WASHED AND READY TO EAT

Under great pressure from one of the mini-Ws, I agreed a couple of months ago to provide shelter for an abandoned cat. The feline in question is a spirited character, who has made short work of our carpet and gets through mountains of chicken and turkey terrine. I guess I must have a soppy, sentimental side. Of course, it's a short step from being a pet owner to shelling out for pet insurance. People are quick to warn you about exorbitant vets' fees. And once you sign up to Petplan, you become a proud recipient of Pet People - a magazine packed full of exciting advice for animal aficionados everywhere. In the current edition, I have an opportunity to win a TransK9 'Space Saver' Dog Transit Box, one of seven 'pawprints lockets' or 10 sacks of Burgess Sensitive Scottish Salmon and Rice. For pet owners worried about their pooch being seen on a dark winter's night, 15 high-visibility, reflective dog jackets are on offer. But it's the obsession with excr...

Great excitement in north London today, with the official launch of Arsenal Snow Globe Christmas Ornaments. A full-page ad on page 69 of The Metro showcases these tasteful Yuletide decorations, which retail at £4.95 - 'a price you may never see again'. The editorial team at Viz should note that the concept of parody was pronounced dead on 20th September 2012. 'Officially approved by Arsenal,' gushes the copywriter, 'each ornament features an intricately sculpted festive character cheering on the Gunners inside a snow globe.' These characters, disappointingly, are not intricately hand-crafted representations of Walcott or Wenger. We are treated instead to Santa Claus, Mr Teddy and Frosty the Snowman. Just one shake and watch it "snow"!

In the middle-class suburbs of London, where I grew up, people had a name for girls with a penchant for getting their kit off in the open air. And believe me, it wasn’t princess. Amid all the debate about privacy and the hullabaloo about the recent antics of Harry and Kate, we shouldn’t lose sight of the reality. In the real world, respectable blokes don’t cavort around naked in $5,000 Vegas suites with hen parties, much as they might secretly like to. And respectable young women keep a lid on their exhibitionist tendencies, confining striptease to the bedroom. Yes, I’m afraid I take the old-fashioned, clearly outdated, liberal view of people’s personal lives. I’m generally pretty tolerant of what people choose to do in private. But the overlooked grounds of some French chateau are not private, if you’re a figure known on the world stage. And your luxury hotel room is no longer private when you open the doors to your minders and a bunch of starstruck party girls with mobile phone...

Does Prince Harry's little game of strip billiards with a Vegas 'bachelorette' troupe really matter? His friends in the media have been quick to offer all kinds of bizarre justifications for his behaviour. The most ludicrous of these - which I read quite soon after the news of his escapade first broke - was that His Highness needed some R&R after the Olympics. Err... excuse me? Was he actually involved in the competitions? I don't remember his challenging Mo Farah for the tape in the 10,000 metres, do you? In which case, we're talking about the need to recover from a succession of jollies, where he lapped up the sporting action from the best seats in the house. Poor diddums. It must have been tiring. The next argument is that he's an army officer and about to ship out to Afghanistan shortly. If we had to fight the Taliban like him, so the argument goes, we too would be spending thousands of pounds a night on a luxury suite and inviting an excitable he...

Personally, I feel pretty ambivalent when it comes to the case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. In principle, it's great that the hypocrisy of world leaders is exposed, but it's a shame the whistle-blowing website has seemingly alienated a number of its erstwhile supporters. And while I have no idea whether any of the personal allegations against its founder hold water, I think the Swedish authorities are unlikely to be part of an international CIA-inspired conspiracy. What can't be disputed is Assange's capacity for generating headlines and disconcerting his enemies. From his political bid for the Australian Senate through to his grandstanding from the balcony of London's Ecuadorian embassy, the guy is a showman who wants to be remembered as a world figure. Although pretty much anything could happen in this bizarre, unfolding story, the smart money surely has to be on Assange staying in his embassy bolthole for years. In 2030, he may still be there, long after ...

