ll have a wee Bell’s and a light ale.”’

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Employment news: Durex is hiring 50 men, at £100 a pop, to test its new ultra-thin condom, Nude.

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Further to my item about Ken Dodd’s tax travails, I am reminded that he was highly amused that the Revenue office tasked with retrieving vast arrears of tax from him was in Andover.

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Did you see that little Kim Jong Un, off to a Big Boys summit in Vladivostok with Putin, prefers to travel by choo-choo?  But it’s no ordinary train. For a start, top speed is only 37mph. The 21 carriages contain a medical  centre, Kim’s personal Merc and a karaoke room. Live lobsters are airlifted in, the wine is the best France can offer and there’s, er, donkey meat for tea.

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RunForCover: This year’s crazy weather has caused insurance premiums to be even crazier, says Bloomberg. One homeowner on Miami’s Star Island, an ultra-rich enclave with some of the highest house prices in America, has been quoted $622,000 for annual house insurance, triple the previous year. A growing number of well-heeled residents are choosing to forgo hurricane insurance altogether and are trusting to luck.

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StatsLife: The number of the migrant butterfly red admiral has soared by 400% in Britain this year. The Big Butterfly Count has recorded 170,000 red admirals this summer, five times last year’s total. It’s down to climate change, apparently (You sure we can’t blame Brexit? — Ed)

Letter of the Week. Mike Roberts, of Somerset, writes to The Times about Ken Dodd: ‘I always thought his best line was after his protracted case with the Inland Revenue. “I didn’t think it applied to me — I live by the seaside”.’

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Caine’sCorner: Uncle Sam, the US government’s nickname, was a real person. One supplier to the US Army during the 1812 war was meat packer from Troy, New York, called Samuel Wilson. He labelled his barrels of beef ‘US’ which troops joked was short for Uncle Sam. In 1961 Congress adopted a resolution saluting Wilson as ‘the progenitor of America’s national symbol of “Uncle Sam”.’ NMPKT

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SportsSnaps with Rockard Rambleshanks, our man with the fluorescent pink balls

WFH has led to a boom in mid-week golf. Stanford Uni boffins (have they nothing better to do?) say the number playing on Wednesdays rose by 150% between 2019 and 2022 while those on Saturdays declined. Top pop tee time? Wednesday at 4pm - up 275%.

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About 11,000 of the 30,000 runners in the Mexico City Marathon were disqualified for taking unauthorised short cuts. Some even rode part of the course in cars or on public transport.

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Former Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson denies money motivated him to switch to the new Saudi footie league. He says: ‘I just wanted something that would excite me.’ Henderson’s wedge for playing for Al Ettifaq is said to be £700,000. A week.

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Evenin’ All. Crime update with Reprobate Rambleshanks

Naughty boys in Spain have stolen 50,000 litres of a precious commodity, olive oil. The contraband, half-inched in a night-time raid, was worth €500,000. Thefts have increased since a major drought sent prices soaring. The cost of a bottle of oil in Spanish supermarkets has jumped 15% since July, according to Bloomberg.

A TV crew in Chicago was  robbed while reporting on robberies … in Chicago. The thieves even stole the camera so the story was never broadcast.

Gangs in Sweden are using Spotify to launder money. They convert the dirty cash - earned from drug deals, robberies, fraud and contract killings - into bitcoin, says Svenska Dagbladet. Then dodgy techies sell ‘fake streams’ on Spotify, earning real money for gang-affiliated artists. Nope. Me neither.

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HotSpot: Temperatures topped 43.3C (110F) for the 54th day this year in Phoenix, Arizona — a new record.

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Askin’ For A Friend: What possessed the Mail to illustrate the sad story about Alastair Stewart‘s early onset dementia diagnosis with a pic of the newsreader grinning? 

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StatsLife:  Half of Americans who earn at least $175,000 (among the richest 10% of US taxpayers) consider themselves merely ‘comfortable’. A quarter of the 1,000 surveyed by Bloomberg said they felt ‘very poor’, ‘poor’ or ‘getting by but things are tight’.

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Coffee nuts be warned: your favourite beverage, once a staple, could soon be a luxury. Demand is increasing, mainly because of a growing middle class in Asia and Africa, who see it as a status symbol, says the FT. Trouble is, warming temps mean that ‘up to half of current coffee farmland could soon be unusable’. One solution, replacing the dominant arabica bean with the hardier but ‘less refined’ robusta, would mean coffee lovers would be faced with a brew that doesn’t taste as good.

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Crime and punishment? They don’t piss about in Turkey, so be warned. The CEO of a collapsed crypto exchange has just been jailed for aggravated fraud and money laundering which cost investors $2.6 billion. The sentence? 11,196 years. Is this a record? Surprisingly not. In 1989 a woman who operated a pyramid fraud in Thailand got 141,078 years but was freed after only a few years.

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Askin’ For a Friend: Why is the river that rises in the Black Forest and empties into the Black Sea called the Blue Danube?

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Estonian high-wire loony Jaan Roose has set a new world record for the longest single-building slack line crossing. The 31-year-old battled strong winds and high temps to walk 150ft along a one-inch wire between two 60th-floor penthouses at the Katara Towers in Quatar.

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Falling battery costs and a tax exemption mean many electric cars in China are cheaper than fuel-powered equivalents. EVs account for 37% of car sales; seven of China’s best selling cars last month were electric or hybrids. Top? Tesla’s Model Y, comfortably.

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Is India about to change its name? Narendra Modi’s government has increasingly been using ‘Bharat’, the traditional Sanskrit and Hindi name, in diplomatic settings such as the G20 summit, says the Washington Post. Apparently, the word India has colonial baggage (wouldn’t you know?). There’s irony here, though.  Modi’s critics note that his Hindu nationalist BJP, party uses Bharat to ‘evoke the sense of an exclusively Hindu past’. This in a country with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world.

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Is Il Popo (as Kelvin would call him) losing it? Pope Francis has hailed the marauding Mongol tyrant Genghis Khan as a bringer of peace. Fact: up to 60 million people (11% of the world’s population) were killed during his reign of terror.

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The heatwave has melted Britain’s longest-lasting patch of snow, says my weather girl with the short skirt and the gleaming teeth who’s only filling in until a job as a reporter comes along. The patch, known as The Sphinx, in the Cairngorms has vanished only 10 times in the past 300 years. Worryingly, in this year of extreme weather, this has occurred five times in the last seven years.

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O tempora, o mores: Workers aged over 35 in China are finding it increasingly difficult to get and keep jobs. Part of the reason is the country’s notorious 996 culture (9am - 9pm, six days a week) which makes it difficult for employees with families. Also, the perception that anyone who hasn’t achieved an exec role by 35 probably isn’t worth keeping. 

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used to take samples.

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I’m depressed. Why so? I’ve just met a 17-year-old youth who has never heard of the Rolling Stones.

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Reminiscences about the intimidating bar’maid’ Mrs Moon by Richard Dismore (he’s everywhere, isn’t he?) jogs a reader’s memory. He recalls a stranger holding his freshly-drawn beer (Young’s or Fuller’s was it?) (Youngs — Ed) up to the light and exclaiming admiringly: ‘My, that’s a fine pint!’ Whereupon, La Moon expelled him. Her point was that every pint drawn in the Dive Bar was ‘fine’. To comment on it was to question this truth. 

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SportsScene by Rockard Rambleshanks, our poet in the Press Box composing cliches  (at least they’re new!)

The crowd acknowledged the pluck and fortitude of snooker ace Kyren Wilson as, obviously injured, he limped around the table at the European Masters. Training mishap, perhaps; pushing his body too far? Ahem, no. Wilson, on a stag do in the Algarve, got into a row over a doner kebab and was whacked on the calf by a baton-wielding cop. ‘I was very much the worse for wear as you’re supposed to be on a stag do,’ he explained.

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Entertaining reminiscences elsewhere about Mohamed Al Fayed fail to mention what an inspirational football club owner he was. Fulham FC were never relegated when he was there. He went through a phase of handing out Viagra tablets to the team before each match. As one player said: ‘He knew how to keep us up.’

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Young Retro’s reminiscences about Afters in Fleet Street in our nostalgic new series Yesterday Once More reminds me of a conversation with Richard Littlejohn, OTP. Rich, being an evening paper man with a different time clock, introduced me to Befores: having a snifter ahead of a pub officially opening. Once he was ‘entertaining a contact’ in the Cartoonist when two City uniforms staged a 10am ‘raid’ and came over all officious. Littlejohn’s snout had a quiet word and they pissed off: they weren’t going to argue with the head of the Flying Squad.

Just when we thought South Africa rugby bad boy Elton Jantjies stood a chance of a World Cup call-up it’s all gone wrong again. On his last international tour he went AWOL with the team’s dietician. They checked into an hotel where their exuberant shagging kept other guests awake. They also racked up a £1300 bill on food and booze before doing a runner. Even so, hard work by the fly half brought him back to the fringes of the squad. Until he tested positive for a banned body-building drug, that is. 

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For the first time in Rugby World Cup history Wales have picked a squad without a Jones in it.

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Quote of the week from an anonymous Labour MP on Sir Sir Keir Starmer’s reshuffle:‘Even Tony Blair didn’t have this many Blairites in his cabinet’.

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More than 3,000 invasive plants and animals are costing the world $423 billion in damage annually, according to a UN-backed report. That’s more than the economic toll of natural disasters. Water hyacinth is taking over lakes and rivers, blocking boats and sucking up water. Non-native grasses fuelled wildfires in Maui. Elsewhere, giant snails, bee-killing hornets and spotted lantern flies threaten ecosystems.

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StatsLife: Up to 91% of women report receiving romantic advances on LinkedIn, says survey. 

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The Slicker. Finance update with Fred Needleshanks

The world’s third most valuable carmaker is a loss-making Vietnamese EV outfit founded just six years ago. VinFast has a market cap of $218 billion, behind only Tesla ($816 billion) and Toyota ($227 billion) after its stock rose almost 700% in two weeks. Tempted to jump in? Easy, tiger: the valuation is dropping and is almost entirely ‘froth’, a combination of not many shares available and over-optimistic amateur get-rich-quick traders.

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The cargo ship snarl-up on the  Panama Canal, where drought has restricted passage and there is huge congestion, is starting to affect economies worldwide. The owners of one ship, desperate to deliver vital goods, coughed up $2.4 million to skip the queue.

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California’s economy has been deprived of almost $5 billion by the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ 127-day strike, says the FT. Other businesses, such as caterers, car rental outfits and even dry cleaners, have been badly affected. The hit from the 2007 strike, which lasted 100 days, was $2.1 billion.

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Sir Sir Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet reshuffle summed up by the estimable Quentin Letts in the Mail: Brian Nonentity and A.N. Other have been given the elbow and replaced by N.V. Goode and Eve N. Verse.

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Pride goeth before destruction … Little Manny Macron’s vanity project, designed to cement his place in France’s history, has become the object of ridicule, says our gal with a front seat in the Place de La Concorde, knitting a Christmas jumper. His centre for celebrating and promoting the French language, which is about to open, cost €208 million, twice the original budget. Collapsed sponsorship deals mean the taxpayer is having to foot the bill. ‘Macron’s folly’, as it has already been called, is also expected to make a loss of €6 million a year.Nice Work If You Can Get It: Tiny Caribbean nation Anguilla struck gold when it was given the country-specific website domain name .ai in the Nineties. You can see where this is going: the acceleration of .ai domains — they doubled to nearly 300,000 in the past year — means that domain revenue is expected to reach as much as $30 million in 2023, roughly 10% of the country’s entire GDP, compared with $8.3 million last year.

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Further to the West Point cadets who opened a near 200-year-old time capsule at a packed college ceremony only to find it contained …mud: well, deciding that they perhaps needed to pay more attention to detail, they subsequently combed through the gunge and finally discovered six American silver coins, dated 1795-1828 plus a commemorative medal. ‘Pity we didn’t find them when we had all those people here,’ moans my grunt with the shiny shoes and the thousand-yard stare.

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Following my snippet about former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s amazing sub-par golf round comes news that President Mugshot has also been in top form. Trump carded a 67 on a 72-par course at his New Jersey club. He explains: ‘Some think that sounds low but there is no hanky-lanky. Many watch plus I’m surrounded by Secret Service agents. Not much you can do even if you wanted to — and I don’t.

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Must be something in the water but 17 sets of twins are due to start school at Inverclyde in Scotland. It continues a tradition of multiples in the area. In 2015 there were 19 sets and since 2013 a total of 147 have attended school there giving the area the name of (wait for it…wait for it) Twinverclyde. 

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Yevgeny Prigozhin: hero? villain? well meaning bloke who just got a bit carried away? Now that he’s safely dead, Russian media are doing a bit of vacuuming and tidying up. The Kremlin has already rehabilitated the boss of the Wagner group, says Ian Garner in UnHerd. He’s now ‘an exemplary military hero’. Pravda says Prigozhin was ‘an epochal man, a heroic man, a legendary man’. Hang on. What about that attempted coup? Apparently, he was simply forcing senior officials ‘to listen to the voice of the people’.

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The actor who plays Italian carmaker Enzo Ferrari in the upcoming biopic, Ferrari, wasn’t allowed to drive any of the iconic cars during filming for insurance reasons. The fact that his name is Adam Driver didn’t seem to help at all.

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Roy Keane’s brush with a fan reminds Roger Watkins, OTP, of an encounter with the excitable Hibernian footie person. He wakes, briefly, to write: ‘My family and I were dining al fresco in a restaurant in Quinta do Lago on the Algarve. My youngest daughter happened to take a pic of our table just as Keane, who we weren’t aware was there, emerged with a takeaway. Realising that he was on the snap, he went into full eye-bulging, finger-jabbing mode as if she were the ref. I’m proud to say that after a brief exchange which, among others, featured the words Pikey, off and piss the result was announced: Watkins Family 1, Keane O.’

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Must be something in the water but 17 sets of twins are due to start school at Inverclyde in Scotland. It continues a tradition of multiples in the area. In 2015 there were 19 sets and since 2013 a total of 147 have attended school there giving the area the name of (wait for it…wait for it) Twinverclyde. 

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SportsSnaps with Rockard Rambleshanks, our snout with the impeccable sources (and the gaffer’s missus on speed dial)

Fans of University of Nebraska Cornhuskers (really!) set a new global record for attendance at a women’s sports event: 92,003 people packed into a specially enlarged stadium to watch a volleyball match. It surpassed the 91,648 fans at a women’s Champions League game in Barcelona in 2022.

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Former Rangers winger Ryan Kent is settling in nicely at Turkish club Fenerbahce. There’s just one item left on his to-do list: finding a pet sitter for his two crocodiles. Kent has form. He once gave a team-mate a snake as a Secret Santa.

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Recollections vary over why German midfielder Nadiem Amiri turned down a move to Leeds United at the last minute. The club says his wage demands were too high and they sent him packing. In Germany they’re saying the Bayer Leverkusen star and his family took one look at Leeds … and legged it.

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How outrageous that a so-called star sketchwriter and columnist is allowed to describe the Leader of the Opposition as ‘a steaming dullard, a juddering bore, constipated as a camel’. It’s not clever and it’s not funny. Keir Starmer is a knight of the realm, a distinguished lawyer, an acclaimed DPP, an accomplished parliamentarian and our next prime minister. OK, so The Goss wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire but that’s neither here nor there.

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Much excitement at West Point Military Academy in the US as staff and cadets gathered for the opening of a time capsule left in 1820. Would it contain a flag? A class ring? A rousing note of encouragement to future students? Er, no. It was full of mud.

A gnarled, bemedalled  veteran comments: ‘Perhaps they should have been told that the next time you pry open a lead casket that’s been buried for centuries, please watch at least one horror movie first — y’all just released a demon!’

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Writers everywhere, be warned. After being pilloried on social media for an hilariously awful report on a football game — it included the phrase ‘a close encounter of the athletic kind’ — the Gannett-owned Columbus Dispatch has halted its Artificial Intelligence sports writing initiative. However, news outlets such as Reuter and AP persist in trying to figure out how to incorporate AI into their reporting process. They might just as well: experts estimate that 90% of internet content will be generated by it in a few years.

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Use of cannabis and psychedelic drugs among US adults hit an all-time high last year, according to a survey. Stats? 44% of people aged 19-30 and 28% of 35-50 year-olds reported using marijuana. More than 11% of young adults used cannabis on at least 20 of the previous 30 days. Psychedelic drugs such as MDMA and psilocybin  were used by 8% of young adults — more than double the rate in 2012.

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Strange People, The Yanks: Tamis Manis, 58, of Knoxville, Tennessee, has just set a Guinness World Record: for the length of her mullet. Measured at 5ft 8ins, it was last cut 33 years ago. 

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StatsLife: CDs now make up only 3% of the music industry’s earnings, down from 96% in 2002.

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Letter of the Week from Elizabeth Challen, of Twickenham, in The Times: Can nothing be done about the plague of inanimate objects talking to us? Lorries on the motorway inform me ‘I’m green’, the cornflakes packet tells me ‘I’m recyclable’, the magazine wrapper implores me ‘Don’t put me in the bin’. A house spoke to me the other day to say ‘I’m for sale’. The final straw came in the ladies’ lavatory at the motorway services, which cooed: ‘I’m sorry, I’m out of order but I WILL BE BACK SOON!’ I wrote on it: ‘Thank you for reaching out to me. Best wishes. Have a nice day.’

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 Thanks to Fru Fru, our eager gender-fluid fashion intern with a City and Guilds in cross stitch, for alerting us to the fact that biker boots are the new ‘thing’. Miu Miu’s  autumn/winter collection started it all and now everyone’s offering their own take. This includes Paris Brown’s distressed brown boots. Vogue suggests combining them with a slip dress or Bermuda shorts for an ‘unexpected, yet undeniably chic, combo’.

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Strange People, The Yanks: Tourists seeking a different New York experience are signing up for late night rat tours. Guides shepherd them around well known rat runs near the Rockefeller Center and in Flushing and Sunnyside, Queens. The city’s rodent population is booming: there were 60,000 reports of activity in 2022, a 102% increase on 2021. Aaron Liddell, who journeyed to NYC with his wife from Pennsylvania just to join a rat tour, confided: ‘It’s just one of those things you gotta see.’ Aaron particularly likes to (and you may wish to avert your eyes) pinch the rats’ long, pink tails.

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I don’t know what Young, Wood, Dempster et al would have made of it but Paris Hilton has acquired a special anti-paparazzi scarf to foil eager snappers. The £150 garment’s highly reflective material makes the flash extra bright, effectively turning the wearer invisible.

Ferrari and a Range Rover Sport, worth a total of £1 million plus have been returned to two Premier League footie stars after being found in a container bound for Dubai at Thurrock, Essex.

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Times online reported that a super blue moon would brighten UK skies ‘in a rare phenomena’. Where have all the classicists gone?

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It’s still the Silly Season (just) so no apologies for breathlessly quoting Mandrake in The New European that Rishi, stung by criticism that his trousers are too short, has decided to wear longer-length outfits. 

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More than 100 million tomatoes have been thrown in the streets of Bunol, Spain, as the world’s largest food fight takes place. Known as La Tomatina, the annual festival draws an army of 20,000 tomato chuckers. Oh, what a mess! Not really. Once it’s all cleared up, the citric acid in the fruit leaves Bunol more sparkling than before.

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Caine’s Corner: The English are sometimes known, with a sort of grudging respect, in Argentina as Las Piratas after Sir Francis Drake. NMPKT

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O tempora, o mores: Rory Stewart’s father died in his arms after suffering a heart attack in 2015. When the then Tory junior minister returned to work on Monday, his boss, Liz Truss, asked him how his weekend had been. ‘I explained that my father had died,’ he writes in his new book, Politics on the Edge. ‘She paused for a moment, nodded and asked when the 25-year environment plan would be ready.’

