Location, location, location: not living in an area of the World currently suffering under UN monitoring means that these are the two most frightening things that happened to me yesterday…

1. My guitar teacher wants me to learn the off-beat strumming of Supertramp’s Give A Little Bit. To do this I have ripped the song to my hard drive and been running the recording at half speed but the same pitch. I want you to imagine the crunchy granola, hippy-whiney vocals that performed The Logical Song and Dreamer stretched out digitally, but anchored in the same key. The squealing of slaughterhouse pigs doesn’t come into it.

2. I bought some myself zinc tablets in an no doubt doomed attempt to ward off the various viruses this October’s influx of students will bring with them. There was a glossy magazine for sale on the shop counter. “Dr” Gillian McKeith, of Channel 4’s pseudoscientific bollocks You Are What You Eat programme, is on its cover, plugging her new trademarked range of “health food”. Under this picture

fraud

[click to enlarge]

was the headline “Dr Gillian McKeith Confesses, ‘Yes I Have A Big Libido'”.