Mrs W has had a real battle with NS&I - the UK's state-owned investment and savings organisation - over her attempts to close accounts for the two mini-Ws. You'd think that closing an account and getting your money out should be a pretty straightforward affair, but not with this particular arm of government bureaucracy. It involved form filling and phone calls on a scale not seen since Leonid Brezhnev asked the KGB to register all the establishments selling vodka within a 500-mile radius of Moscow. Anyway, after about three months of going backwards and forwards, the money did emerge and Mrs W was offered some modest compensation. We can forget it all and move on. As a footnote, however, it's worth flagging up one complete and utter absurdity of the way NS&I handles accounts for children. It seems from Mrs W's correspondence and conversations that any kid over the age of seven, who may nominally be an account holder, is required to give permission for their ...

Although Nice Airport is France's second biggest, the facilities beyond passport control are a little on the limited side. In terms of eating and drinking, passengers have a choice between a small convenience store which rejoices in the name of Ouishop and an Irish bar called Murphy's. The two establishments interconnect through supermarket-style gates that swing open and shut, so perhaps it should have dawned on me that the shop and the pub were, despite very different facades, one-and-the-same business. In fact, this connection only became clear when I looked at my receipt and saw that it was headed Murphy's-Ouishop. I feel Murphy's-Ouishop is a brand name with real potential for extension across multiple markets. Irish enough for Dublin and French enough for Paris. A place you might expect to find crackers, as well as a healthy serving of craic. To be sure, it has a je ne sais quoi about it.

This is a family blog, so it's with some trepidation that I turn to an ad on page 67 of the Metro newspaper, which promises men 'longer lasting' love-making. To take advantage of the incredible oral spray being promoted, I need to phone for a free consultation with a specialist doctor. It's a little difficult to imagine how this conversation might go, but the customer testimonials seem to give us a clue as to its likely frank nature. Mr MH of Luton tells us that he... wakes up somewhat... err... aroused, shall we say, in the mornings now. Indeed, he proclaims, the very thought of this arousal alone is enough to get him going all over again. Ray Phillips of Redcliffe is so happy at being able to last 20 minutes, he's prepared to give us his full name. Mr H of Bedford, meanwhile, is very precise in his time measurements. He's clocking up 12-15 minutes extra every time he hits the sack. Too much information already, gents. Mr PW of London has lasted a full 17...

The London 2012 torch procession has been great entertainment. It seems that if you want to carry the thing, your best bet is to claim that you're a stalwart of that much-admired community organisation The B-List Actors' Guild. Unless, of course, you've been picked by a corporate sponsor or transported from overseas like that unfortunate American lady whose tattoo artist couldn't spell Olympic. Yesterday, after a brief intervention by uber-luvvie Patrick Stewart - 'Make it Glow, Number One' - we were transported to the fictional world of Walford, where real-life cops were paid to protect make-believe Eastenders characters from a potential attack by a deranged extra. 'Tell 'em to hurry up, guv. We got to be up west in three quarters of an hour...' In many ways, this blurring of truth and untruth could be a metaphor for the whole Olympic adventure. Real-world stadia protected by imaginary G4S security guards. The opening ceremony is rumoured to b...

Of all the dubious statistics thrown around in relation to the London Olympics, the claim that there are '47 tube journeys in central London that can easily be walked' is surely one of the most misleading. I suspect it is based on the relative proximity of one station to an adjacent one. Embankment is walking distance from Temple. Charing Cross is a stone's throw from Leicester Square. But what exactly is a 'tube journey'? As I've understood it - and I'm only going on three decades' experience of using the network - it is a journey that takes you from any one place with a tube station to another. My journey from Leicester Square might take me to Charing Cross, but it might also lead me up the line to Camden Town or down south to Morden. In fact, from any one tube station - thanks to the wonders of interconnections - there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of options available to me. Now, I don't claim to have a PhD in mathematics, but the number of p...

The Belgravia Centre is a place which helps guys like me. People whose gorgeous, thick head of hair isn't quite as gorgeous and thick as it once was. Their ad on the tube at the moment says that if I visit their website, I can 'view the world's largest online collection of hair loss success stories'. My mind is immediately racing. This must mean there are other collections of hair loss success stories out there, but they're lightweight in comparison. Perhaps just one or two blokes half-heartedly saying they think there's a bit more body to their barnet these days. Could it be that there are offline collections of hair loss success stories? Pop-up exhibitions, perhaps? 32-page brochures? I can't quite bring myself to explore further. Too personal. Too close.