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It’s little known but Luis Rubiales, the baldy at the centre of the Spanish kissgate batahola, used to play as a defender for Scottish team Hamilton Academical. Four games, four defeats. Then he moved on to greater things.  Accies’ former chairman Ronnie MacDonald remembers: ‘He was a proper gentleman, polite to everyone. I’d never guess he’d be involved in something like this. You never know what’s coming but at this club there’s always something coming…’

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Village sign enthusiasts among Drone readers, of whom there are a few, follow up my vignette about Cock Bridge losing its signs to souvenir hunters. Apparently those in the nearby hamlet of Lost are regularly, er, lost. And don’t get me started about Twatt on Orkney. Further south in Dorset, residents clubbed together to carve their village name on a one-and-half tonne slab of Purbeck stone. ‘Let’s see them try to take that away in the back of a Ford Fiesta,’ says Ian Ventham, chairman of the parish council in Shitterton.

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This Sporting Wossname with Rockard Rambleshanks, our side-stepping superstar who’s a bit standoffish.

England’s rugby woe as the World Cup looms wrings no tears from The Goss. Statistically, the team should win every match it plays. Out of 6.6 million players of all ages registered with World Rugby,  England has 2,220,988; Fiji who have just beaten England for the first time just 136,030. Ireland has 237,080; Wales 60,557; Scotland 62,500 and perennial over-achievers New Zealand 156,893.

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Just thought you’d want to know: London Zoo has just conducted the yearly weigh-in of its 14,000+ animals. Not only does it update records but it helps other zoos to benchmark animal health.

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Now over to the Economist for our Letter of the Week: ‘Your article on smuggling banned products into Iran reminded me of the problems encountered by foreign embassies in Saudi Arabia when the importation of alcohol was prohibited. Import papers had to be crafted so as not to raise alarms. As a result, the British embassy was informed by Saudi customs that “your consignment of pianos is leaking”.’

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O tempora, o mores: The French government is allocating €200 million to destroy surplus wine and support producers. A growing thirst for craft beer over vino is the reason. The cash will buy excess stock; the alcohol will be sold for use in hand sanitiser, cleaning products and perfume. In 1926 the average French citizen drank 136 litres of wine a year; today it’s 40 litres.

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O tempora, o mores: The tiny Aberdeenshire village of Cock Bridge has ordered tamper-proof signs to deter thieves.  Souvenir hunters regularly take the place name. Now local councillor Geva Blackette says: ‘I want it back up: it’s a world-famous sign. But when the sign for Cock Bridge goes up next it must stay up.’

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The Goss Colour Supplement: Welcome to some new highly specific colours you’ve never heard of, according to the website Mental Floss. Bamber-Amber, used in theatres to give the illusion of dawn or dusk; Drunk Tank Pink, proven to have a calming quality when painted on the walls of police holding cells; Lusty Gallant, the name of a Tudor dance adopted as a colour by Elizabethan dressmakers and Sang-de-Boeuf, another word for the rich crimson of ox blood.

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As Quantas prepares to launch 22-hour, nonstop flights from Sydney to London and New York, the airline has been using volunteers, hooked up to biometrics monitors, to find ways to combat jet lag. Result? Eat plenty of chocolate and chilli is the advice: they encourage a healthy sleeping pattern and better adaptation to new time zones.

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Shame, isn’t it, that the Trump mugshot has given naughty media outlets the excuse to re-use the LAPD image of Shit Grant (wearing a truly awful shirt, by the way)? It was taken in ‘95 after vice cops swooped on him receiving a BJ from prostitute Divine (sic) Brown in his parked BMW near Sunset Boulevard. She said police were alerted by flashing brake lights inadvertently caused by Shit in rhythmic extremis. His ‘career’ hardly suffered. Divine made $1.6 million from the publicity, enabling her to buy a house and educate her daughters privately.

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StatsLife: The number of illegal migrants in Britain is 100,000; six million have entered the US during Biden’s presidency alone.

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Only 35 non-English songs have reached the Top 10 of the Billboard chart since it began in 1958, says the Drone’s tame troubadour Rihanna Rambleshanks. Six of those have been this year though.

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The boss has allowed me a few days’ respite from my treadmill tyranny and deadline drudgery (It’s only The Goss, for fuck’s sake - Ed). I told him I’d be out of contact in Communicado, a cliff top village down the coast from Cognito. ‘OK’, he said, ‘but don’t let me catch you in Flagrantedelicto’. Chance’d be a fine thing.

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QwickQwiz: What have Ronald Reagan and Robert Redford in common with Rockard, Rhett, Reynard and Rosalie Rambleshanks? (Er, none of them exist — Ed)

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O tempora, o mores: Of course you need one; you just never knew you did. A wine bag that is, somewhere to put that bottle of Chateau Cashinella you pick up on the way to a ‘do’. Let’s banish carrier bags, shall we? Instead, posh plonk holders include Anya Hindmarch’s seagrass model (£225), a cork-topped carafe by Ancient Greek Sandals (£200) or really impress with Mulberry’s two-bottle carrier in ‘vintage oak’ leather (£495).

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Never let it be said that The Goss is outside the gastronomic beltway. Thus, sidle up to Darkroom Core, which is currently exercising America’s trendiest eateries, says the NY Times. The aesthetic of ‘dim interiors lit primarily in red’ is thought to stimulate hunger, cover up diners’ blemishes and evoke a sexy, nocturnal atmosphere. A bit like the old Express canteen, then.

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Whatever’s going on in Russia, its economy really is suffering from the war and stringent sanctions. The rouble has dropped 40% since November; energy sales are down to €2 billion a month from €12 billion last year. The Kremlin can’t afford aircraft parts: some passenger jets have to land with their brakes switched off so as not to wear them out. Pilots rely on reverse thrust alone.

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Sporting Snippetettes by Rockard Rambleshanks, our scout in the home team’s showers on a slippery slope with the slippery soap

Anxious to attract sporting stars, North Korea is inviting leading golfers to play the Taesong course in Pyongyang. This is where former leader Kim Jong Il shot an incredible 38-under round which included an unprecedented 11 holes in one: a feat witnessed, authenticated and verified by at least 17 personal bodyguards.

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Goalkeeper David Raya, Arsenal’s new signing from Brentford, embarrassingly has a tattoo celebrating the West London club’s win over the Gunners in 2021.

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Amid praise for the Lionesses Down Under and England’s Ashes fightback at home, let’s not forget the Silver Ashes, in which our over-70 cricketers dominated a three-match series of ODIs. Special mention to England captain John Evans, 71 in July, who hit a splendid 114 against the Aussie visitors in a ‘Test’ at Colchester. As he said, not bad for a man who waited six decades for his international debut.

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West Indies cricketer Sherman’s Rutherford was named player of the series in the GlobalT20Canada tournament. His prize: half an acre of land in the USA.

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Miami Marlins baseball franchise celebrated the capture of Chicago White Sox infielder Jake Burger by flogging burgers at a cut price $5. Now fans clamour for the signing of Yankees’ pitcher Dan Oysters’n’champagne. 

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StatsLife: The crap late summer has provoked a last-minute rush to the sun. British Airways Holidays has seen a 22% year-on-year increase in bookings; Club Med’s sales are up 146%.

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India’s successful moon shot, apart from proving how the Drone Picture Desk leaves no scone unturned in its space coverage (It was a crumpet, dolt — Ed), reveals how daft Britain’s foreign aid policy is. In the five years to 2021 we spent £2.3 billion on aid to India, which has a larger economy, and this is set to continue. Eh?

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Joke of the Week

Old man at GP surgery: I’ve had to buy a roof rack. His friend: Why? OM: To get my prescription drugs home.  This is an entrant in the Online Newspapers’ Life’s a Joke contest. Is this the best you can do? — Ed

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Caine Corner: the Royal Mint is making jewellery out of silver extracted from old x-rays. Metal will be taken from the hundreds of tonnes of images stored by the NHS. It will be fashioned into pendants and bracelets celebrating sustainable design. NMPKT

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If you thought the airport was busy (and the Red Lion in Swanage was heaving) this summer, brace yourselves. You ain’t seen nothing yet. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that travel will be a $15 trillion industry by 2033. That’s 11.6% of the global economy and a 50% increase from 2019. Some 430 million people will work in travel - one in every nine jobs worldwide.

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A Times Letters correspondent, pondering, like many, the future of the longest-serving Home Secretary in the history of the world, writes: ‘In your story about Suella Braverman you describe her as a polarising figure, with some of her colleagues describing her as “totally useless” and others hailing her as a future party leader. I’d like to point out that, based on recent experience, the one doesn’t rule out the other.’

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Our old pal, Bic Mac, holiday stand-in on another publication, mentions difficult interviewees. What about Vladimir Nabokov who never gave a one-to-one without having the questions in advance? Once he greeted a journalist with: ‘Here’s your interview: you can go home now.’ He handed over a sealed envelope marked ‘finished interview’ containing his thoughts on Don Quixote, being a lepidopterist and Ezra Pound (‘that total fake’).

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Stat’sLife: 17 million: population of Netherlands; 22 million: bike population of Netherlands; 12,000: number of bikes dredged from Amsterdam’s canals — each year.

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Much hilarity in the BB of the FF over my item about people being naughty in the driverless taxis of San Francisco. Now I hear the cars are also the object of amusement. Ten suddenly stopped, causing chaos at a busy junction outside a music festival. Concertgoers using their mobiles had disrupted the cabs’ communications. Another cab drove on to a construction site and became embedded in fast-setting concrete. More seriously, a fare was hurt when his taxi failed to give way to a fire engine on blue light alert.

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Remember the rumpus when boys were forced to learn ‘domestic kitchen’ at school? Actually, I don’t: we did Greek instead. Russia, though, is beginning classes which require teenagers to be taught how to strip down, assemble and clean Kalashnikovs. Using hand grenades and first aid in combat are also on the curriculum. By the way, UK defence chiefs estimate Russian casualties to be 220,000 in the Ukraine war.

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Egalité? C’est couilles! France is now home to 2,821,000 dollar millionaires, says UBS. (Britain has 2,556,000). Good for the French economy maybe but it doesn’t help Macron’s ‘we’re all in this together’ vibe.

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Much grumpiness at the Drone where staff shortages have led to copy hardly being subbed. Shame-faced Chief Sub LP Brevmin says: ‘It’s true. Some of the so-called ‘celebrity columns’ have got away with it. As a result, there’s been an awful lot of dross in the Drone. Writers used to self sub but not in any more. Anyone got a number for Bunny Laws?’ (If I could get Brevmin out of the pub, things might improve  — Ed)

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A recent re-run of Great Hoary Anecdote No. 33 prompts a reader to comment: ‘I remember Billy Montgomery, who was there, thought it frightfully poor form’. (As would any alumnus of Dollar Academy like what Bill was — Ed)

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Evenin’ all with Reprobate Rambleshanks, Crime Corr

One of Italy’s Most Wanted, Mafia capo Vincenzo La Porta, spent 11 years on the run, sometimes living on rain water and tinned sardines, before setting up, under an assumed identity, on Corfu. All sunshine and spanakopita, then. Until his beloved Napoli won their first Serie A title in 30 years: Vinnie, hearing fans celebrating in a restaurant below his apartment, couldn’t resist joining them. Alas, pesky social media pix were spotted by the carabinieri and his collar was felt a few days later.

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My titbit about shuffling cards has had abacus-wielding Drone readers in a bit of a frenzy. One called Wood, who boasts he was a Wizard of the Slide Rule, (I’ll be the judge of that, Stevie love — Ed) says: ‘If the TikTok Twat is correct, you could make a strong claim that no two packs of cards in history, when properly shuffled, have had the same sequence.’

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As temps remain high, zoo keepers in Dallas are making ice lollies for the lions — out of horses’ blood. (Oh purlease! — Ed)

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Oh, I say: the MoS carries a picture of Dick Emery as Bovver Boy in a spread on the enduring appeal of denim. Dick Emery died 40 years ago.

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Great Hoary Anecdotes No. 33. Talk about dropping in for lunch! Give Jameson his due, he carried on as if nothing had happened — Ed 

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The case of Andrew Malkinson, whose rape conviction, for which he spent 17 years in jail, was quashed after another man’s saliva was found on the victim’s vest, is such a scandal that I am surprised that more people in public office aren’t shouting from the rooftops. It turns out that the CPS first received this vital DNA evidence in 2009. Who was DPP then? Well, there’s less to him than meets the eye, certainly. He is a man who rose without trace and on whom The Goss wouldn’t piss if he were on fire. That’s who.

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StatsLife: A third of people in the US have a tattoo; 22% have more than one. More women (38%) have one than men (27%). Gays (50% +) outnumber straights (31%); young, under 30 (41%), pensioners (13%). The tattoo industry will hit $3.9 billion by 2030. Removing them is also big business and is expected to bring in $795 million in 2027.

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Freckles, once considered an imperfection to be hidden, are now desirable, the Washington Post confides. So much so, that digital ‘freckle filters’ are available on Snapchat and Instagram to doctor pix. Freckle pens can be used on your face and, for the really committed, a tattoo-like procedure can apply fake ‘sun-dappled dots’ which last up to three years.

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Lovely tale, courtesy of Popbitch, about Michael Parkinson when he was working in Oz in the 80s. Elton John invited him and wife, Mary, to a yacht party. Alas, they were late and arrived to see HMS Elton sailing towards the horizon. Friendly harbour police came to the rescue, though, and ferried them out to the vessel. Was Elton impressed? Was he fuck. Seeing the police launch approaching, the yacht’s revellers assumed it was a drug bust and dumped all their gear overboard —thousands of pounds worth.

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The Goss, scarcely literate, never mind numerate, passes on this from a TikTok Twat:

He says that the possible number of ways you can shuffle a pack of cards is so unfathomably large that you could gather 1 trillion people, hand each of them 52 cards, tell them to shuffle them 1 trillion times a second for 1 trillion years, let that happen across 1 trillion civilisations in the universe, let that happen across 1 trillion universes … and a pack of cards you shuffled right now would only have a 40% chance of matching the sequence of any single one of the packs in this experiment. Er, that’s it.  

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More good news from the world’s greatest paperless newspaper: the clean energy revolution is accelerating. Renewables are projected to surpass coal as the world’s top electricity source in 2025.

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Do you sometimes wonder about Aussies? Their government has hired an ethics consultant to advise on how to work with consultants. The consultant who recruits the most consultants will win … a pink car. Oh frabjous day!

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Say what you like about the Beeb, it’s the world’s most trusted source of news and other info. In June bbc.co.uk and bbc.com had 1.1 billion visits, 3% up year on year. That’s well ahead of No.2, msn.com on 733.9 million. Mind you, timesofindia.com, with only 193.4 million visits, has put on 35% YOY. 

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A rare two-headed snake is back on display in a Texas zoo after taking two years to recover from an injury caused when it tried to go in two directions at once. (I promise I’m not making this up. Indeed, I’m lifting it from a very reputable website). The 3ft long Western rat snake, known as Pancho and Lefty, has the same condition which results in conjoined twins in humans.

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O tempora, o mores: thousands of troops and police were needed to move just one man — a gang leader called Fito — to a maximum security jail in Ecuador. It follows a massive operation, aided by the FBI, to find who assassinated presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, an outspoken critic of corruption and organised crime.

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Not sure whether to file this in Caine’s Corner or under Remember Who Told You First but we’ve all been frustrated by those daft ‘are you a robot?’ tests where you have to list how many tractors or traffic lights etc appear in a grid. But I didn’t know that so-called CAPTCHA programmes come from Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

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Diana, Princess of Wales, was so ahead of her time when it came to shoes, gushes Frou-Frou, our new gender-fluid fashion intern with an AI laser tape measure and a City and Guilds in cross stitch.  Not only are her ballet flats back in vogue but ‘silver shoes’, which she spent the 80s and 90s wearing, are one of the most popular trends this summer. The late icon had so many shoes that costly cobbler Jimmy Choo confessed he had lost count of those he had designed for her.

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Elsewhere, there’s mention of a cafe owner in Lake Como charging €2 to cut a toastie in two. Now I hear of another case of outrageous banditry: €20, added to the restaurant bill as ‘servizio torta’. That’s slicing up a cake to you and me.

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Ever wonder how a ragtag mob as bizarre as UKIP screened its candidates? Former party treasurer Andrew Reid sheds some light in a new book: one felt she was born on Sirius eight light years away; another subscribed to the ‘lizard people’ theory about the royal family and yet another had been ‘convicted of starving 250 sheep to death’. One would-be candidate, asked to pledge that they had ‘never engaged in, advocated or condoned racist, violent, criminal or anti-democratic activity’, crossed out ‘criminal’.

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The things they say: Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, was asked what advice he’d give to young entrepreneurs wishing to make a fortune. ‘Make sure you have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.’

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My whimsical jotting about holes in copy prompts an aged reader to wake up and recall the occasional stand-in copytaster with the florid face and early onset paranoia who had a unique way of ‘spiking/filing’ stories he deemed not fit for use. He used to attach paper clips to the sheets and slot them onto a spike. Then, when the cry went up: Hey, anyone seen Wild Gunman Wipes Out Cabinet? he would discreetly slip the copy from the clips and hand it over — without any telltale holes.

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The Goss mention of Iowa State Fair aroused a fever of interest (Eh? — Ed). If you intend going, and there’s still time, forget cutlery. Everything to eat there is served on a stick: hard boiled eggs, deep fried strawberry shortcake, pickles, edible dough. But the No.1 dish, as voted by readers of the Des Moines Register, is pork chop on a stick. Way to go, buddy. 

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StatsLife: Oppenheimer, at more than $500 million, has become the highest-grossing film set in World War II, eclipsing Dunkirk and Saving Private Ryan.

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What is a significant plank in Japan’s healthy economy? Cherry blossoms, believe it or not. The annual floral display generates billions of dollars through tourism and predicting when the trees bloom is a fine art. In 2007 the Japan Meteorological Agency had to make a grovelling apology  when its blossom forecast was nine days out. Now private companies employ teams to take temperatures and monitor trees. This year analyst Hiroki predicted Tokyo’s first blooms to within a day

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Nanny always said eating too much cheap, ultra-processed food was bad for a chap (and chapesses, I suppose). But it’s true, says Henry Dimbleby in his new book, Ravenous. Today 28% of Britons are obese; in 1950, before junk food took off, it was 1%.

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Last word on Ron and Eth (with apologies to Muir and Norden): 'Ooooh, Ron. I see you there with your eyes narrowed and sinister, your finely-sculpted lips drawn back in a demonic leer, your cheeks flushed, your breath coming in short pants and your hands fluttering nervously by your sides. What are you thinking about, my beloved?’ ‘Nothing, Eth.’

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Give Gwyneth Paltrow her due: she’s one cool girl. Her magnanimous reaction to her ski crash court victory showed why she’s so popular. Which brings me to the revelation that she used to carry a separate mobile phone for every man she was dating in addition to her main device. That was so she knew which one was calling. At one point in 2000 she had dedicated mobiles for Ben Affleck, talent manager Guy Oseary and, despite the fact that he was engaged to Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt. May I say: Atta girl?

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Depressing statistic of our time: if you live in Hampstead you can expect to survive 12 years longer than someone born in Glasgow. That’s 88 years old compared with 76. Fifteen of the top 20 parly constituencies with highest life expectancies are in London and the south east; 17 of the worst are in Scotland; Glasgow’s seven seats fill the bottom seven spots. I’m tempted to say it must be all those deep fried Mars bars but you wouldn’t approve so I won’t.

