HA! I have just read in the newspapers how a new breed of modern woman is emerging who wants to stay home and look after the children instead of going to work. This is a significant event in social evolution. It offers convincing evidence of many aspects of human psychology (did I say female psychology? Would I!). . Firstly, it proves the human race is essentially very dumb. Secondly, it proves there’s nothing new under the sun. Thirdly, it proves we have the memory span of goldfish. Staying at home and looking after the children is not a “new breed of modern woman”. It’s as old as… well, staying home…

MY arm has gone septic. They told me it was bursitis, which is ridiculous. Old people get bursitis. It makes your elbow swell up and look silly, but it doesn’t make it rot. I can now reveal to those thousands of you who wondered why I didn’t write this column last week that it was because I had a septic elbow. Not bursitis.   My arm looked like the kind of marrow that would win prizes — if it wasn’t so ripe your fingers went through when you tried to pick it up. You can’t type a column with an arm like that. Well, you can but you can’t use…

IT was obvious really, when you think about it. If God has meant us to take vitamin pills he wouldn’t have invented knives and forks. Or Pan Pharmaceuticals. It’s gone very quiet in my house. We had given up on traditional food. Things you had to cook and cut. Basically we sit down to a plate of things that rattle or that look like suppositories. It started with vitamin C. My wife assures me you can’t overdose on vitamin C tablets because the body doesn’t store it. Maybe. But you can choke to death on them. Especially the quantity she makes me eat. Then there’s the B complex, vitamin A,…

WHAT did we do with leftovers before they invented plastic? If you weren’t around in the pre-plastics age let me tell you – there weren’t any leftovers. I used to think this was because we couldn’t afford much food, but it was obviously because we didn’t have any little plastic containers. Or a fridge. No-one realises the profound effect fridges and little plastic containers have had on the world. Cases of dysentery, for instance, must have skyrocketed. Did you think the proliferation of Asian food was something to do with a coordinated epicurean campaign by the world’s Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, and Indian chefs? Wrong. It’s because there’s nothing much else…

IT’S not a generation gap. It’s a yawning chasm. It’s a whole galaxy, with me on one side and the aliens on the other. The aliens are 18 years old. They have spots and no manners and food vanishes into them like planets into a black hole. One has come to stay. It’s a pity the white slave trade isn’t still thriving. I’d sell him; except that they’d give him back, probably with a thousand dollars between his teeth. As a bribe. He’d eat it. What’s more he’d sniff it first. This oaf, who is 190cms tall and has hands like feet, has come to visit us. From England. He…