It’s Friday, so I’m not looking to revive that old argument about the stationery, but I thought you lot might be amused by my two Playboy-related observations of the week.

Firstly I was in an ASDA supermarket the other day and decided to survey their “Back To School” range. Hoping not to be denounced as a “paedo” by a baying crowd of chavs, I discreetly worked my way along the relevant aisle and examined all of the designs with a recognisable image or icon, as opposed to coloured patterns. There were, as far as I could see, three lines on sale [names invented by me]:

• “cheeky monkey”: smiley, tree-climbing cartoon primate embossed on jungle foliage disc, all set on snot-green background
• “pink loveheart”: single, large, cerise motif against monochrome (black?) background
• “funky chicks”: three cool, attractive cartoon women standing with their hands on their hips or in other assertive-looking poses—fully clothed and with a token ethnic-beige character, yes, but with head-to-body ratios that make them older than adolescents and weight-to-height ratios that guarantee that none of them could menstruate

No Playboy bunnies though, so that’s alright then.

And secondly, by coincidence, the BBC Web News’ “interviews with people who have interesting jobs” series features a British Playboy model this week. Her page on their site features an hilariously posed and captioned photograph of her doing chores around her home. My sister used to supplement her limited student income with the sort of catalogue/high-street brand modelling that this woman claims to have started doing, but Clare made a conscious (and probably very expensive in terms of lost lifetime earnings) decision not to get her top off. Her most revealing job was about ten years ago, when she appeared in some fancy underwear in The Mirror, next to a caption that contained about five sentences, three of which were lies. Anyway, you now know where my niece gets her looks from—if not her colour.