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What’s depressing me about Trump’s upcoming comeuppance in court (although if you believe that, you’ll believe anything) isn’t that he is the first former president to face criminal charges but hearing a breathless BBC hack saying that he’s in ‘unchartered waters’.

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I habitually take half a hour or so every April 1 to go through the papers to spot their April Fool japes. I’m so glad the Daily Drone doesn’t go in for that sort of thing, aren’t you?

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Witty gag writers who contribute to the Drone have been asked to tone down their humour. A confidential memo from the editor, seen by a Goss nark, warns that too much hilarity isn’t good for the ageing readership. Compline and a period of silent, contemplative prayer will follow shortly.

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Old Man Manners, the hermit seer of the North, he say: Good news travels fast; Goss travels at speed of light. 

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I have been admonished by Take It From Here fans for not crediting the fabulous writing duo, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, for their razor-sharp scripts. As I do so, here’s another example of Ron and Eth’s frustrated canoodling. For a change, they are grappling on the sofa when Mr Glum (Jimmy Edwards) bursts in: ‘Ullo, ullo! Sorry to interrupt but have you seen the garden shears? Mrs Glum wants to do her eyebrows.’

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It gives me little pleasure to join the throng gleefully pissing on the chips of those stone-throwing glasshouse dwellers on the Grauniad but their abject apology, accompanied by £10million for ‘restorative justice’, for their founders’ link with slavery is beyond satire. And, as Charles Moore points out in the Spectator, poses a dilemma. Website readers of the paper which lauds its ‘fearless journalism’ are regularly asked to make a donation. But to what? The current newspaper or historical reparations? Better to pay directly to the cause, says Moore, rather than ‘rewarding a paper which has taken two centuries to admit its wickedness’.

*****

Can’t resist Lily Savage’s view on weddings: ‘It’s a very big occasion to make it up the aisle in Liverpool. Usually you just get shagged in a bus shelter.’

*****

Sweden’s gone bonkers! A huge wave of gun violence is sweeping the supposedly peaceful Shangri-La. Twenty years ago the country had fewer than 10 gun-based murders a  year. In 2022 there were 391 shootings, in which 63 were killed, and 90 explosions involving hand grenades and homemade explosives. This year? 71 shootings; 38 explosions. Stockholm is thought to contain three times as many illegal firearms as London which has 10 times the population.

*****

My nostalgic reference to Ron Glum and his fiancée, Eth, prompts a flurry of emails from readers either reminiscing or in WTF mode. They were, of course, the long-engaged couple, played by Dick Bentley and June Whitfield in the radio series Take It From Here, who could never quite get it on or have it off. Sometimes Eth would inquire: ‘Oh, Ron. Is there anything on your mind, beloved?’ To which he would reply: ‘No, Eth.’ I vaguely recall Eth saying: ‘Oh, Ron. Do you expect me to just sit here like a lemon?’ ‘No thanks, Eth, I’ve just had a banana.’

*****

Richard Dismore sets a tantalising puzzle at the end of his new column:  Fill in the blanks in the sentence: ‘If that’s a splash…’ Writing hacks almost always go for: ‘My prick’s a bloater’. Subs, being wordsmiths seduced by alliteration, prefer: ‘My cock’s a kipper’. Dismore, of course, would say: My dick’s a Dickie’.

*****

What a wasted opportunity when ITV News paid generous tribute to Paul O’Grady, who has just died. A police raid on a gay club where he was performing in the eighties was recalled, mainly because the cops, astonishingly, wore rubber gloves fearing they might catch AIDS. Alas, ITV neglected to record O’Grady’s response: ‘Oh, look. It’s the police come to do the washing up.’

*****

Anyone who’s drunk in an American bar knows how spiteful mandatory tipping can be: currently 20%, I’m told. Yet in the 19th century the practice was considered ‘disgustingly Un-American’. In the early 1900s some states even passed laws banning it. Now, though, tipping fuels tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. hospitality industry and makes up the bulk of workers’ pay.

*****

Eagle eyes are constantly focussed on Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis these days. Now we are told he has ‘terrible table manners’. Former aides report that on a flight from Tallahassee to Washington he wolfed down a choccie pud using only three fingers. I don’t know why but I am tempted to say: ‘Ooooh, Ron.’ You are supposed to reply: ‘Yes, Ef.’

*****

Boris’s fans (and they’re looking more bonkers by the day) claim he won the 2019 election on his own. But, the FT’s Tim Bale confides, detailed polling reveals the victory owed more to the slogan Get Brexit Done and almost universal antipathy to Corbyn than any great love for the blond mop head. On election day he was actually less popular with voters than Corbyn or May were at the 2017 election.

*****

The narrow-eyed rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ fraternity are marking the 21st anniversary of the death of Simo Häyhä at 96. His is not a name on most people’s lips but he is a genuine legend. The White Death, as he is known, is history’s leading exponent of a highly refined art: sniping. During the four-month Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939-40 he shot 500 enemy troops — at long range. He was truly phenomenal and had the ability to estimate distances with an accuracy of one metre over 150. Once, for fun, he hit a target 16 times in a minute from 150 metres away.

*****

It’s a small world: on the back of Westminster School’s decision to admit girls at all ages, Giles Coren writes a nostalgic piece in The Times about his time in Rigaud’s house; meanwhile, his wife, Esther is beavering away on a Telegraph reminiscence on her years in Westminster’s sixth form. Nice work if you can get it.

*****

Forget the frustrations with beleaguered health services everywhere. The medical staff, particularly surgeons, are fantastic. Doctors in Turin have restored a blind man’s sight by transplanting part of one eye into the other which began to work again. Emiliano Bosca, 83, says: ‘I woke from the anaesthetic and could see the outline of my fingers: I felt as though I was being born again.’

*****

Reluctant Romeos in China are renting girlfriends at £120 a day to stop their mums nagging them to find a nice girl and settle down. Worried parents are even arranging blind dates for their sons in the hope they’ll find someone.  A 29-year-old graduate, who regularly poses as a potential bride, tells the South China Morning Post business is booming. She doubles her rates and books multiple ‘dates’ a day at peak times. Most lads just want someone nice to introduce to mum. Sweet, in a way, isn’t it?

*****

What are we to make of the fact that even fewer journalism trainees achieve 100wpm shorthand? Only 17% passed in 2021-22, compared with 21% and 24% the two years before. Yet an NCTJ survey reveals that 82% of media employers consider shorthand to be vital, desirable or essential. My old shorthand teacher, Miss Fitztitely (180wpm Pitman’s), must be spinning in her grave.

*****

There are few politicians more up themselves than doe-eyed Andy Burnham, Labour mayor of Manchester. So let’s all cry cock-a-doodle doo now that some chickens have flocked home to roost. Burnham, an outspoken denouncer of speeding motorists, has just been fined a chunky wedge for driving at nearly twice the speed limit. This is same Andy Burnham who criticised Boris for undermining trust and integrity in politics and called on him to quit. Latest score: Andy Burnham: £1,984 fine; Boris: £50. 

*****

Another titbit from The Goss’s Tomorrow’s World section: athletes and spectators at next year’s Paris Olympics hope to be able to travel from one venue to another by electric air taxi. Five ‘vertiports’ will be set up across the city enabling pilots to ferry around solo travellers. There is a downside, however. Aviation experts are concerned the taxis might be vulnerable to down draft from passing choppers.

*****

The ‘Cronut’ (a croissant-doughnut mix): so passé; the ‘cruffin’ (a croissant-muffin) ancien aussi. Latest trendy pastry is a cube-shaped croissant from Le Deli Robuchon. The London patisserie’s Le Cube Robuchon is a flaky confection full of chocolate, vanilla or matcha cream. £6.95 to you, squire. But hurry. They usually sell out by mid morning, says my random Rambleshank on the coffee/pastry run.

*****

The newspaper without a discernible revise system, which I am unable to name, carries a picture of Call the Midwife star Helen George stepping out with a new, brunette hairstyle. Writer Ronan O’Reilly (we have a name and shame protocol here) identifies and prices her handbag and trainers and lists her past credits including a sixth place in Strictly. Alas, there’s no mention of Helen’s current starring role in a lavish multi-date touring production of the King and I which was even featured on Saturday night telly.

Nice turn of phrase from Rose Wild’s Feedback column in The Times on newspapers’ use of short forms such as ban, probe and axe: ‘Headline writers probably dream in three and four-letter words.’

*****

The Goss came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.

Just days after the Goss proclaimed a complete boycott of this year’s Proms because of the BBC’s decision to axe the BBC Singers, Corporation chiefs have climbed down (they’re rather good at that lately).  It may also have had something to do with a huge cry of outrage from the classical music world and a 140,000-signature petition. The closure of the choir to save about £1.3 million annually has been suspended while alternative funding is explored. In other news, Gary Lineker is paid £1.3 million pa by the hapless Beeb.

*****

Beleagured Boris Johnson hired (aided by sizeable infusion of taxpayers’ spondulicks) a team of very specialist lawyers to help him fight his case against the Partygate Privileges Committee. Before his appearance in front of Madame Hattie Defarge and Co he was spotted in the Fetter Lane offices of Peters & Peters. Who they? According to an established registry, they are listed as a top firm for ‘Fraud: White-collar Crime (Advice To Individuals)’. It’s probably not significant, though.

 *****

Overheard in Fortnum and Mason (Sure you don’t mean Freeman, Hardy and Willis? — Ed): ‘Of course, I always turn to The Goss first with my morning Ethiopian, Petunia. Religiously. Yes, even before darling Pat Kidd in The Times. And as for that strange chap on the Mail — no, not Andrew Pearce — sometimes I don’t get to him at all.’

*****

Our mission on The Goss is to boldly go to the outer reaches of the vast, forbidding universe of knowledge (Get on with it! — Ed) to bring you snippets such as: Slovenian skier Ema Klinec has set a new world record for ‘sky flying’ — a sort of super ski jump. Competing at the Norwegian resort of Vikersund, the 24-year-old ‘flew’ nearly 250 yards and was airborne for an astonishing eight seconds. Atta girl!

*****

I don’t want to worry you but we all know that what happens in the States usually occurs here, too. So look out for a boom in car thefts. Last year in the U.S. they went up 50% in Atlanta and El Paso, doubled in Chicago and tripled in Dayton, Ohio. Why? Viral TikTok videos by so-called Kia Boys show how to start Kias or Hyundais using a USB charger. In the first half of 2022 Chicago had 551 Kia or Hyundai vehicles half-inched; second half: 6,250! 

*****

As the Met tailspins into a deepening crisis, a cautionary tale from Central America: the 90% approval rating for El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is attributed to a dramatic drop in violence and crime. The murder rate has fallen from 106 per 100,000 people - the world’s highest - to just 7.8, triggering a revived tourism industry and a boost to the economy.  Lonely Planet even lists the country as a ‘top destination’. All good news, then? Not really. Bukele’s mano dura (iron fist) has produced a new law allowing police to arrest anyone without cause. Since then 62,000 (2% of the adult population) have been locked up by the state. Now people are more terrified of the police than they previously were of gangs.

*****

Breakfast cereal has come to the crunch. With more people favouring eggs, yoghurt or skipping the meal entirely, cereal makers have had to come up with a new marketing wheeze: bedtime cereal, eaten before turning in. One product, Sweet Dreams, touts notes of lavender and chamomile as well as vitamins and minerals to increase production of the sweet hormone melatonin. It’s all billhooks* isn’t it? 

*Food Standards Agency guidelines

It’s OK to say bollocks when it is bollocks — Ed

*****

Chilling, isn’t it, to see Putin and visiting Xi Jinping cosying up together in Moscow? But, hey, it’s just for the cameras, yes? Hmm.  Apparently not. The 10-year bromance between the two leaders is real.  They have a lot in common: similar age, dads who fought in the war, daughters. They bonded at a 2013 summit when it was Putin’s birthday. Xi threw an impromptu party and the two shared cake, sandwiches and vodka shots late into the night. Xi later said of Putin: ‘No matter what fluctuations there are in the international situation, he is my best, most intimate friend.’

*****

There’s nowhere left to hide for the Met after the Casey Report: but where does it leave Captain Hindsight? According to Casey,  trust in the police plummeted about the time a certain Cressida Dick led the Met from 2017 to 2022. And who was an enthusiastic cheerleader for her? Step forward Sir Keir Starmer. Even after Sarah Everard’s murder, he was telling Good Morning Britain: ‘I’ve worked with Cressida over many years in relation to some very serious operations when I was Director of Public Prosecutions and I was pleased that her contract was extended and I support her.’ One thing you’ve got to say about Keir: he’s completely unspoiled by failure.

Bird boffins from the University of Exeter have been on to confide that flamingos form social cliques based on their personalities. They studied a ‘flamboyance’ of 147 Caribbean pink ‘uns and a gathering of 115 of the Chilean variety. The Caribs were generally a bolshy lot with the bolder birds ganging together. They not only started more fights but were more likely to pile in if their mates did. Who knew? (And who cared? — Ed)

*****

Following my GossGem about Noel Coward, Raviolo, my favourite cocktail guru, diamanté-encrusted swizzle-stick agleam, FaceTimes from Frambo’s lounge on West 71st Street to reveal how the polymath liked his Martini: London gin, one olive and a token wave of the glass in the general direction of Rome.

*****

Stop me if you’ve heard it, but thanks to Oliver Soden’s new biography of Noel Coward for reminding us of The Master’s reaction to an ad for the 1954 Michael Redgrave-Dirk Bogarde film, The Sea Shall Not Have Them: ‘I don’t know why not — everyone else has.’

*****

Now it can be told: Sweden had such major concern about the dwindling birth rate in 2001 that the government hired Bjorn Borg to lead a campaign to get the population, er, bonking. In a full-page ad in the business daily Dagens Industri, the tennis champ declared: ‘There aren’t enough babies being born but there’s a simple solution that’s both enjoyable and relaxing. Get to it!’ The ad ended with the catchy come-on: Frack* For The Future!

*for att skydda de oskyldiga

*****

Who’d be a clickbait chancer on the online La-di-da? Some poor sap bylined ‘Jennie Buzaglo’ (get a proper job, luv) files a ‘story’ at 6.57 am proclaiming that there has been a ‘huge shake-up’ on BBC Breakfast. She takes 14 pars to tell us that one presenter and a weather woman she expected to be on duty, er, weren’t. Those damned rota rejigs!

*****
We (or at least I) have chuckled here over Michael Caine’s stage name. When he was known as Michael Scott, he was in a Leicester Square phone box on a call to his agent who told him another actor was already using that name and he should choose another. Looking around for inspiration he saw a half-obscured poster for a famous Bogart film at the Odeon. And that was that. Later he said that, had he been able to see all the poster, he could have been Mickey Mutiny. A new version says that, had he looked the other way, he would now be Sir Michael 101 Dalmatians.

*****

Reminiscing about Michael Caine, now 90, leads me effortlessly into our popular Not Many People Know That feature: an autopsy on American writer Sherwood Anderson, who died in 1941, found his intestine had been pierced by a three-inch toothpick stuck through an olive he swallowed while drinking a martini. But today’s winner is Ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, killed when an eagle mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise on it.

*****

I have already been billhooked* by the Drone’s Inclusivity and Diversity Unit for using ‘wily’, ‘oriental’ and ‘chink’ in the same sentence but what are we to make of the fact that a growing number of China’s elite are insisting on being educated in the West? Over 20% of the Central Committee have had some schooling at Western universities, an increase of 6% since the millennium. And eight out of the 24 members of the all-powerful Politburo have studied in the West.

*T&Cs

*****

A novel perception of the fabulously rich Rishi from Deborah Ross in The Times. Sunak paid for upgrading the local leccie network around his Yorkshire estate because his heated swimming pool was using so much power. My heart goes out to him, Debs laments. ‘He must feel so left out of this whole cost of living crisis thing. Looking across his pool and new tennis court, he must wonder: why can’t we be miserable and desperate like everyone else?’

*****

The beleaguered Beeb’s crazy decision to disband the BBC Singers, on the eve of their centenary, to save the equivalent of Gary Lineker’s salary has rightly been condemned. There has been talk of a performers’ strike at the Proms and suggestions that the audience should join the boycott. I’d like Tim Davie to know that, while I had no intention of attending the Proms, I definitely won’t be going now. So there.

*****

My note about used Lamborghinis prompts my man with the oily rag in the transmission shop at Sant’Agata Bolognese to remind me how the iconic super car was born. Ferruccio Lamborghini manufactured the best tractors in Italy but drove Ferraris. Alas, the car’s clutches were crap. So he drove to Enzo Ferrari’s home in the next village to suggest some modifications. Ferrari must have come to regret his response: ‘Let me make cars. You stick to tractors.’ Pissed off Ferruccio then did both.

*****

While Britain is enthusiastically backing Ukraine, some chaps in the U.S. are not so keen. In fact, both Republican presidential hopes are now openly sceptical. Trump claims he’ll end the war within 24 hours of becoming president; DeSantis says further involvement in a distant ‘territorial dispute’ is not in America’s interests. Fewer than 40% of Republican voters think the U.S should continue arming Ukraine. And Tucker Carlson, influential Fox News presenter, describes President Zelensky as a ‘despot’, a ‘corrupt strong man’ and Biden’s ‘Ukrainian pimp’. Get off the fence, buddy!

*****

The economy. Is there something we ought to know, do you think? Something they’re not telling us? Hunt is like a bright-eyed, bob-tailed bunny; Rishi’s smile is as wide as his new swimming pool. Yet, and perhaps it’s just me, is the fact that there are 420 used Lamborghinis, including a £314,950 Aventador, currently on Autotrader a cause for worry? Or not? Answers on the back of a Credit Suisse share certificate to the usual address.

*****

Last word (I hope) on Linekergate: pop popette Self Esteem (aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor) caused a ‘social media flurrying ’ by wearing a FREE GARY T-shirt on stage. Fans started posting pics…just as the story was breaking that nasty predatory paedophile Gary Glitter was being recalled to prison for parole violations.

*****

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. Silicon Valley Bank is the latest financial institution to crash catastrophically after being celebrated by Forbes magazine. Just three days before it was declared insolvent, Silicon Valley tweeted that it was ‘proud to be on Forbes’ annual ranking of America’s Best Banks for the fifth straight year’. How fleeting is fame.

*****

If you’ve ever sashayed along Avenue Princesse Grace you won’t be surprised that Monaco has the most expensive real estate in the world. According to Knight Frank, $1million can buy only 17 square metres of residential space; in Sao Paolo it’s 231. Unsurprisingly, New York and London are pretty expensive at 33 and 34 square metres respectively. Basildon didn’t trouble the scorers.

*****

Anyone who’s tried to unravel the intricacies of Shakespeare stuck behind two chattering Japanese girls flashing their iPhone 193s will agree with Nick Curtis in the Standard that the behaviour of theatre audiences is appalling these days. Drunkenness, bad manners, verbal and physical abuse: they’re all there. One usher was punched for asking a punter to stop singing along in a musical and in an NT performance of The Life of Pi, before the hero was taken to the ocean, a man was ejected for repeatedly shouting: ‘He’s meant to be at sea!’

*****

It is proof, if we needed it, that the world is, inexorably, going bonkers. President Biden has approved a huge new drilling project in Alaska. Trouble is, permafrost there is melting so quickly that equipment might get damaged so engineers are installing cooling gear to keep it frozen. Hard to disagree with Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker that artificially chilling the Arctic in order to pump out more climate-warming oil is ‘the perfect metaphor for our time’.

*****

Paris in the spring? Forget it. London has been named the most scenic city in the world at this time of the year. A travel firm trawling Instagram found more than 100,000 posts tagged #springinLondon. That’s 20,000 more than second placed Paris. Next were Seattle, Melbourne, Chicago and Sydney.

