I WAS going to watch a video, but I can’t find one that’s organic. Surprising, I thought. The entire commercial world has gone organic but no, there’s not one organic label on the video shelves. If I’d wanted a lawn mower I could probably have found one. I hear they’re making one entirely out of recycled parts. I’m sure organic won’t be far behind. I looked it up. Organic, says the dictionary, means derived from plants and animals, and if you take the next step in the lexicography, it means derived from carbon. Great! Now I feel much better. Next time I take a walk down the supermarket aisles I can…

I’m supposed to make you laugh. That’s the idea of this column: you get up on a Saturday morning and there’s the lawn to mow and the dog to wash and you wish you’d stayed where you were. It all seems too much — until I draw to your attention the fact that lawn mowers only ever work on days when it’s storming stair rods, when mowing is impossible, and that washed dogs always go and roll in something disgusting, so what’s the point? Today, though, you’re going to have to let me off. What I really want to do is weep, but you can’t, can you, if you’re a…

I KNOW a newsagent’s shop — one of many I frequent — where the bloke behind the counter is a mealy-mouthed, sour, monosyllabic, taciturn, vinegary old fool. I don’t mind this. I know we can’t all be the same. Some people out there have to be the tossers. What I don’t understand is how he got to be standing on the other side of a counter in a shop that is frequented every moment of the working day by human beings. If he were an executioner, or a sewer inspector, or even a chemical warfare scientist whose only company was mutant rats, I could understand it. While these jobs don’t actually…

WE went to see a counsellor. In a bid to save our marriage. We went together. Two things became apparent during the course of an hour-long session with this person. First my wife and I agree on very little. Second, one thing upon which we agree absolutely is that counsellors are a plague upon the surface of the earth. If you shot them all they might improve on the basis that the only good counsellor is a dead one, but I doubt it. Perhaps it is not all counsellors. Perhaps it was just ours, but I have my doubts. Why are they here? How did they happen? If counsellors have…

I THOUGHT we were supposed to be gradually growing more religious. As a nation, I mean. Not as a family – one of my daughters even has 666 in her telephone number! But if that’s true why do I have this nagging feeling that Easter is creeping by in much the same way Porridge Day might, if we had one? Not in the churches, of course… they’re right behind it, but that’s their job. I mean out there among the hoi polloi, where the real people live. Oh sure… the shops have done the Easter egg thing, and the Easter bunny thing, even though it’s entirely the wrong time of…