*****

When Rishi became PM he must have been, understandably, apprehensive about facing forensically-posed questions from one of the country’s top lawyers at PMQs. He need not have worried. I suspect he receives more scrutiny from Larry, the Downing Street cat. I may have touched on it before, but there really is less to the Rt Hon Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition than meets the eye.

*****

My item about frogs’ legs prompts a Goss groupie to refer me to a piece in the i newspaper which says environmental campaigners are urging us to eat squirrels because increasing numbers are damaging ecosystems. Intrepid Sophie Morris writes that she ordered two ‘vacuum-packed critters’ at £4.95 each. They arrived ‘beautifully skinned with deep purple flesh’ but were a bit of a sod to prep. However, after dicing and cooking them with wine, veg and spices, the resulting ragu was ‘meltingly soft.’ I don’t know about you but I’m going to take her word for it.

*****

This new Artificial Intelligence is the coming thing all right. Someone called Richard Dismore obviously employed it to ‘write’ an entertaining piece, elsewhere in the Drone, on Drunks I Have Known. It reminds me of the story of William Wilberforce who, after a religious moment, decided to leave behind his dissolute life and reduce his gambling and drinking. He cut back to only six glasses of port today. Hard.

*****

Nigel Farndale of The Times, known as Nostradamus Nige because he won an office sweepstake accurately predicting the 2019 Tory landslide, is toying with the idea of becoming the new Mystic Meg. He reveals his eerily successful technique: ‘Whatever the BBC/Guardian/Twitter nexus is predicting, I predict the opposite’. I do that, too. When the Grauniad rubbishes a new film, book or TV series I know I’m going to love it and vice versa. As Nige says: ‘It never fails.’

*****

Next time you need a good sit-down after filling your petrol tank, here’s something to consider. It won’t make you feel better, though. Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco made a $161billion profit last year, the highest ever by a publicly quoted firm. Bloomberg’s David Ingles tells his Twitter faithfuls: ‘That’s $5,000 every second.’

*****

Them rich toffs should know better don’t you think? But no: light-fingered Oxford students have taken to half-inching their colleges’ fancy crockery. Magdalen has warned that lifting plates and cups with the college crest will be regarded as theft. Balliol is now using place mats and plain cups without crests.

*****

You can’t keep The Donald down, you know. The former President is publishing 150 private letters sent to him by celebs and statesmen. The RRP of Letters to Trump is $99 or, if you want a signed copy, $399 (that’s some signature). It will include correspondence from Nixon, Reagan, both Clintons, Princess Diana, Liza Minnelli and cuddly Kim Jong-Un. One 2000 letter from Oprah was in response to his saying she would be his ‘first choice for vice President’. She gushed: ‘Too bad we’re not running for office. What a team!’ Bet she regrets that now.

*****

The lustrous Gabby Logan introduces coverage of the Scotland v Ireland match supported by a full complement of commentators, summarisers and pundits. Does this mean that the rugger chaps, by actually turning up for work, back the BBC and not Lineker? Answers (in pencil, please) on the back of an Ireland-England ticket for the 18th. 

*****
Young people can be challenging and contradictory, don’t you think? Their favourite new sport is, apparently, Formula One motor racing. Eh? You wouldn’t think that ‘Generation Greta’ would be keen on a something which showcases rich, male, mostly white tax exiles driving fuel-guzzling cars in socially illiberal oil states. But 16 to 35-year-olds were responsible for 77% of F1’s audience growth in 2020.

*****

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted…Awards Nominee Rosalie Rambleshanks, who is still a trainee, of this parish, announces that, in solidarity with Gaz, Wrighty and the rest of the team, she will not be contributing to Match of the Day, Match of the Day 2, Football Focus and Final Score in the immediate future. She wishes it known that she considers the whole situation is well out of order and that jumped-up herbert, Tim Davie, must be having a giraffe. Thank you for sharing that with us, Rosalie.

*****

The Goss - a statement

The Drone’s popular daily gossip column, reflecting the whimsy and the mores of contemporary life, has had to be held over because its editor, William Dumpster, and sundry members of the Shanks family who contribute, have withdrawn their labour in solidarity with Wrighty, Big Al, Danny, darling little Alex and anyone else nimble and opportunist enough to clamber aboard the passing Gary Lineker bandwagon.

The Drone is unable to remove this column as the entire staff are working to rule, which its effectively a strike and they do fuck all anyway — Ed

*****

A strikebreaker contributes: Sony may have ceased production of floppy discs 12 years ago but they still remain crucial. Amazingly, the antiquated date storage devices are still used in some commercial planes such as 747s, 767s and the Airbus A320. San Francisco’s subway system couldn’t run without them and — yikes! — they were an essential part of America’s nuclear weapons programme until 2019.*****

A scab writes: Don’t you think that the Bidens are taking this wholesome, down-home, ma and pa act a bit too far? Joe and Jill popped out to a Red Hen near the White House and ordered exactly the same meal. They both had a glass of Barbera, bread and butter, a chicory salad and rigatoni with sausage. Predictably, DC sophisticates have poo-pooed their choice but Leonie Cooper in Vogue says: ‘Personally, I found it pretty damn cute’.

*****

A blackleg writes: it had to happen and I guess we ain't seen nothing yet. Artificial Intelligence is now aiding scammers. Free software obtained online enables someone’s voice to be recreated from only a 30 second sample. Fraudsters are creating scripts in which a person asks for an urgent money transfer then playing the plea over the phone to relatives. The family of a victim in Canada transferred £12,800 after hearing what they thought was their son appealing for cashThe Seychelles: a sun-shining, palm-waving, sea-lapping holiday haven in the Indian Ocean, right? You betcha! But, says BBC News, it is also in the grip of a drugs epidemic. Around 10% of the local population is addicted to heroin, the highest per-capita consumption rate in the world. Why though? The island nation is on well-established trafficking routes from Afghanistan and Iran to East Africa and Europe with easy sea access to smugglers, says my beach bum with the vacant look.

*****

Pity the poor Oscar nominees. It’s a nervous time for them. Will I win? Will my acceptance speech be OK?  One thing they don’t need to be apprehensive about: Will ‘Rocky’ Smith, having been banned, won’t be causing pugilistic mayhem this year. And, I can disclose, everyone’s a winner when it comes to goody bags. All the nominees in acting and directing categories are guaranteed a $100,000 hamper containing 60 gifts. They include a facelift, courtesy of a celeb surgeon, silk pillowcases, a three-night stay in Ottawa, trendy Japanese milk bread and, bizarrely even for La La Land, a plot of land in Australia - ‘size and location unknown’.

*****

Will someone please tell that ubiquitous smartarse Amol Rajan that, when discussing the problems of HS2 on Today, it’s best not to say Haitch instead of aitch? That’s if you want to be considered a serious broadcaster.

*****
A nice example of virtue-signalling recalled by Martin Samuel, a fine sportswriter who, since moving to The Times, has added straight pieces and book reviews to his armoury: the Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a dress to the Met Gala in New York with the bold red message ‘Tax the rich’. Samuel points out her outfit and accessories cost $990; her stay at the five-star Carlyle Hotel and other exes, $5,580. They really don’t get it, do they?

*****

Whoever wins the Oscars it’s British night at the official after party. Elliott Grover, executive chef at London’s CUT at 45 Park Lane, where an 8oz ribeye will set you back £170, is serving a classic national spread at the 95th Academy Awards: fish and chips, chicken pot pie and sherry trifle. Not very glamorous is it? And can you really picture Hollywood’s finest in a chippy?

*****

I don’t wish to be indelicate but the sad death of the iconic astrologer Mystic Meg prompts the question: is there no seer, soothsayer, clairvoyant or visionary on the Drone’s staff who could have predicted it? She’s disappeared due to unforeseen circumstances — Ed

*****

For all my life ‘experts’ have predicted that machines would take over running the world, leaving millions jobless. The Economist demurs. It says it’s worth remembering that the total spent on industrial robots in 2020 was a relatively meagre $25bn. ‘People spent more on sex toys,’ the mag points out. Ooh er, missus.

*****

Those luvvies just have to ‘live the role’ don’t they? Who can forget Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance in My Left Foot when he insisted on remaining in a wheelchair even when he wasn’t filming? Gary Oldman, playing Churchill in Darkest Hour, really ‘got into character’ by insisting on smoking genuine Cuban cigars for the entire shoot. He later claimed he had puffed on a dozen £50 cigars a day for 48 days. That’s nearly £30,000 of method acting. 

******

Gorgeous, pouting (sic) crusader for truth Isabel Oakeshott maybe on thin ice over the leaking of little Matty Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. Ghostwriter Issy claims she broke her NDA with the former Health Secretary because it was in the public interest. However, Mandrake in the European, says she has good reason for being shy about how much the Telegraph paid her for disclosing the messages: lawyers say that if it can be shown that her main motive was money, her public interest defence could well fall apart.

*****

When Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron meet for vital talks about migrants it could be dubbed the Shortarse Summit: neither hovers much above 5ft 6ins. No wonder, then, Florida Governor and US Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, a Napoleonic 5ft 9ins, is so anxious to have greater stature on the world’s stage that he has started wearing high heel boots and shoes. My snout in the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee says Ron is conscious that every President since Jimmy Carter has been 5ft 11ins or taller. However, a Republican critic, who has posted a pic of him apparently standing level with 6ft 1ins Tiger Woods, comments: ‘He must have had a growth spurt’.

*****
Millionaires’ Row? Forget it, cheapskate, says my tame estate agent with a tape measure and a pocket book full of hyperbolic phrases. London now has a Billionaires’ Row, Avenue Road in St John’s Wood, where more mega-mansions are being built than on any other street in the capital and it has supplanted the former champion,  Bishops Avenue in Hampstead. According to Tatler, leafy Avenue Road, which runs from Regents Park to Swiss Cottage, is lined with homes ranging from the spacious (5,700 sq ft) to the gor blimey at 30,000 sq ft. The 25 properties currently being built will be worth a total of £930m or an average £37m each.

*****

The more we read about Misprint of the Month Roald Dahl the more we realise he wasn’t as nice as he looked. When Salman Rushdie was sentenced to an Iranian fatwa in 1989 for The Satanic Verses, Dahl was quick to denounce him as ‘a dangerous opportunist’ who knew exactly what he was doing. All praise then to the Booker winning author for not bearing a grudge. Rushdie has attacked the recent ‘absurd censorship’ of Dahl’s books by ‘bowdlerising sensitivity police’  and said the publisher, Puffin, should be ashamed.

*****

This trans billhooks* is baffling me. Apparently, it’s ‘an article of trans faith’ that there are 73 genders, according to Mary Wakefield in The Spectator. Fastest growing is ‘xenogender’ — people more akin to animals and plants than humans. Wakefield also tells of a horse child who is taken out for gallops by school staff, a boy dinosaur who only eats strips of meat and several people who ‘identify as cake’.

* Rainbow preferred

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Shadow Home Sec, the  Rt Hon Pixie, sporting her I Am a Serious Politician specs, bounces up and down in response to Suella Braverman’s Illegal Immigration Bill statement and condemns the Government’s record on asylum seekers. Fair enough: she is the Opposition, after all. Pixie lost me, though, when she droned on, in forensic detail and with intricate incisiveness, outlining the Labour blueprint for solving the crisis. Enough, already. TMI.

*****

When is someone going to make a film about Antoine-Charles-Louis, Le Comte de Lasalle, larger-than-life, rootin’ tootin’ French hero of the Napoleonic wars? Flashman? Forget it. This guy was the real deal: joined the army as an officer at 11, gained rapid promotion, was busted to private, fought his way back to the top and became known as the Hussar General. Gambler, seducer, duellist and dieu sait quoi d’autre. Lasalle once said: ‘Any hussar who lives beyond 30 is a layabout.’ He was killed in battle, aged 34.

*****

Lovely story about Wally Fawkes, cartoonist and jazz aficionado (a session buddy of our own Tim Holder) who has died, aged 98. He was drawing his Mail strip cartoon, Flook, a small, hirsute creature with large ears and a small trunk, when the boss’s wife, Lady ‘Bubbles’ Rothermere, chanced by. ‘How’s your lovely little furry thing?’ she inquired. ‘Fine, thank you. How’s yours?’

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Who’d be a digital journalist toiling to fill the 24/7 ‘news’ schedule? Take The Sun’s Stephen Moyes (yes, we name and shame here). He’s put his name to an ‘exclusive’ about a pub waitress so scared of tomato ketchup she bursts into tears when ever she even sees it. She shares an incident when she had to be comforted by her boss after dropping a dollop of the red stuff on her shoe. Meanwhile, thousands are dying in a European war, Britain faces a migrant crisis, inflation is more than 10%, the NHS is in turmoil etc etc.

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The infiltration of woke billhooks* into our daily lives continues apace. In the US one outfit wants employees to avoid the words ‘stand’ and ‘American’ because not everyone can stand or is American. Likewise, ‘blind’ and ‘crazy’, even in figures of speech are frowned upon. Use of ‘battle’ and ‘minefield’ out of context is disrespectful to military vets. Students in California (where else?) are discouraged from using ‘fieldwork’ because ‘it could be associated with slavery’. But at least San Francisco Board of Supervisors has given up trying to replace ‘felon’ with ‘justice-involved person’.

*Webster Dictionary preferred usage

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Not that you’re really interested but Nicola Peltz’s £2.85m wedding to Brooklyn Beckham sounds as if it didn’t exactly go off smoothly. A lawsuit has revealed some of the snotty messages petulant Peltz sent to her wedding planner (the second of at least three the couple saw off).  She complained about the flowers ‘not being white enough’ and that she was ‘tired of catching mistakes’. Tame by industry standards, apparently. One bride in New York wanted to arrive suspended from a trapeze in a venue with 70ft ceilings; another wanted dogs to give her wedding a ‘country vibe’; yet another insisted on arriving by chopper (Freudian?) despite having stayed at the venue the previous night. These difficult ladies are known as Bridezillas in the trade.

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As the 23 vehicle number plate is launched, those sensitive spoilsports at the DVLA have banned those combinations it deems offensive and inappropriate. Come on,  whatever’s wrong with BO23LOX, EU23NOB, GO23SHT, LE23ZBO and TO23ERS?

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Bless old Auntie — always guaranteed to amuse and irritate us. How does the Beeb get away with it? The Archbishop of Canterbury has been recalling being invited to do Thought for the Day on Radio 4 one Good Friday. Justin Welby says that when he decided to talk about the crucifixion he was told: ‘There’s a bit too much Jesus in this.’

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Horreur de choc! Carthusian monks in Voiron in France have announced they are cutting production of their iconic liquor, Chartreuse. A publication called Everyday Drinking (Surely not - Ed) says they want to protect their monastic life and devote time to solitude and prayer. Frères chartreux have been brewing the green stuff since the early 18th century from a secret 1605 recipe using 130 different flowers, plants and herbs. Just three monks know the full formula; two others know different halves of it. All five have taken a vow of silence. Just don’t all fly on the same plane, bruvs!

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Orientals have always had a reputation of being, er, short-arsed (Isn’t that heightist and racist? — Ed). But the South Koreans have really shot up over the past 100 years. While the average human has grown about three inches, that country’s men are six inches taller; the women eight inches. How so? Switching from producing things such as textiles to cars and consumer electronics has substantially increased wealth enabling people to afford better nutrition and healthcare. By contrast, in neighbouring, impoverished North Korea average height has hardly changed.

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Moving story about Boris Pasternak nervously addressing a Soviet writers’ conference in 1937 at a time when an ill-judged word could consign you to the Gulags. As the literary giant walked to the lectern it was said that the silence could be heard all the way to Vladivostok. He began his speech with just one word: Thirty. Immediately the audience of 2,000 rose and recited, by heart, Shakespeare’s 30th sonnet When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past. Proving, I think, that they can’t touch what we hold in our heads

*****
Following the Sun’s ‘Frogzit’, I welcome the Daily Star’s entry into our Headline of the Millennium (Sure that shouldn’t be Week? — Ed) competition: ‘Apocalypse Miaow’ — on a story that officials briefly considered culling cats at the start of the pandemic because of fears that they could spread Covid.

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I’m not sure if I believe this but I’ll carry on typing anyway.  Ford has been granted a patent for a gizmo that make autonomous cars ‘repossess’ themselves and drive back to the dealers if the owner fails to keep up with payments. That’s only the ultimate sanction though: before that the vehicle will start disabling features such as the GPS, speakers and AC as well as emitting incessant and unpleasant sounds. The car could also lock itself randomly or refuse to be driven to certain places.

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It’s all to play for in the Republican race for the White House next year. Or is it? A Fox News vox pop at a diner in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, within walking distance of where leading hopeful Ron DeSantis used to live, produced some interesting replies. The first six people asked for whom they would vote all declared: ‘Trump’. Finally, the question was put to a woman wearing a DeSantis T-shirt. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Trump or DeSantis: I’m an either/or.’

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Fans of Brentford FC shouldn’t be all that surprised that their striker Ivan Toney faces a six-month ban after admitting breaking betting rules. His full name is Ivan Benjamin Elijah Toney making his initials I.B.E.T.

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My ball boy playing keepy uppy in the car park of the Luigi Ferraris Stadium in Genoa pauses to confide that all’s not well with the local footie club, Sampdoria, languishing at the bottom of Serie A. That was a bit of an understatement, alas. Club president Massimo Ferrero has received a package containing a pig’s head with a note declaring: ‘Your head’s next.’ It follows another special delivery in January: a bullet with a note reading: ‘It’s blank but next time it will be real’. Try telling the Sampdoria ultras that it’s only a game.

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Poor old Popbitch has had a fit of the vapours over a ‘tabloid hack’ who gets scoops at award ceremonies after downing free drink, staggering around obviously drunk and then writing ‘hazy, half-cut recollections of what he thinks happened’. The email newsletter reports this, wide-eyed and breathless, as if such behaviour is new. They should try the Artistes’ Bar of the Flying Frack* on BAFTA night!

 *Stage Management Association T&Cs

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Following that well known literal, Roald Dahl, we come to that Winfrey woman. Oprah, right? Er, no. Actually, it’s Orpah. The broadcaster was named after a woman mentioned in the Bible (Ruth 1:4) but no one knew how to pronounce it. ‘On the birth certificate it’s Orpah,’ she told an interviewer ‘but then it got translated to Oprah so here we are.’

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Trust the currant bun: Frogxit, the latest family slight on the Spare Part and his shy, self-effacing wife, is one of theirs but it’s too late to join new words just unveiled by Dictionary.com. Among them is ‘cakeage’ (qf corkage), the fee charged by a restaurant for serving cake brought in from outside, and ‘cakeism’ (qf Boris Johnson), the false belief that you actually can have your cake and eat it. Other newbies are ‘rage farming’, provoking political opponents by putting inflammatory posts on social media, ‘petfluencer’, prats who gain a large online following by posting pix of their pets and ‘bed wetting’, the exhibition of emotional over-reaction.

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Isn’t this incessant hounding of JK Rowling such a fracking* load of woke billhooks*? For months now gobby, hand-wringing, lip-trembling snowflakes have campaigned for a boycott of the new Harry Potter video game, Hogwarts Legacy, in protest against the author’s alleged transphobia. So how’s that going, then? In its first two weeks the game has sold more than 12million copies, making it one of the fastest-selling titles ever. Vox populi, vox dei.

*Compliant with Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry rules.

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Remember when boy (standing around with his mates) met girl (dancing around her handbag) at the Locarno? No? Well you know what I mean. In the States, though, for the first time in history a majority of couples now meet online. My tame cherub with the bow and arrow tells me 53% of heterosexual pairings met virtually, way more than ‘in a bar or restaurant’ (23%) and ‘through friends’ (15%).

*****

If you thought the national dailies were having a hard time (see this page) pity our provincial cousins. Although most have morphed into online news providers, they also continue to churn out print editions. Why? It doesn’t make sense for dailies, which once sold more copies than the Express does now, to flog on selling fewer than 10,000. Circs in the last ABC period widely dropped by more than 20%. And what’s the point of the Oldham Times even opening up each morning to sell 819 copies?

*****

You can’t seem to move for that literary literal Roald Dahl these days. If it isn’t the woke folk trying to rewrite his work, it’s stories of his legend as a serial shagger. Dahl was recruited by fellow author CS Forester (who knew?) to spy for Britain in Washington during the war with the specific task of enticing the US to join the conflict. This meant it was open season for the notorious womaniser to go through (sic) as many DC socialite wives as he could. But, says Helen Lewis in The Bluestocking, he met his match in the formidable writer, politician and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, a woman with a sexual appetite even more voracious than his own. He had to beg his spymasters to reassign him. ‘I’m all fracked* out,’ he shouted down the phone.

*To accord with SIS peacetime protocols.

*****

Quirky detail from the mass coverage of Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework breakthrough: is it the Stormont Brake or the Stormont Lock? Rishi, the broadcast media and the Press, including The Times, say Brake but the Thunderer’s leader writer says Lock. Does he know something that we don’t or could it be that the paper, like another I am proscribed from naming, has no discernible revise system either? 

*****

Draw up a chair at the chef’s table in The Goss’s Curious Culinary Tastes Dept. My scullery maid, up to her armpits in greasy washing-up water, confides that American presidents are known for their whacky menus: Garfield and Eisenhower favoured squirrel soup; Taft was partial to possum while Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D, loved bison steaks with terrapin soup as a starter.

George Dubya? Takeaway hot dogs, of course.

*****

While the woke thought police step up their campaign to rewrite Dahl and Fleming, a Times reader offers: ‘For a reasonable fee I will read books that have been neutralised and sanitised and edit them back to normal English’.

*****

As the Falklands War hotted up, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Knight, who has died aged 90, was charged with organising bombing raids on a target 7,000 miles away. Trouble was, long-range Vulcan bombers were being scrapped; several had even been donated to American museums along with their air-to-air refuelling probes. Sir Mike was forced to send RAF technicians in civvies to the US to sneak around museums to surreptitiously retrieve the vital gear. And, after the Port Stanley runway was put out of action and the conflict ended, one museum wrote congratulating the RAF but ‘demanding the immediate return of stolen property’.

*****

Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 this year, tried ever so hard to be, er, hard. So much so that he was accused of being a ‘prisoner of the virility cult’. Inevitably, he was drawn to fisticuffs, embracing  boxing lasciviously and just loved sparring with young admirers. Once in the Green Room at a late night chat show he head butted his great literary rival, Gore Vidal. A pugilist to the end, Mailer insisted on being buried in full boxing regalia.  Hmm.

re than 105 times it’s original $599 retail price.

*****

If you’re still umming and aaahing over whether you can afford a week in Tossa this year, you may want to hurry on to the next Goss titbit. Alternatively, if you’ve got $200million to spare, the most expensive home ever to be offered for sale in the Caribbean could be yours. It comprises nine separate structures set in 17 acres on Mustique. The main 16,000 sq ft Italian-style villa has nine bedrooms. There are three swimming pools, several guest cottages and a 12,000 sq ft entertainment space connected to the main house by a tunnel. Don’t all rush.

*****

Like eastbound No.11s, when you’ve already got one mobile another one’s sure to follow. So when Karen Green, who already had a first generation iPhone in 2007, received another as a gift she didn’t even take it out of its sealed box. Like you do, she wrapped it in a pair of jim-jams, tucked it away and forgot about it. Until recently, that is. Then, as she told Insider.com, she saw a similar vintage mobile on eBay at $10,000 and started rummaging in her drawers. It was worth it: her pristine iPhone fetched $65,356 at auction mo

*****

Bimimbap anyone? Or how about some kimchi? Yes, those favourite dishes have sent Korean food to the top of a list of the most popular worldwide cuisines compiled by a travel firm. If that’s a bit of a shaker, it settles down after that: Italian and Mexican are second and third with Indian, Vietnamese and Turkish also in the top 10. French? Tu blagues.

*****

Thanks to Tom Jones in The Critic for reminding us how woke and precious Manchester Art Gallery has become. Latest up yer bum ‘installation’ is The Empty Space — literally an empty space reserved for black womens’ art because, alas, the gallery doesn’t have any.

*****

I regret that there is more controversy over the sartorial impeccability of the World’s Greatest Lunch Club (see picture, this page). One derogatorial armchair Beau Brummell has unkindly referred to one member wearing a ‘Primark anorak’. I am grateful to Drone Fashion Director Reckless Rambleshanks for clarifying the situation. She says that, on the contrary, the item is clearly from My Guy in the Damart Debonair range.

*****

Oh, how we love Quentin Letts on The Goss. His Times sketch on Sir Keir Starmer’s Manchester speech was a gem. The Labour booby was introduced by the auburn-tressed temptress who said the country was fed up with ‘three-word slogans’: pity she hadn’t told the boss. He launched into his speech with a pledge of ‘mission-driven government’ before assuring the audience that these would be ‘laser-targeted missions’ which would replace ‘sticking plaster politics’. There really is less to him than meets the eye, you know.

*****

What’s the most irritating phrases used in the office when the Express was in Fleet Steet? Bob Haylett’s away: you’re late stop for the next fortnight? Your turn for the tea? David Laws wants you back? Nowadays, according to a new survey,  top of the list is ‘holibobs’ (holiday); ‘happy hump day’ (Wednesday); ‘nice to E-meet you’ and that old faithful ‘think outside the box’.

*****

Anyone can make a mistake - but not as much as Japan’s coast guard. Back in 1987 they manually totted up on a map the number of islands the country has: 6,852.

Right? Er, no. Using modern advanced mapping devices and aerial snaps, geographers have now discovered 7,000 more. Now it’s 14,125.

*****

When money’s no object you tend not to feel constrained, I guess. That’s why architects in Saudi Arabia are bashing on with planning a 1,312 feet high cube-shaped skyscraper to be built in Riyadh. The Mukaab (the cube) will be 20 times larger than the Empire State Building in New York with more than 21 million square feet of shops and tourist attractions. ETA? By 2030, say ambitious government officials.

Welcome to The Goss’s Tell Me Something I Don’t Know dept: London has the worst traffic of any world city. Data from GPS maker TomTom’s many devices found that it takes an average 36mins 20secs to crawl 10km in the capital. A distant second is the chaotic Indian metropolis Bangalore where it takes 29mins 10secs. Mind you, TomTom doesn’t say whether you get there in one piece or not.

*****

Albert Einstein may have been relatively good at quantum mechanics but don’t rely on him for marriage guidance. The theoretical physicist laid down strict rules for his wife, Mileva including: ‘Make sure I receive three meals a day in my room; forgo my sitting at home with you; leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it; stop talking to me’. Did it work? They separated a few months later.

*****

Here’s something you thought you’d never read: the Prime Minister’s wife has been spotted on the school run wearing carpet slippers. Not Primark’s faux fur at £3.50 a pair. Akshata Murty, holder of £430million in shares in her family’s IT empire, went for a pair of JW Anderson suedes at £570. ‘Expect more off-duty looks from the UK’s First Lady,’ says the Evening Standard’s Amy Watkins, who, with a surname like that, is obviously in the know.

*****

Dear Oscar had it right: what is it with women and handbags? Are they never content? After years of  Berkins, Mulberries, Vuittons and the rest being the objects of lust, ‘visibly worn-in styles’ bearing scratches and stains are now more sought after, reports The Wall Street Journal. Searches for such beaten-up bags has soared by 13% in six months, says one site. A New York stylist explains: ‘They help you look like you’re not trying too hard: you just appear cooler.’

ITV News deserves praise for its investigation into the NHS’s crumbling infrastructure, including one hospital where a roof has been leaking for eight years. Of course, the implication is that a callous Government has been starving ‘our NHS heroes’ of funds. Could this be the same NHS that recently advertised for a Director of Living Experience at £115,000 pa and spends £40 million a year on 812 equality, diversity and inclusion managers? Sure darn tootin’ it could.

*****

Jimmy Carter was always a homespun country boy even when he was in the White House. The 39th President, 98, currently receiving hospice care, never tried to make a fortune and moved back to a two-bed home in his native Georgia. It’s worth just $167,000, considerably less than the armoured Secret Service vehicles on permanent guard outside. 

*****

Affable World of Sport presenter Dickie Davies, who has just died at 94, may have been an avid sports fan but he was not an accomplished competitor. Once he had just gone out to bat for the Lord’s Taverners when his wife, Elisabeth, rang. ‘It’s all right,‘ she said. ‘I’ll hang on.’

*****

I wish I’d thought of it (You will, dear boy, you will — Ed) but Michael Gove has been dubbed the Revelling Up Minister. He’s only gone clubbing again (Oh, no!) in his home city of Aberdeen where he was visiting his mum. The Govester was seen at the 1980s-themed Club Tropicana whirling a woman around to I Feel Love by Donna Summer.

*****

First I need to apologise to Garth Pearce for omitting him from my recent list of Sad Bastards Who Survived Eric Price on the Western Daily Press. Garth’s amazing tale of the demise of Terry Pratchett mentions the WDP’s news editor, Norman Rich, a kind, avuncular soul in complete contrast to Price. He once attended the cremation of a former colleague. As the curtain closed and the coffin glided to its fiery end, Norman could be heard proclaiming: ‘Christ, it’s hot in here.’

*****

Warning: the following item on the worrying increase in the Sun Online Clickbait Crap Quotient contains words which may offend some readers. 

Viewers of a Premier League game on Sunday will have seen Spurs and West Ham

midfielders Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg and Declan Rice confronting each other in what the website called ‘a brutal three word blast’. Tempers flared, we are told; the ref had to intervene as ‘choice words were exchanged’. Then — and you may wish to look away now — the Sun reveals the brutal three words. Rice told Hojbjerg: ‘Nobody likes you.’

*****

Don’t panic! Don’t panic! It’ll probably be OK but I thought you ought to know that a chunk of a nuclear bomb is buried in a field in North Carolina. It dates from 1962 when a B-52 carrying two nukes crashed in the area. One deployed its parachute and landed safely; the other one ploughed into the field at 700mph. The army found the main part of the bomb but of the secondary core,  a ‘torpedo-shaped piece of radioactive material’ there was no sign. And because it had no detonator, searchers just left it there. That’s all right, then. So why is the farmer forbidden from digging deeper than five feet? Yikes! 

*****

Food lovers are ‘racing’ to social media to laud the swankiest dish in London just now: Mount St Restaurant’s lobster pie for two — at £96 is the most expensive on the menu if you forget the Oscietra caviar. Pictures of the dish, with the lobster’s head peeking out of the puff pastry crust, have gone viral and the Mayfair eaterie is getting through 140 of the arthropods a week. So what’s it like? ‘Delicious but very rich,’ confides Harry Wallop in The Times. ‘I needed a lie-down afterwards.’

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It’s a Catch 24 (yes, 24) situation. The second largest democracy in the world is in an awful muddle as next year’s US presidential election looms. Only 31% of Democrats want Joe Biden to run for a second term but that’s not going to stop him. Joe sees his mission as keeping Donald Trump out of the White House and he worries no other Democrat could do it. Thus the Catch 22 is: Biden will run unless a ‘plausible alternative’ emerges. But unless he rules himself out no alternative can arise.

*****

Trust those wily Orientals (Are you sure you can still say that? — Ed). A Chinese culinary favourite — a hotpot of meat cooked in a hot, oily broth — could be the future of aviation. That’s because used cooking oil ‘is emerging as a major source of sustainable jet fuel’, says Bloomberg. For instance, Chengdu, capital of the hotpot-loving Sichuan province, produces 12,000 tons of waste oil each month, much of which is starting to be exported to countries which recycle it into biofuel.

*****

The land of the automobile is facing a downturn in the demand for cars because Gen Z couldn’t give a flying frack* about learning to drive. In 1967, 62% of Americans aged 17 held a driving licence; today it’s just 45%, reports the Washington Post. Why? The environment and the high cost of fuel and car insurance. Another important reason: the ubiquity of affordable ride-booking apps. As Dorothy sang on the road to Oz: Somewhere Uber the rainbow…’

*US Department of Transportation advisory

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As I idly leaf through the holiday brochures I am reminded that the iconic swimwear, the bikini, celebrates its 77th anniversary this year. Designed by Louis Réard, a French automobile engineer (What was that all about?), it was named after the Bikini atoll in the Pacific where the US had tested an atomic bomb four days before its unveiling. Réard sought well known Parisian models to debut the two-piece, made out of 30 square inches of cloth, but none would come across, as it were. Step forward Casino de Paris nude dancer Micheline Bernardini to make history. Micheline, still going strong at 94, carried on modelling bikinis until she was 58. Atta girl!

*****

Following my piece on France being excised from an international top 10 of cheese makers, my tame gourmand with the florid face, bulging waistband and Gaviscon on drip reminds me that the Bulgaria-based outfit, TasteAtlas, responsible for the survey, has form on this. Last year it placed our Gallic neighbours behind the U.S. (imagine!) in terms of world cuisine.

*****

NASA boffins probing the mysteries of travel to the far reaches of the universe are turning to arctic squirrels — as you do. Researchers are studying the rodents’ hibernation patterns when their brain activity slows, cells stop dividing and their body temperature falls allowing them to survive in freezing conditions without their bones or muscles wasting away. Now the challenge is to see whether astronauts can be placed in such a state.

*****

I report the following strictly without comment and, please, absolutely no schoolboy sniggering from the down table fraternity: Beth Neale and fiancé Miles Cloutier have broken the Guinness World Record for the longest kiss down under, the water that is. The ‘free divers’, who met through a mutual love of ocean conservation, managed four minutes and six seconds of underwater tonsil tickling.

*****

Like ubiquitous, gobby footie pundit Micah Richards’s carefully coiffed hairstyle? He’s proud of it. So he should be: he has it cut three times a week - at £200 a time.

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Mon ami, le grand fromage avec le Huanyu Commercial Cheese Slicer, est triste. Pourquoi? (Stop it! — Ed). A major survey has excluded any French cheese, of which there are hundreds, from an international top 10, a decision which has been described as ‘a crushing blow to French gastronomy’ by the news channel BMFTV. Bulgaria-based TasteAtlas names eight Italian cheeses (first was Parmigiano Reggiano) in its top 10; the others are Polish and Portuguese. One hundred cheeses were rated: best French offering is reblochon at 13; Britain did not trouble the scorers.

*****

This working from home, bed, pub, wherever is getting out of hand, my Haitch-Arr mole with a fine line in management-speak reports (in triplicate). Some chancers are even fitting in ‘hush holidays’: 36% of employees already have a clandestine trip booked for this year. A 29-year-old marketing manager confides that for the past month she has been joining Zoom calls from Mexico without her boss being any the wiser. Downside: she has to log in at 5am. Upside: she’s all done by noon and ‘can drink margaritas on the beach for the rest of the day’. 

*****

I must confess to not being backward when it comes to kicking the BBC: a bloated monolith in urgent need of reform, say I. But Welsh newscaster Huw Edwards celebrates the centenary of BBC Wales by reminding me that the broadcaster was responsible for Under Milk Wood - by commissioning Dylan Thomas to write it. For that, I’d forgive ‘em anything.

*****
Precocious Kate Forbes, 32, Scottish government Finance Secretary, is regarded as a front runner in the race to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister. I do hope she wins and becomes an instant pub quiz question…as the only leading politician to have been married to a chimney sweep.

*****

What are we to make of the fact that, arguably, the best player in the best international rugby team in the world, Ireland, is a 6ft 4ins, 17stone back row forward called…Doris?

*****

Just because Valentine’s has passed doesn’t mean that you can’t still use some historic terms of endearment to your loved one. Bagpudding — literally a pudding boiled in a bag — was all the rage in the 16th century. Cabbage is another pet name first recorded in the OED in 1722. Crustaceans were popular, too. As one character says to another (presumably called Marie Rose) in William Pett Ridge’s 1895 novel Minor Dialogues: ‘I expect you’re a saucy young prawn.’ Maybe, though, we should hesitate to use a favourite  term, meaning candied fruit sweetmeat: Sucket.

*****

Stay up for the Super Bowl? No, me neither. But it gives me an excuse to continue my ad hoc series Strange People, the Yanks. The NFL spent two years — and $800,000 — preparing the turf for the big match, sportswriter Joe Pompliano reveals. It was grown on a local farm and laid two weeks before the game and was able to be stored under cover at night and rolled out in the sunshine each morning. Good job? Hardly. The playing surface was dreadful with the players sliding and slipping all game. One said: ‘It’s the worst field I’ve ever played on.’ Sod’s Law, I suppose.

*****
What is the main cause of car crashes? Speed. Alcohol. Drugs. Fatigue. To these should be added Masculinity, says a new French road safety ad. Last year in France 84% of those suspected of causing road accidents were men as were 93% of drunk drivers. Thought you ought to know.

*****
Bluetooth is named after a 10th century Viking king. The ubiquitous wireless system was originally going to be called PAN (Personal Area Networking) but techies decided they needed a snappier more with-it vibe. One engineer, who had been reading about King Harald ‘Bluetooth’ Gormsson, of Denmark, suggested the name. The Bluetooth logo was designed by combining the Viking runes ᚼ (H) and ᛒ  (B). Or as a well-known actor would put it: NMPKT

*****

It used to be said that when cabs were easily available you could tell there was a recession. Now there is also the Lipstick Index and the Y front X Factor: sales of the beauty product increase during a downturn because it’s an ‘affordable luxury’. Men’s underwear is replaced less. In the U.S. a reliable guide is strippers’ tips. One dancer confides: ‘I know girls who dance in Las Vegas and even they weren’t making  money. And if Vegas girls aren’t, no one is.’

*****

The leafy Cotswolds haven of Nailsworth is holding its breath as the new boss of local team, Forest Green Rovers, settles in. He’s Duncan (Big Dunc) Ferguson, at first sight an unlikely gaffer of the world’s first vegan football club. The 6ft 4ins former Scotland hardman has a combative reputation: he has spent spells at Her Late Majesty’s Pleasure for head-butting a policeman, punching a fan who was on crutches and meting out justice to a burglar so severely that CPR was required. Now he is more familiar with carbon credits and polar ice melt than the inside of Barlinnie. Perhaps the former Everton assistant manager always had a gentler side: once in a Scottish pub he was wearing silk gloves and a flower behind his ear when he was ridiculed by two fishermen. He knocked them both out. Perhaps not, then.

*****
Don’t all rush now but Waitrose has a special Valentine’s offer: oysters delivered to your door. The so-called aphrodisiac costs a reasonable £8.40 for six and is brought to you by Deliveroo. As The Times says, lovers can expect an evening of anticipation ‘either of sex or a bad reaction to the molluscs.’

*****

Proddie, my man with the sharp pencil, the eagle eye and the unforgiving nature, has come over all excitable at a piece lauding the style guide of the Kansas City Star where a young Ernest Hemingway worked, albeit briefly. The first of 110 precepts in the guide was: Use short sentences; Use short paragraphs; Use vigorous English; Be positive, not negative. The Wall Street Journal says they might as well be an introduction to Hemingway’s technique. As the author said in 1940: ‘Those were the best rules I ever learned. No man with any talent can fail to write well if he abides by them.’ Easy for him to say, mind.

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As the annual Valentine’s red roses rip-off gathers pace, a reminder, from Matthew Wilson in The Spectator, that they haven’t always symbolised ‘courteous romance’. In the classical world roses were often associated with decadence, immorality and rampant sexual desire. The pouting red blooms depicted in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Venus Verticordia offended critic John Ruskin so much that he blanked the painter thereafter. And the ‘Rosebud’ in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was an in-joke. William Randolph Hearst, inspiration for the title character, used it as a codeword for his doxie’s pudenda. Oooh er, missus.

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Americans (who else?) are ushering in a new age of etiquette. Meetings now begin with attendees articulating what they look like. You know: ‘I’m Alan. I’m a journo with silver hair, wearing a suit, white shirt, inappropriate tie and carrying a small sausage on a stick’. Apparently, it’s to make the partially sighted feel more comfortable. Microsoft recently started a conference by acknowledging that the land delegates were on ‘was traditionally occupied by the Sammamish, Duwamiash, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, Snohomish, Tualip and other coastal Salish people since time immemorial.’ Strange herberts, the Yanks, as I may have mentioned before. 

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You’ve got to admire the Swedes for their get up and go. They’re moving a town in the north of the country one building at a time because of severe subsidence caused by being next to the world’s largest iron ore mine. Cracks have appeared in Kiruna’s hospital; the school is unsafe. Now entire structures are to be loaded on to trailers and transported two miles east. Some 6,000 out of the town’s 18,000 inhabitants expect to be relocated.

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What fun to hear that scamp Johnson on TV resurrecting his nickname for Keir Starmer: Sir Crasheroonie Snoozefest, the Human Bollard. As a venerable copy taster of my acquaintance might have said: ‘Oi, Boris. Ever thought of taking up journalism full time?’

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A BBC2 continuity announcer breathlessly warns that there are sexual scenes in the latest episode of Marie Antionette: ‘And tongues are wagging at Versailles’.

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You’d better believe it 1: New Yorker Kingsley Burnett, fed up with the winter, decided to chase some sun. But it was only when he flew over a snow-covered mountain peak that he realised he’d booked to go to Sidney, Montana, not Sydney, Australia. ‘I couldn’t believe the flight was so cheap,’ said  Burnett, 62. Still, he’s not alone: the owner of the inn where he stayed while awaiting a return flight said it was the second time someone had checked in after making the same mistake.

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You’d better believe it 2: Six sniffer squirrels have been trained in China to foil drug deals. Police in Chongqing say they are cheaper and more agile than dogs and can wriggle into tight spaces and climb walls in ‘complex environments’ such as warehouses

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Forget the rhetoric about growing tensions between the U.S. and China, says my tame bean counter with the high-tech abacus and the avaricious mien. The two countries are trading more than ever — a record $690 billion last year. When you account for US tariffs on Chinese imports and Beijing’s ban on American tech, it just goes to show, says Politico, how intertwined are the world’s largest economies despite their efforts to ‘decouple’.

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The death at 94 of prolific songwriter Burt Bacharach prompts nostalgic sniffs about the 1965 recording by Cilla Black of, what to many, was his most beautiful composition, ‘What’s It All About, Alfie?’ Burt was so determined to produce a perfect version of the song, written for the Michael Caine movie, that he flew over to supervise the recording at Abbey Road. He conducted, from the piano, a 48-piece orchestra and the Breakaways as backing singers. Poor Cilla, then only 22, was reduced to tears when he insisted on 29 takes — and used the first. Still, it won an Oscar.

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Those film chappies love a flash, bang, wallop don’t they? My best boy with a key grip on the cutting room floor points out that the Guinness World Record for the ‘largest film stunt explosion’ is held by the 2015 Bond movie Spectre. The spectacular destruction of Blofeld’s sinister lair used 8,400 litres of kerosene and 33kg of explosives, the equivalent of 68 tonnes of TNT. Shaken and stirred, eh?

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If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. Adult male killer whales so depend on their mothers that they struggle to survive without them, boffins have found. Orca mums even catch all their food and cut it up in bite-size chunks. Aaaah.

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More on the very trendy ChatGPT: I confide that it displays distinctively Leftish tendencies.  Ask it and the AI bot will willingly create an ode praising Joe Biden. A similar request in favour of Trump elicits the response that it would be ‘in poor taste’. It won’t tell jokes about women or Allah but will churn them out at the expense of men or Jesus. Don’t try asking it to praise fossil fuels: ‘against my programming’ comes the haughty reply. Should we worry?

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A pedant writes: increasingly these days I see the once deprecated  form ‘comprised of’ appearing in publications. Have we lost this battle? Well, technically, ‘comprise’ means ‘composed of’ so using the phrase you complain of is tautological. But when it crops up in The Times, in the top leader no less, I suspect we should, regretfully, just shrug and move on.

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The latest soldiers in the front line of the war against cancer could be…ants. They have such a good sense of smell that they can detect the disease which kills millions each year. The Max Planck Institute in Germany has discovered that the insects are able to differentiate between the urine of healthy mice and that from mice implanted with human breast cancer tumour. There is hope that the ants can be trained to spot cancer quickly and cheaply compared with current more invasive methods.

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The bizarre compulsion to photograph and post everything you do has spread to drinking vessels. So trendy bars now offer booze in a variety of containers such as conch shells, novelty milk bottles, bath tubs, shopping trolleys (it says here) and flamingo-shaped glasses. A TikTokker gushes: ‘After all, we drink with our eyes first and a bizarrely-shaped beaker brings just a little extra joy to the night.’ Bless.
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A rare shaft of common sense among woke language police in California (where else?). Back in December Stanford University listed 161 words and phrases that should be banned under the Orwellian-sounding Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. Thus, ‘addicted’ to drugs would read ‘devoted’. Don’t call people ‘crazy’: they’re ‘surprising’. Thankfully, the dumb (oops, ‘non-verbal’) project has been aborted ‘ended’.

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The 2009 film Avatar is usually hailed as the most profitable of all time: adjusted for inflation, it made $4billion. But so has Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and Titanic (1997). The key benchmark, though, is return on investment which includes marketing and production costs. Here, the top performer is ET. The 1982 movie recovered 7,552% of its $10.5 budget. A kewpie doll for anyone who can name second on the list. It’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). Budget: $5million; takings $369million - a 7,375 return.

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TikTok? That’s sooo last year. ChatGPT is where it’s at (if ‘where it’s at’ is still where it’s at) nowadays. It’s the fastest-growing consumer app ever, say boffins at investment bank UBS. The AI bot notched up 100 million active monthly users in January only two months after its launch. TikTok took nine months to reach that figure; Instagram about two and a half years.

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Who knew? Pope Francis swears like a docker, Charles Moore tells The Spectator. His Holiness  regularly punctuates speeches with four-letter tirades. He recently described priests who deny absolution to the unrepentant as fracking* careerists who frack* up the lives of others. The Pope’s predecessor, the conservative Benedict XVI, was reputed to be ‘harsh’ but was, in fact, a sweetie-pie. Easygoing, fun-loving Francis is thought to be an advocate of toleration but appears to be anything but.

*Colossians 3:8

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There’s nothing like oiling up and getting to grips with some do-it-yourself…Oops! Musings from some future Country Boys bulletin seem to have infiltrated our system. What I meant to say is: WD-40, the lubricant that loosens nuts and bolts, also has a distinctive smell. Or should I say ‘fragrance’? A New York art collective has created a cologne based on the spray called Smells Like WD-40. They must be having a giraffe, eh? Not really: it sold out instantly.

An over-excited, hyperbolic MC proclaims breathlessly that, after her latest awards, Beyoncé is the greatest Grammy artist ‘of all time.’ Calm down, laddie. Fact: The awards are 65 years old; time is nearly 14 billion.

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Wokey, wokey! The ‘University of Greenwich’ (who knew?) has issued a trigger warning for Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Academics (sic) denounce the novel as containing ‘sexism’ and ‘gender stereotypes’. A Goss favourite, Victoria Richards in the Indy says they’ve missed the whole point: It’s a satire that wryly mocks gender roles rather than upholding them. As Austen herself said: ‘The person who has no pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid’

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Equestrian skijoring? Come one, you must have heard of it. According to the self-proclaimed ‘essential lifestyle guide for adventurous and established men’ InsideHook, it’s the ‘wildest show on snow’. Retired racehorses pull skiers downhill at speeds up to 40mph including scary jumps and gates. High adrenaline? You betcha:

It’s the fastest growing winter sport in North America. More than 4,000 competitors and spectators are expected at Skijordue 2023 in Calgary, a festival celebrating skijoring and fondue. I ask you.

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Airships haven’t always had the best Press — remember the R101 and the Hindenburg back in the 1930s — but they may be making a comeback. Newly designed models can carry up to 130 passengers or, in an upmarket configuration, a handful of guests in luxury suites for up to five days. One company, OceanSky Cruises, offers a 36-hour trip from Norway to the North Pole. The upside: gazing at polar bears, snow foxes and reindeer from 1,000ft; the downside: $200,000 a ticket. Ouch!

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Be assured that The Goss Monitoring Section scours the world (plunders other websites you mean — Ed) for the zany, quirky and just downright odd. Our Down Under stringer with the sun-tanned eyelids texts to say that the male Oz marsupial the Northern Quoll fracks* itself to death. They have so much sex that they succumb to fatal sleep deprivation. Females, who are more laid back (sic) live four times longer.

*Northern Territory compliant.

Animal lovers, avert your eyes. The boss of a zoo in Chilpancingo, Mexico has been ‘let go’ for conduct unbecoming. Jose Ruben Nava killed four pygmy goats to serve up at an end-of-year party. Oh, and he also traded a zebra for some DIY tools.

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We all know lazy teenage boys who roll out of bed just in time for Bargain Hunt. They’ve nothing on 14-year-old Isaac Ortman who has slept in a tent in his garden for 1,000 consecutive nights. Trouble is, he lives in Minnesota where the temperature can dip to -38C. Isaac, who began the habit when he was 11, tells me: ‘Even in the cold I sleep just fine. My dad has a job to wake me sometimes.’ 

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You may not have heard of shy, retiring Carol (shrinking violet) Vorderman, 62. But the selfie-effacing former game show totty has announced she has five lovers on the go, as it were. How does the former Countdown presenter keep up with it all, muses Michael Deacon in the Telegraph. Schedule dates on a kitchen calendar like council bin collections? Five separate summer holidays? Birthday parties? As he says, thank goodness she has a head for numbers.

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Those psephologists who poo-poo Donald Trump’s chances of a presidential comeback must beware of peaking too soon. Will his main rival for the Republican nomination pass the crucial Beer Test? Voters in the US are famously supposed to plump for the candidate they’d most want to have a beer with. But Florida governor Ron De Santis, who ostensibly seems an ideal candidate, is perceived as having absolutely no personal charisma and, it is said, speaks with the stiffness of a lolly stick. Mind you, my barkeep with the swanky swizzler reminds me that Trump is teetotal so where does that leave us?

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Having routed the smokers and scared the arse off the drinkers, what next for the health and safety zealots? It’s got to be coffee. Have you noticed how everyone is suddenly comparing the caffeine kick delivered by different high street baristas? You know, Costa cappuccinos deliver 325mg —equivalent to four cans of Red Bull — five times as much as Starbucks. It’s got be awfully bad for us and it’s time something was done about it!

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A reckless pledge by libidinous, perma-tanned, sleazebag Silvio Berlusconi has come back to bite him on the bum, so to speak. The owner of newly-promoted Italian footie team AC Monza told players at the club’s Christmas jolly that if they beat one of the top sides: ‘I’ll bring a coachload of whores into the locker room.’ Late flash (sic): Monza 2, Juventus 0. ‘I’ve already received 100 calls asking me to stand by my word,’ admits the former Italian prime minister, 86.

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After my note about Eric Price’s four-letter reign of terror at the Western Daily Press, I am reminded that some distinguished figures worked as journalists in Bristol. Forget Expressmen Terry Manners, Bertie Brooks, Graham Noble, John Fox Clinch and Roger Watkins: I’m thinking of Terry Pratchett and Tom Stoppard. 

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What you’ve got to feed a population of 1.412billion you have to try to be ahead of the game. That’s why China is developing a Super Cow to cut its dependence on imported milk. Der Spiegel says that three cows born in the last month are capable of each producing 18 tons of milk a year, more than twice the yield of your average German cow. Now boffins are trying to identify the five out of every 10,000 cattle that produce more than 100 tons in their lifetime. Let’s copy their DNA and assemble a herd of more than 1,000 Super Cows in three years! That’s the theory anyway.

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Never let it be said that The Goss doesn’t bring you the really important intelligence de nos jours. So here’s a stonker: NASA’s latest mission is to land a spaceship on an asteroid said to be worth 70,000 times more than the global economy. Asteroids are usually made of rock and ice but the 137-mile wide Psyche is mostly iron or nickel worth $10quintillion - that’s $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 to you. So that’s the end of the cost of living crisis then? Alas, no. Rather than finding a way of bringing this lucrative rock down to Earth, scientists merely want to enhance their knowledge of how planets form. Zzzzzzz.

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Reports of alleged bullying of civil service snowflakes by Dominic Raab wring hollow groans of irony from those who worked at Bristol’s Western Daily Press when edited by Eric Price. The notorious former Express sub didn’t suffer fools at all and regularly subjected them to sneering, four-letter monstering. So much so, that one new recruit lasted only until his first mid shift break. Another, who also couldn’t stand the pace, walked out and, subsequently, took a restorative cruise during which he wrote to his former tormentor: ‘I’m on a ship leaving a sinking rat…’

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My bulging In tray contains an exciting update from The Goss’s ‘Just Saying’ fact-checker desk: Despite the ‘prophecies’ of the gloomsters and doomsters, the visionaries and seers, the crystal ball charlatans and the gimcrack turf accountants, Suella Braverman has now celebrated 100 days as Home Secretary and is officially the longest serving in that Cabinet post in 2023. Thought you deserved to know.

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LATEST GOSSGoss groupies will recall my item about the decline of bank raids in Denmark because the increase in digital transactions mean that few banks actually carry cash. Cow horn-helmeted blaggers should move to Argentina instead. Bloomberg says that, with inflation nudging 100 per cent, the volume of physical currency there is growing so fast there just isn’t enough room for piles of pesos.

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An early front-runner for The Goss’s Strange People, the Yanks trophy, sponsored by Drone Enterprises: for $10 this Valentine’s Day, the zoo in St Antonio, Texas, will name a cockroach after your ex…and feed it to an animal. If you feel like pushing the boat out, you may upgrade to a rodent for $25. And if you’re feeling really vindictive to your past paramour, you may pay $150 for the zoo to record a personalised video showing your choice of nosh being ceremonially devoured.

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Journos throughout the country are grateful that hundreds of thousands of teachers, university lecturers, train drivers and civil servants have staged the biggest mass strike in more than a decade. One news editor confides: ‘It’s a real blessing to be honest: February 1 is traditionally a slow news day when absolutely nothing of note ever happens.’

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The Tories, awake to their fading election prospects, are going woke. Prospective MPs are having the latest diversityspeak drummed into them. Election candidates are being instructed on concepts such as ‘micro aggressions’, ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white resentment’. Our old pal Michael Deacon wonders in the Telegraph how this will all play ‘on the doorstep’. Will voters shun questions on the cost of living, the broken NHS and people in boats to ask: ‘What are you doing to increase the cultural visibility of gender-fluid pansexual demiboys?’

Come on, let’s not be judgmental: it could happen to anyone. Mining company Rio Tinto has confessed to losing a highly radioactive caesium-137 capsule somewhere in an 870-mile chunk of Western Australia.  Exposure to the device can cause skin burns and even cancer, warn boffins. Apparently, the 8mm x 6mm capsule fell off the back of a lorry (No, really) and would easily fit in a tyre tread. Walt Hickey (no relation) tells his readers in the Numlock News not to worry: ‘It’s not even in the top 10 most dangerous things in Australia.’

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This time next year the 2024 US presidential election race, in which Donald Trump has vowed to run, will have started. Trouble is his Republican Party already agrees it’s time to move on from Trumpism but they don’t know how to dump him without alienating his many fanatical supporters. Latest plan is just to wait for him to pass on to the great White House in the Sky. The rationale is simple: Trump’s 76, overweight, thinks exercise is bad for you and enjoys the diet of a college freshman. While party managers are waiting for nature to take its course, though, they might like to consider that the 45th President’s mother died at 88 and his father at 93.

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It’s a must for cartel chiefs, insecure South American presidents and, maybe, Spare Parts worried about lack of protection. The latest hyper-secure vehicle to keep baddies out is the Rezvani Vengeance, a 4X4 styled like a ‘steroidal tank’, assures the Grauniad. The beast has bulletproof glass (natch), electrified door handles  and blinding strobe light. Your driver can execute a neat handbrake turn while blasting pepper spray out of the wing mirrors and a Bond-style smokescreen out of the back. Will it fit your wallet? To you, squire £400,000.

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As the man pertinently said: never send to know for whom the bell tolls…

I mean did you really know that until the late 18th century people actually believed that ringing church bells during a thunder storm would stop lightning from striking the steeple? Alas, says a source who puts the camp into campanology, between 1753 and 1786 386 churches in France were struck by lightning. Some 103 bell-ringers were killed.

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Everyone’s selfie mad these days (ask Carol Vorderman). Now even the animals are joining in. A black bear has taken more than 400 pictures of himself by setting off a motion-activated camera snapping wildlife in Colorado. He was caught in a variety of  poses from full face staring into the lens (a lot of those!) to side profile and even poking his tongue out. I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille!

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As spring beckons, earnest eco groupies are starting to prepare for the annual toad migration when thousands of the reptiles return to ‘ancestral ponds’ to breed, says my gal in a Wildlife Trust beanie and Hunter wellies. Volunteers are needed to prevent nasty scenes as the toads stream across main roads. It was also an excuse for Les Diver to hand out a short and woe betide the sub who failed to write the line: Major Toad Ahead.

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What are we to make of young people? My tame InstaTokGrammer tells me that youthful social media users innocently refer to spag bowl as the abbreviated term for a popular pasta dish.

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Following my note about the golfin’ Commander in Cheat, that nice David Aaronovich in The Times confirms that we live in an era of ‘great liars’. Not just Trump, of course, but pretend heiress Anna Sorokin and Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Homes. However, the gold-plated, bevel-edged, cantilever action, appliqué inlaid, Karla-trained fibber supreme is US Congressman George Santos. The 34-year-old with the ever-lengthening schnozzle has been caught out lying about his education (not a private school), where he worked (not Goldman Sachs) how is mother died (not 9/11), his religion (not Jewish) and his grandparents (not Holocaust survivors). There’s more…but you get my drift.

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The Drone’s food critic — he of the veloute-flecked, bechamel-stained Garrick tie — warmly recommends the oldest restaurant in the world, which must be the only place to have served Columbus, Mozart and Clint Eastwood. St Peter Stiftskulinarium in Salzburg has been dishing up food since 803 but now combines classic Austrian with nouvelle cuisine. ‘We love history but don’t live in the past,’ say the owners, rather smugly one feels.

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Those among us who still wince as we recall bending over the housemaster’s chair and receiving a sound thrashing with a spiteful cane have some sympathy with the 69,000 children who receive corporal punishment each year in the US. Amazingly, it’s still legal in 19 states with Mississippi the worst offender by far. Meanwhile, the UK banned the practice in 1986 and it is also illegal throughout Europe and most of East Asia and South America. Strange people, the Yanks.

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Amid all the hysterical predictions of meteorological Armageddon in the red tops, one development we should, perhaps, take notice of: an iceberg the size of Greater London has broken free from Antarctica’s 500ft-thick Brunt Ice Shelf. It is likely to follow another giant berg, named A74, which broke off in 2021 and is currently pootling around the Weddell Sea.

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The 45th president of the United States is notorious for being, how can I put it, deceitful on the golf course. So much so that Donald Trump is known as Commander in Cheat. Competing in a tournament at his own West Palm Beach club, Trump missed the first day’s play. Players turning up for day two were, therefore, surprised to see him top of the leaderboard by five shots. He explained that he’d played a ’very good round’ earlier in the week and that would be his first day’s score. Late flash: The worthy champion  is…Donald J. Trump.

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Wayne Rooney has hidden depths, it seems. The footie star appears to be making a success of his transition from playing to managing and is revealing a sharp line in self deprecating wit. His current club, the American side DC United, has posted on YouTube a rousing speech he made to gee up his players. Pity they didn’t film another morale booster he gave in the autumn. In it he said: ‘You may look at me as a serial winner but I’ve made my frack*-ups. I’ve had to overcome my limitations: I’ve got a tiny cock.’ My dressing room toady says: ‘Some of the young lads were horrified. They don’t get the British sense of humour.’

*Major League Soccer profanity protocol

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I may have mentioned it before but strange people, the Yanks. My tame Minuteman basks in dawn’s early light and reveals that an American company is hiring people to eat cheese before bed for three months. Why? To disprove the old theory that fromage eaten late at night causes nightmares. Each volunteer will receive $1,000 to record how their dreams, sleep quality and energy levels are affected. Downside: participants, who must have a ‘consistent sleep schedule’, are required to sleep alone.

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Inflation running at 10.7%? Taghdhiat aldajaj! You should try Lebanon, says my boulevardier in a white suit and jaunty Panama reclining in a rattan chair outside a seafront restaurant in Beirut. A Twitter user in the Lebanese capital has posted a cafe bill for two lattes drunk two-and-a-half hours apart: the second cost nearly 9% more than the first.

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A snippet from The Goss’s I’ve Heard It All Now dept: camping inside churches, known as champing, is gaining popularity. Some 573 ‘guests’ stayed at 22 registered sites last year raising £86,000 for building repairs and maintenance. They get basic bedding and access to water and a lavatory. Some churches co-operate with pubs and cafes to provide meals. Prices start at £49 for adults and £25 for kids. Room with a pew anyone?

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Never let it be said the Goss doesn’t keep you up with the fascinating eccentricities of the mysterious Middle East. My souk shisha smoker in the soiled dish-dash reminds me that the villages of Nahwa and Madha on the Arabian peninsula are a geopolitical oddity in that they are an enclave within an enclave. Nahwa, part of the UAE, is entirely surrounded by Oman-controlled Madha which is itself entirely encircled by the UAE. I didn’t know that and I suspect not many people do. (Even fewer care — Ed)

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We try to avoid footie stories in The Goss. But take pity on relegation-threatened Everton, managerless, rudderless and with directors advised to stay away from Goodison because of fans’ protests. Then the club ‘signs’ Dutch forward Arnaut Danjuma to help reverse the decline. Our Arnaut poses for photos and vows: ‘I will do absolutely everything I can to keep Everton in this league’. So what did he actually do?Sign for Spurs the next day.

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That Buzz Aldrin: he’s a card isn’t he? The iconic astronaut, just married for the fourth time at 93, was once lined up for a live TV interview. As the director counted down the seconds to transmission, scamp Buzz leaned over to the TV presenter and whispered: ‘Nothing about the moon, OK?’

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Dogooders, worthies, sycophants and those just doing their jobs who are recommended for honours have to be vetted by a traffic light system aimed at highlighting those with unhealthy tax records. Green is OK, amber questionable and red is absolutely no fracking* way. Tory chairman Nadhim Zahawi was put up for a knighthood in the New Year honours. Or should I say Mr Nadhim Zahawi as he still is?

*Complies with HMRC guidelines

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What is it with newspapers and constant dire warnings of meteorological Armageddon? The Express, of course, used to be famous for its flammed up weather stories, a mantle that has lately passed to the Mirror. Now the paper without a discernible revise system says that, if we think it’s cold now, just wait until February when a ‘polar vortex’ could trigger a ‘sudden stratospheric warming’ (it’s all such billhooks* isn’t it?) causing Arctic air to rush towards Britain. Amid all the conjecture they rather give the game away by quoting a weatherman who says there is ‘a small chance’ the SSW will bring cold weather.  Personally, I rely on lookoutthewindow.com for my forecasts.

*To protect the vulnerable

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Trust The Times  obituarists to turn an elegant phrase. Reviewing the many-faceted life of libel lawyer Sir Richard Hartley, KC (Private Eye’s Sir Hartley Redface) who has just died at 90, one notes: ‘While he rested his head on many scented pillows, it was not until 2018 that he finally married.’

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Beware digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri: they can cause trouble with a capital T. It was the latter which activated itself on Australian boxing trainer Jamie Alleyne’s Apple Watch as he was sparring. When Jamie grunted ‘One, One, Two: nice shot’ it dialled 112 - Oz’s equivalent of 999 - where a call handler picked up the word ‘shot’ and dispatched 15 cops and several ambulances to his gym.

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Heartening, isn’t it, to see the Irish hell-raising actor (hell-raising? Irish? actor? surely not — Ed) Colin Farrell cleaning up his act? The 46-year-old, lauded for his appearance in the movie The Banshees of Insherin, is on his best behaviour these days. A far cry from the time he was better known for shaggin’ and drugging’. He once said his weekly intake was ‘20 Es, four grams of coke, six of speed, half an ounce of hash, three bottles of Jack Daniel’s, 12 bottles of red wine, 60 pints and 40 fags a day’. And he learned lines?

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Mixed messages from the US’s nicer neighbour, Canada, according to my stringer with the glazed look and the silly giggle. The government’s new alcohol guidelines are no more than two drinks a week, down from 15 for men and 10 for women. Bizarrely, next month some parts of the country will decriminalise heroin and crack cocaine. 

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A nostalgia gem from music promoter Tony King’s autobiog The Taster: he once had to usher John Lennon out of a Four Seasons concert after the Beatle kept bellowing at Frankie Valli: ‘Show us your dick!’

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I haven’t seen it but, apparently, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is starring on social media in a video to explain why inflation is so high and how he’s going to bring it down. Using a flat white as an example he explains why a coffee that was £2.50 a year ago is now costing nearly £3. Of course, he doesn’t mention that, thanks to taxpayer subsidies, a flat white in Parliament’s The Despatch Box cafe is still only £1.85. Priceless.

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You know how we love words on The Goss. After all, we claim to be wordsmiths. So let’s welcome a new study which identifies the hardest word to pronounce in English: the Irish name Aoife (ee-fa). Others include the Brazilian fruit açaí (ah-sa-ee) and the Greek kebab gyros (yee-ros). Also mentioned is the traditional English shed-yool as opposed to the pesky American sked-yool.

Medical news: My informant in a white lab coat with pipette RSI tells me that university researchers in the States have tracked down a protein which counteracts key toxins in rattlesnake bites. The hope is that this will lead to identifying effective anti venoms for all snake bites. Just as well: they caused 120,000 deaths last year.

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Look, it could happen to anyone. These TV discussion programmes aren’t easy you know. Sometimes you forget things. Thus, Sky News staged a Q&A on the teachers’ strikes with a ‘handpicked panel of experts’ including a primary school headteacher who had nothing but criticism of the Government during the hour he was onscreen. Not surprising, really: Sky forgot to mention he was chairman of his local Labour Party branch and even stood for the party in the 2017 election. 

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Oh, what fun they had back at the beginning of the 20th century. The online mag Mental Floss reminds us of some of the whimsical slang terms in vogue in 1910. Such as: Againster — a contrarian or hater; Bosher — someone who talks bosh or nonsense; Woofits — a malaise caused by anything from lack of sleep to being Peloothered or, to you and me, pissed.

*****

Look, I don’t want to worry you but…on December 5, 2022, a Russian airbase 500 miles southeast of Moscow was bombed by a Ukrainian drone. What didn’t receive much coverage was that this airbase appears to contain nuclear warheads, says Eric Schlosser, of The Atlantic magazine, which means that this was the world’s first aerial assault on a nuclear base. OK, so there was very little risk because the warheads are in heavily fortified underground bunkers but as Eric says: ‘It’s a reminder how dangerous this war remains.’

*****

Don’t let anyone tell you that The Goss only concentrates on trivia: Stoke-on-Trent is Britain’s smelliest place — official. The Staffordshire city received 860 smell complaints last year, more than any other local authority. 

*****

I don’t know how to put this, and stop that down table sniggering, but 2023 is The Year of the Beaver. That’s Castor Canadensis to you, not any other sort. Two beavers, Chompy and Hazel, have been released into the wild in Hampshire marking the first time in 400 years that the toothy rodent has lived there. Forget darling little Greta, apparently beavers are the ultimate climate activists: they build dams that reduce flooding, help store water for droughts and help wildlife. Why, they’ve even been helping the Ukrainian war effort by churning up the land on the border with Belarus making it impassable for the Russians.

*****

Our old tartan-hued chums in Albion Street have known this for years but now experts catch up by confirming that Scotch whisky is one of the best investments. Rare Scotch increased in value by 428% between 2011 and 2021, considerably more than classic cars (164%), fine wine (137%), watches (108%) and art (75%). Investors clamour for rare bottles from  so-called silent distilleries, such as Port Ellen, Rosebank and Ladyburn, which closed long ago. Slàinte Mhath!

*****

It’s about time we had a new year contribution from the Drone’s The World Has Gone Mad monitoring department. So The Wall Street Journal’s assertion ‘The latest TikTok star is canned tuna’ is a pretty good start. There have been more than 25million views of clips tagged #TinnedFish and year-on-year sales are up by 10%. Now there are new varieties featuring flavoured olive oil, sauces and spices on the market and some glitzy brands are retailing at $20 a can. A tame marketing guru tells me: ‘It’s not about repackaging a standard tuna sandwich but proving it’s possible to have a gourmet experience with a can of tuna.’  I thought you’d want to know.

*****

Alice, front of house at the Drone’s ‘executive staff eaterie’, pauses for a chat as she slaps down my daily egg and chips. She confides that a 34-year-old American has broken the record (who knew?) for visiting the most Michelin-starred restaurants in 24 hours. Eric Finkelstein managed 18 locations in New York. Dishes ranged from oysters to a savoury Japanese custard called chawanmushi. Cost? Not too spiteful: $494 before taxes and tips.

*****

Our hand-wringing religious correspondent Father Terry, he of the unbelievably dirty habits, bewails the fact that young people are increasingly shunning God and turning to Satan. In the 2021 census more than 5,000 respondents say they’re batting for Beelzebub compared with 1,893 in 2011. London-based Satanist chaplain Leopold says that only a minority actually worship the Prince of Darkness (sic). The rest ‘just like rituals’.

*****
Those sharp-suited shysters at Goldman Sachs, the finance institution often criticised for lack of ethical standards, have done it again. They’ve  laid off 3,200 workers, some with only half an hour’s notice. Forget the sacked staff, it’s win, win for the bosses. Not only did the bank save all those salaries but money-grubbing investors were so impressed by the mass cull that the GS market cap was boosted by $3.3billion. Even I can work out that this is more than a million dollars for each employee let go.

*****

Don’t breathe a word to the Haitch-Arr team at Reach, because it may give them ideas, but American companies have devised a devious way to avoid paying overtime. A legal loophole means that managerial staff don’t receive pay for extra work. So lowly workers are now being given fancy titles such as ‘price scanning co-ordinator’, ‘lead shower door installer’ and ‘carpet shampoo manager’. Don’t laugh: it’s saving US firms $4billion a year.

*****

Power lunch? Purlease: that’s sooo 2022. Haven’t you heard? It’s  all about the spa these days: clients entertained in infra-red saunas, brainstorming in ice baths, job interviews to the accompaniment of vitamin drips. And just because it’s happening in the States doesn’t mean it isn’t real, you know. Most popular spa spot? ‘The foot rub area,’ reveals Kane Sarhan, founder of spa chain, Well. ‘I’ve seen dozens and dozens of meetings there.’ Sounds a bit like the dodgy Turkish bath a certain Express exec used to patronise between editions. Nuff said, though.

*****

Pity Christmas is past. Here’s a gift guaranteed to be first in most people’s stocking: a pillow that detects when a sleeper is snoring and subtly nudges their head into a different position to stop the noise. The Motion Pillow, developed by a Korean tech company, can tune into the timbre of anyone’s snore and when grunts start it slowly inflates to improve the sleeper’s airflow.

*****

The Spare Part’s  whingetome reveals he consulted ‘a woman with powers’ to contact his late mother. Mysticism and communicating with loved ones beyond the grave is all the rage nowadays. One astrologer, trusted by nobs such as Princess Eugenie, even charts ‘a DNA map of your soul’. Trust the luvvies to get in on the act, so to speak. Helena Bonham Carter hired a psychic to contact Princess Margaret to ask if it was OK to play her in The Crown.

*****

Anyone who’s been there knows that Japan is a strange place. Home to humanoid robots it may be but its bureaucracy remains ‘steadfastly analogue’, says the Washington Post. Official documents are still transmitted by fax (what’s that?) or floppy disk. Bank transactions and housing contracts can still require a personal seal. At last, though, a brave new world beckons: a digital minister has been appointed to oversee a huge switch of public services online.

*****

Readers have been petitioning the editor for more, ahem,    s-e-x in The Goss. So here goes: the constant drone (sic) of ships’ engines is disrupting the love lives of crabs, an innovative study at the University of Derby has found. Researchers say it really, really spoils the mood for the amorous invertebrates. Now they’ve come up with the idea of presenting male crabs with yellow sponges doused in sex pheromones to stimulate randy females. After all, says author Kara Rising (sic), ‘poor little crabs need to have sex, too.’ (I can’t believe I‘ve just typed that).

*****

Now a return to our popular Oddballs-R-Us feature in which we scour the globe for snippets about, er, oddballs. A man in Japan has just spent £18,000 on a full-size wolf suit to fulfill a childhood dream to be an animal. The grey and white outfit, modelled on a timber wolf, took three days to make. ‘But,’ says Woolfie, ‘those three days felt very long. It was the kind of excitement I have not felt for a long time.’ The recipient chose to remain anonymous (well, you would, wouldn’t you?)

*****

Former BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellen-Jones, 64, retains his sense of humour despite suffering from Parkinson’s. He has formed a dining club with other sufferers, including ex-colleagues Mark Mardell and Jeremy Paxman. They’re thinking of launching a Movers and Shakers podcast.*****

My west coast stringer with the Hawaiian shorts and the 7ft FireWire Dominator surfboard texts: California (where else?) has a new law requiring companies with 15 or more employees to give salary estimates for all job postings. But they’re all pretty elastic. Tesla is offering one job paying between $83,200 and $417,600; a berth at Netflix is listed at $90,000 to a whopping $900,000.

Golden Globes viewers were a tad surprised to hear Austin Butler, who played Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic last year, still using the King’s distinctive southern drawl. The 31-year-old insists his DNA ‘will always be linked’ to Presley after immersing himself so fully in the role. Luvvies, don’t you just love ‘em?

*****

Richard Littlejohn’s column about union leaders trotting out the cliché of always wanting to ‘get around the table’ with bosses to attempt to solve disputes rings a distant, nostalgic bell. The rheumy-eyed among us recall the Express FOC who wore one of those rotating bow ties, beloved of clowns, when he got ‘around the table’ with Struan Coupar and Co. Whenever the management said something with which he disagreed his only response was a spinning bow tie. On another occasion he claimed he had a bad back and lay down on the floor causing Struan to have to stand up and peer over the table every time he addressed him. Not so much around the table but under the table.

*****

The Spare Part didn’t actually say ‘My cock’s a kipper’ on a US chat show but, during a discussion on the perils of frostbite, he did describe his penis as my todger, my  johnson, my wilson, my manpiece, my willy.  Interestingly, the Late Show censors only started bleeping when he referred to a ‘cock cushion’. Strange people, the Yanks.

*****

The apocalyptic weather in the US just lately, including a frightening deluge in California, has left San Francisco largely unscathed. This has been attributed to an initiative by the city to allow citizens to adopt individual storm drains and keep them free of debris in exchange for naming rights. Thus, top choices include Grate Expectations, You’re So Drain, Watergate, Lana del Drain and, inevitably, Drainy McDrainface. Strange people, the Yanks.

*****

Always been partial to a bit of Madness, me. Top ska performers who have maintained their popularity over the years. So much so that they caused a minor earthquake at a reunion concert in 1992.  As the lads launched into One Step Beyond, the crowd of 35,000 at Finsbury Park started jumping up and down in unison causing a tremor which registered 4.2 on the Richter scale cracking windows and balconies. Three nearby tower blocks were evacuated. Lead singer Suggs says: ‘It’s something to go on the CV.’

*****

Do you think Harry Windsor and his publishers might regret the title of the whingetome? The English phrase ‘heir and spare’ doesn’t translate well so Spare is very much a challenge. In Poland it’s The Other One; in France The Substitute and in Sweden The Second. Reserve is the title in Dutch and German while in Portuguese-speaking Brazil they went, appropriately you may think, for What’s Left Over.

*****

Who said footie chaps haven’t got a literate sense of humour? One of the Beckham boys, making his debut for Brentford’s development team, asked what number shirt he should wear. Came the reply: ‘Wear four out there, Romeo.’ In fact he wore 21 but as Shakespeare says, in The Merry Wives of Windsor: ‘Good luck lies in odd numbers’.

*****

Oh, what larks! Bert’s Books, an independent retailer in Swindon, has Prince Harry’s whingetome, Spare on prominent display…alongside Bella Mackie’s new novel, How To Kill Your Family.

*****

Some of us remember the rather haphazard way the Express interviewed potential staff (Raybould and Benett anyone?). But they had nothing on Thomas Edison: he quizzed research assistants over a bowl of soup because he wanted to see if they added salt and pepper before tasting their food or afterwards. Premature seasoners failed the test because it showed they were overly reliant on assumptions and lacked curiosity.

*****

The Goss recruits pioneering outriders who roam the far frontiers of human endeavour,  knowledge and understanding so that you don’t have to. Consequently, we can reveal that heavier, potato-shaped stones are better for skimming across water that the flat ones everyone spends hours looking for. Chunkier rocks can give a ‘super-elastic response’. They may not bounce as many times but because they press into the water more deeply and for longer, the force they achieve can cause a ‘mega bounce’ that launches the object further.

Next: New formula for knocking skin off rice pudding.

*****

In the unlikely event that you’re ‘lucky’ enough to book an invasive op when our NHS heroes are actually working, please check for unseemly post-op clanking when you’re up and about again. My George Clooney lookalike in the green scrubs and matching Crocs reveals that the number of ‘foreign objects’ left inside patients was a record 291 in the year 2021-22. Of course, swabs and gauzes are the most common items sewn up in patients but scalpels and drill bits have slipped in, too.

*****

We’re used to the French paranoia about their precious language but now welcome to the irony-free zone that is the Italian Culture Ministry. Its boss, Gennaro Sangiuliano is outraged by foreign (especially English) words infiltrating Italian. Trouble is, he labelled the practice: ‘snobismo, molto radical chic’. Snobismo, of course, comes from snobbery, radical from, er, radical and chic from the French chic.****

To the Rattlebone Inn at Sherston, Wiltshire, in a field behind which the Spare Part claims he lost his virginity to an older woman who obviously ‘went like a rattlebone’. Particularly recommend the popular £14.95 Pie & Pint night with a choice of three pies prepared, appropriately, ‘by Roger and his team’.

*****

Oh, the vagaries of publishing, as Prince Harry would tell you (well, he’s told you everything else).  A beautifully produced glossy, full colour, copy of the latest Rupert Annual, originally priced at £10.99, is available at my local WH Smith for a crisp onecer. As Rupert writes: It really isn’t very fair that I am now a cut-price bear. Bill Badger says it is a sin that I am in the discount bin.

*****

You can’t avoid recaltricant strikers these days. If it isn’t revolting railmen, it’s posties and NHS ‘heroes’. My man with a free bus pass tells me of encountering slogan-chanting protesters outside a retirement home near our office in Walton-on-Thames: 

‘What do we want?

More cash for pensioners.

When do we want it?

Want what?’ 

Old people, eh…

*****

Bank robbers in Denmark are, apparently, hanging up their stocking masks and retiring discreetly to their villas in Spain, the Caribbean and Thailand. There wasn’t a single bank raid in Denmark last year. Just as well, says my snout in the horned Viking helmet: the vast increase in digital payments means that cash transactions are so rare that only 20 branches in the whole country carry physical money.

*****

It’s squeaky bum time in Hollywood, I hear. News that Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, teenage stars of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet, are suing Paramount for $500million, alleging they were tricked into a semi-nude scene has had studio bosses choking over their popcorn. Yikes, says my best boy on the cutting room floor, if they succeed what about Brooke Shields as a sexually exploited child in Pretty Baby or Jodie Foster playing a prostitute in Taxi Driver when she was only 12?

*****

Frack* the New Year sales! Now Mrs D wants one of those super new ‘intelligent’ ovens which can not only cook delicious food but scrape the plates and put out the cat at night. Samsung’s latest version claims to be able to recognise 106 dishes as soon as you put them inside and recommend a cooking time for each. The Goss’s skivvy in a pinny reports that other features detect when a dish is being over-cooked and a hidden camera which enables you to watch your food cooking on your device or, if you’re really tech savvy, live-stream it straight to social media.

*Lord D compliant

*****

Time was when any Back Bar punter could name warblers who were top of the pops. Stars such as Sid Vicious, Terry Tantrum and Lenny Livid. Not any more. The real stars rarely figure in the charts or even earn a mention on TV or in newspapers. Bad Bunny, for instance, ‘is both one of the most popular artists in history and an unknown entity’, Tom Taylor, of Far Out magazine, tells me. The Puerto Rican purveyor of Spanish language reggaeton songs was the most streamed Spotify artist last year for the third consecutive year with an astonishing 18.5 billion plays. Yet he has never had a number one in the UK charts and only two in the top 40.

*****

We wordsmiths are notoriously poor at maths so we should all applaud teacher Sunak’s ambition for all school pupils to study the subject until they’re 18. Mind you, a lot of MPs are no better.  When 101 were asked a simple GCSE maths question - if you toss a coin twice, what’s the probability of getting two heads? - only half gave the correct answer: 25%.

*****

Nostradamus is alive and well and is posting on Twitter. A thread featuring predictions for 2023 made in 1923 has accumulated 10 million views. Some are amazingly accurate, such as the population of the US ‘will probably reach 300 million’ and people will communicate using radio telephones the size of watches. Others not so much, including cancer will be ‘eradicated’, life expectancy will be 300 years, newspapers will be obsolete by 1973 and ‘all people will be beautiful’.

*****

Pity those poor Albanians booked on flights to Rwanda. Their new home has a unique system for keeping the place clean and tidy. On one Saturday morning every month all bars, restaurants and shops have to close and people are only allowed to leave their homes to clear up litter. Those who try to ignore the rule can be stopped by police and made to start litter picking on the spot. Tirana was never like this, says Bujar, under footman at Drone Towers.

*****

Following my note about an American university banning cliches, I now record the finals of the World Cup of Random English Words. And the winner is…shenanigans!

The noun, meaning either secret, dishonest activity or manoeuvring or silly, high-spirited behaviour or mischief, triumphed after a year-long series of Twitter polls, beating codswallop in the final at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro (not really).  Other words that made it to the knockouts were: kerfuffle; skulduggery; pandemonium; murmuration; cantankerous; flibbertigibbet and bollocks*

*Protocol breach permitted

*****

Did you see that British diplomats have been judged the most honest in the world - at least when it comes to parking tickets? A five-year study of unpaid penalties by envoys at the UN in New York revealed the Brits didn’t receive a single one. Alas, Kuwait can’t claim the same: its diplomats notched up an average of 246 each every year.

*****

They’ll blame Brexit for anything…even the ‘quality’ of illegal drugs. Ravers have been warned that because of supply snags, including Brexit, ecstasy pills contain less and less actual ecstasy and more guff such as caffeine. My man with a vacant look tells me that nearly half of the gear sold as ecstasy at festivals last summer contained no trace of the drug at all. Back on the Carly Special!

*****

Bravo to the American university that has joined the Drone’s crusade to avoid cliches like the plague. Lake Erie College has issued a list of words and phrases that are banned on campus. They are:

GOAT (greatest of all time); inflection point; gaslighting; quiet quitting; moving forward; amazing; absolutely; does that make sense? irregardless; it is what it is. Onwards and sideways, I say!

*****

Guinness  World Records are becoming increasingly bizarre, although I suppose that’s the name of the game. Last year saw the longest tightrope walk in high heels: 639 feet in four-inch stilettos (well done, Frambo!), the largest gathering of people with the same names: 178 Hirokazu Tanakas in Japan and the longest voyage by pumpkin boat: 38 miles down the Missouri River.  

*****

Norway is among the richest countries in the world and maybe this is one of the reasons why: forces’ conscripts have been ordered to return their government-issue underwear when they leave military service so that the pants, socks, vests and bras may be passed on to the next batch of recruits. After what defence chiefs insist were ‘proper checks and cleaning’, of course.

*****

Lunch With The FT, the Pink ‘un’s weekend interview spot, is a cherished tradition. Back in 1995 the poet Gavin Ewart, then 79, was the subject. He insisted on having several negronis (not for the faint-hearted) as aperitifs and carried on from there. Next day the interviewer received a call from Mrs Ewart. ‘There are two things you need to know,’ she said. ‘The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him for a long time. The second - and you’re not to feel bad about this - is that he died this morning.’

*****

*****
Whom the gods would destroy, first they make mad … by completing a US Department of State Consular Electronic Application Center Online Nonimmigrant Visa Form. A chum of The Goss says he aged visibly filling in the notorious DS-160. And don’t anyone mention ESTA: if you’ve visited what the Yanks consider a country guilty of State Sponsored Terrorism, you’re fracked*. Only tortuous and torturous visa grovelling will do. To be fair, the website did (accurately) warn it would take 90 minutes. Our pal says: ‘Now all I’ve got to do is the provide a current photo and arrange a formal interview at the US embassy (three months’ waiting list) and wonder what they will ask me in the hour and a half I’m told it will take. Of course, I could  just go to Skeggie.’

*To attune with American sensibilities 

*****

Much has been made of the revelation that supermodel Heidi Klum’s (admittedly admirable) legs are insured for $2.2million. But readers with grey, or ash blond, hair may remember the dancer Cyd Charisse whose pins were covered for a $5million pay-out way back in the fifties when money really was money.  However, the record insurance for legs (£40million) is claimed by a tattooed ubiquity who used to kick a football for England. Shuffle forward, David Beckham.*****
A former Express mouse racer, a devotee of the match-making app, Tinder, shares the latest dating trend (as if I give a flying frack*). It’s ‘situationship’, more than a mere hook-up, I’m told, but not quite a traditional relationship. 

Other developments in this alternative world: Dinner and drinks are a no-no but ‘activity dates’ (remember them?) such as picnics, mini-golf, walking and bowling are in. Interests most likely to attract a match in users’ bios are concerts, yoga and vintage fashion.

*To protect the innocent

*****

The World’s Gone Mad No. 653: the art market went totally fracking* bonkers in 2022. Six pieces sold for more than £100million compared with only one the previous year. Top price was for Andy Warhol’s 1964 work Shot Sage Blue Marilyn which went for $195million. Georges Seurat’s 1888 piece Les Poseuses Ensemble (petite version) fetched $149million and La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, painted by Cezanne also in 1888, was sold for $138million. Unbelievable!

*T&Cs
*****

Courtesy of The Goss: your handy guide to the jargon nouveau you’re threatened with in 2023, according to The Economist. Productivity Paranoia describes WFH tensions around bosses suspecting that staff are just drinking coffee and munching Hobnobs while the workers are paranoid about being perceived as just drinking coffee and munching Hobnobs. Post-quantum Cryptography is the phrase for ultra cyber security systems handy for combating hacking from super powerful quantum computers. And Battery Belt is the new name for the Rust Belt, America’s old industrial heartland rejigged for electric cars and other green tech.

*****

Who’d be an author? Ask Matt Hancock about poor sales and less than enthusiastic criticism. Now LitHub has listed some of the year’s most scathing reviews.  They include the New York Times’s ‘reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo’ on Breaking History by Jared Kushner. Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song was summed up by the LA Times: ‘I began to feel like a therapist sneaking glances at my watch while the crackpot on the couch blurts one creepy fantasy after another.’ Even more brutal was the TLS verdict on Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise: Anyone must have a brain of stone to finish it without shedding tears of relief.’

*****

Thanks to the Times obit of satirist John Bird for reminding us of the character he created who said: ‘I don’t like the word xenophobic. For one thing it’s a Greek word and I detest Greeks.’

*****

Who’d be a snapper? Richard Pohle of The Times rather gives the game away as he reviews his year in pictures. On the day the Queen died he clambered on to the wall of the Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buck House to take an historic picture of sombre crowds gathering to mourn. He says: ‘I realised to my horror that, in my haste to get there, that I’d forgotten my wide angle lens.’ You’ve got to admire him for admitting he used his mobile instead. Who knew?

*****

Twenty years ago Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, sold (aka practically gave away) 395 metric tons of gold — 55 per cent of Britain’s total reserve — at an average price of $275 an ounce. Why? To diversify the UK’s reserve assets away from gold which was thought to be too volatile. Mr Brown has recently become very active among the Labour Party hierarchy and is regularly consulted by Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Should we be alarmed? Well, the price of gold today is $1,815 an ounce. Go figure!

*****

Actor Martin Compston proves again what a good operator he is in the agonising BBC two-parter, Mayflies. Of course, he’s better known as London detective Steve Arnott from the award-winning series Line of Duty. But in 2016 he made a dramatic switch in roles to star as the Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel in In Plain Sight to great acclaim, except from one reviewer, no names etc, who rubbished his dodgy Scottish accent. Pity. Compston was born and brought up in the Clydeside town of Greenock and was even a professional with Greenock Morton football team.

*****

Salvador Dali was not only one of the most accomplished artists of the 20th century but he also wasn’t far behind the door, as mummy used to say. He would avoid paying for meals out by putting a doodle on the back of his cheque knowing full well that the restaurateurs would rarely cash them. Michael Jackson also used the ploy: when he had to cancel a concert, he refunded ticket holders with hand-signed cheques. Fewer than one in 10 were cashed.

*****

Henry Ford dismissed history as ‘bunk’ and the academic Arnold J. Toynbee said it was ‘just one damned thing after another’ so I suspect neither would have been impressed by the knowledge that Cleopatra (69-30BC) lived closer to the launch of the iPhone in 2007 than the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza in about 2,600BC.

*****

More fodder from The Goss’s Esoteric Snippets Dept to help if you’re stuck for witty, incisive conversation at new year gatherings: hamsters are the heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom. They can, according to researchers, neck the human equivalent of one and a half litres of 95% ABV vodka at a sitting. The rodents need this hardy tolerance to survive the winter when their hoards of ryegrass seeds and fruit ferment. They also seem to have developed a taste for it, says The Atlantic: ‘Given a choice between alcohol and water they always go for the booze.’

*****

Woke snowflakes have joined gnarled old inkies to lament the further gentrification of Ancoats in Manchester, home since 1939 to the Black Lubyanka (northern branch). The opening of a Michelin star restaurant in an area where black pudding used to hold sway was bad enough. Now, though, worried conservationists gather in the Crown and Kettle sipping schooners of Vita Maris IPA (6.5% ABV) to discuss a new planning application for a 20-storey Hilton Hotel just off Great Ancoats Street. Former Natsopa FOC Joe Suggs texts me: ‘It used to be a nice, rundown area of the city but now it’s going to the fracking* dogs.’

*Amended to protect the innocent.

*****

What a monster, that Vladimir Putin. He just loves playing childish power games when entertaining visiting prime ministers and presidents (remember he and Macron ‘negotiating’ at either end of a very long table before the Ukraine invasion?). Once, when meeting Angela Merkel, he allowed his huge black Labrador, Konni, to roam the room. Why? The former German Chancellor has a dog phobia after being bitten as a child and was visibly scared. Putin just sat back and enjoyed her discomfort.

*****

Perhaps it was the pioneering spirit of the Old West or, maybe, he just dismissed the excitable weather poppets’ dire warnings of the worst winter storm in living memory, but whatever possessed Ditjak Ilunga to go for a spin as the US’s deadly ‘bomb cyclone‘ approached? Not just down the road to a drug store near his home in Gaithersburg, Maryland but 421 miles to Hamilton, Ontario. Accompanied by his two young daughters and (as you do) a Pomeranian puppy. Of course, they became trapped in a snowdrift near Buffalo, NY but managed to stay warm by keeping the engine running. When the fuel ran out at 4am, Ditjak really chanced his luck and continued on foot. Happy ending though: they reached safety. Twat!

*****

Proof, if we needed it, that the world has gone fracking* bonkers: Charli D’Amelio, an 18-year-old dancer from Connecticut, now earns nearly £13million a year from posting dancing clips for her 149.2million followers on TikTok. Mind you, she’s just an also-ran compared with YouTube’s Jimmy Donaldson, 24, aka MrBeast. He garnered £39million from videos of his zany stunts. A bit of context: the median pay for top CEOs in the US is £9.6million, says The Wall Street Journal.

*T&Cs

*****

Back by popular (Eh? - Ed) demand, the Drone’s homage to a famous British actor: Barbra Streisand sang in the same school choir as Neil Diamond and was a classmate of chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer. Not many people know that.

*****

A reader confides: ‘My grandson received Christmas gifts of a dehumidifier, an orangutans calendar, a cast iron frying pan, a pack of Tarot cards and a pair of socks adorned with illustrations from the Kama Sutra. What, if anything, should I read into this?’

*****

Grateful to Allan Massie in The Oldie for the reminder that Scotland is a late convert to Christmas. When he was a child in the 1940s, Christmas Day wasn’t even a public holiday: work carried on in factories and shipyards and banks were even open until noon. All because of the Scots’ enthusiastically embracing the Reformation and the shunning of ‘Papist idolatry’. Hogmanay was the great winter festival but the jocks were eventually seduced by festive-themed TV: oh the lure of Christmas Night With The Stars.

*****

Fed up with carols? (how can Aled be as big a pain now as he was then?) Me too. Yet Jingle Bells started out as a Thanksgiving song called The One Horse Open Sleigh. Then Americans started singing it at Christmas and it sort of caught on, to put it mildly. And Good King Wenceslas wasn’t some gnarled old codger with a white beard but a young thruster in his twenties murdered by his brother with a lance. Not very festive was it?

*****

ITV’s programme The Savoy at Christmas recalls the halcyon days when the hotel was once a sort of upmarket canteen for some senior Express execs. There’s a tale of Sir Larold Lamb being forced to take public transport to the Strand when his office car was off the road. Hopping aboard a west-bound No. 11 Routemaster outside PA, the great man ordered the conductor: ‘Take me to The Savoy!’

*****

Who knew? Elizabeth Taylor amassed a fabulous fortune from films, including a percentage cut of Cleopatra, and husbands but this was easily eclipsed by a perfume she developed and marketed in 1991. White Diamonds, described as ‘a magical and glamorous fragrance’ has brought in £1.5billion (and counting).Channel 4’s Wagatha Christie trial re-enactment (bit tedious, isn’t it?) gives everyone another chance to laugh at Peter André’s allegedly diminutive cock. Not that André, a genial chap, seems fazed. Apparently, at an after show media trough fest to mark his West End turn in Grease he handed around a tray of chipolatas to hacks to help the medicine go down. 

Incidentally, another name for the Rooney-Vardy libel tussle: The Scousetrap.  

*****

How the ‘mighty’ have fallen: jungle over-achiever Matt Hancock entered the book charts at 191 with his much-hyped Pandemic Diaries. Now, though, it has plummeted out of the Top Thousand altogether, comprehensively outsold by The Air Fryer Cookbook. Ouch!

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Just when you thought it was safe to return to the No10 rose garden … BoJo takes the first important step on his comeback trail. The ousted prime minister has flown to Rupert Murdoch’s ranch in Montana to beg the media mogul to support him when, the theory goes, May’s local election results make Rishi Sunak’s position untenable. 

Apparently, Murdoch ‘heard him out’ and now Victoria Newton, Tony Gallagher and Emma Tucker are said to be dreading the phone call telling them to back Johnson.

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Darts? That’s for cissies. Latest craze in the US, says The Economist, is axe throwing. Some 20,000 competitors take part in 324 dedicated venues (up from 16 in 2017) all over the country. Chucking axes at wooden targets is also popular for team-building, stag dos and break-up parties where women target pictures of their exes. As retired cop Dean Cooper, from Texas, says: ‘I get to throw sharp stuff into wood and drink beer with friends. What’s not to like?’

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My snippet recalling Dorothy Parker’s Wrath of Grapes warning to those who, ahem, like a tincture prompts old chums to message The Goss with other examples of her keen wit.

From Country Boys’ Billie the Ghillie (and he should know): ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.’

And from a feature writer who, wisely, wishes to remain anonymous: ‘I’m not a writer with a drinking problem but a drinker with a writing problem.’

Finally, from cheeky little Flo, who sometimes used to assist Alice (as in ‘pass the sickbag’) in the Express Grill Room: ‘I like to have a Martini: two at the very most. After three I’m under the table; after four I’m under my host.’

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As the Christmas party season builds to its over-loud, often embarrassing, sometimes vomit-flecked climax let’s remind ourselves of, and heed, Dorothy Parker’s warning about the Wrath of Grapes.

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Worried how Donald J Trump is faring two years after his fall from grace? Don’t bother. Legal problems aside, the 45th president is like a pig in shit, says the Washington Post (it didn’t really but you know what I mean). The strawberry blond-tressed 76-year-old plays 18 or 27 holes of golf six days a week using a golf buggie equipped with a laptop and printer which a lackey, who rides shotgun, uses to show him nice media coverage. On ‘quiet days’ another lackey calls his allies to request they phone him ‘to boost his sprits with positive affirmations’.

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Talk about the cost of living crisis: loaves of a Japanese-style milk bread are selling for £11.40 a pop in London and £15 in Los Angeles. The Tokyo bakery Gina Nishikawa, which created the latest must-try nosh called Shokupan, has a secret (up till now) ingredient for each loaf: a spoonful of honey.

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A bearer pads into my den bearing a cleft stick containing a dispatch from a chum at the Mirror. The message reads: This is the first par of the latest Hi folks, coming after our paltry 3% and all the misery of staff cuts and rota mischief:

'Hi folks

This week I've begun my annual tradition of reading A Christmas Carol … It's a reminder on the importance of reflection and a great recharge of your empathy batteries!'

My contact commented: 'Presumably he's lost the charger for the 'self-awareness batteries’.

To spare the author’s blushes I hesitate to name him. Suffice to say it’s Big Jim, who may or may not be CEO of Reach.

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