A lot of the stuff I'm handed in the street is poorly written, but it very rarely leaves me completely and utterly flummoxed. I'm looking right now at an A5 flier, folded to A6, which features a picture of an attractive, sleeping woman. 'Do Dreams Come True?' asks the headline. 'THIS ONE DID!' Intrigued, I turn inside. What can the pretty lady have dreamt? Actually, it turns out that she didn't have the dream at all. It was a bloke called James Sharp . In the North East of Scotland. In 1613. The leaflet tells the story of how Sharp predicted in a nocturnal vision that he would become minister of Crail, be subsequently consecrated as Archbishop of St Andrew's and eventually murdered at Magus Muir. Fascinating stuff, but what conclusion am I supposed to draw? Well, it's not entirely clear. Instead of explaining or interpreting the story, the people responsible for the flier launch into verse. Are you going to Heaven or Hell, When life here...

In Manchester this week, funnyman-turned-filmstar Russell Brand gets to introduce the Dalai Lama to an audience of local youngsters. One suspects the eccentric comedian might be rather more familiar with His Holiness than the Buddhist leader is au fait with Katy Perry's ex-husband. On the other hand, it's important to remember that Aung San Suu Kyi was sustained through her years of house arrest by listening to the Hairy Cornflake, Dave Lee Travis. Sometimes unlikely partnerships are forged. Watch out for the Dalai Lama saying how much he enjoyed Get Him To The Greek and passing over a copy of 'My Booky Wook' for an autograph.

If you were holding your breath, it's at last possible to release you from your suspense. The £27m opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics will be a recreation of the English countryside. Complete with farmyard animals clucking and oinking their way around the stadium and 10,000 volunteers turning in cameo performances, presumably as milk maids and scythe sharpeners. Danny Boyle, the man responsible, says that he plans to involve NHS nurses in the show and will give them their own special role. Distributing anti-nausea medication to the British public, perhaps. This mind-boggling spectacle of rustic kitsch - polished with some kind of post-industrial, quasi-environmental veneer - demonstrates a real poverty of ambition. Instead of embracing the Olympic Games as a platform for promoting the UK's future, we use them as a way of projecting an imaginary and idealised past. Let's not pretend this is the Britain that anyone recognises today or believes is going to emerge ...

Everyone in the UK has their own way of celebrating the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, I guess, but this funeral director's in Fulham, west London, has created a fairly unique tribute. What do you reckon they'll do when Her Majesty finally hands over her crown to St Peter?

Is there a closet republican involved in the sub-editing of The Richmond Magazine ? In the latest edition of the glossy south-west London freebie, the diary column reports on both the visit of Her Majesty The Queen to Richmond Park and the inauguration of a new freshwater habitat in the park by local resident Sir David Attenborough. On the contents page of the mag, these stories are summarised as follows: "Her Majesty in Richmond; new pond life."

Just looking at another of those embarrassing ads for match.com on the London tube. 'He texted me before the date and my tummy got the good sort of butterflies.' I'm glad to hear it. If it had been the bad kind of butterflies before you'd even met the bloke, perhaps that would be a clue you shouldn't be giving your mobile number to randoms you met on the web.

Can you find a video on the web that is kitscher than this Neil Sedaka extravaganza? I think you'll agree that I'm setting the bar pretty high.

I had a flash of inspiration this morning. Working with marketers in the UK, I've encountered quite a few frustrations from people who feel they are unable to talk about a certain sporting event which is planned this summer. Due to legal restrictions, designed to protect the official sponsors, no one is allowed to mention the name of said event. Or the year in which it is taking place. Or the main host city, which lies somewhere on an axis between Bristol and Leipzig (but a bit nearer to Bristol). Ok, so my flash of inspiration is this. What if we developed codewords to describe the things that are unmentionable? No one could be prosecuted, but everyone would know what they really meant. The name of the event is The Carrots. The year is 3000. The city is Trondheim. Now, marketers have previously unimagined freedom. We can launch a new red, white and blue cereal which openly proclaims that it's celebrating Trondheim 3000. It's time to get crunching with a patrioti...

I hope Emily isn't Jim's secretary. Or Jim's Mrs will start questioning how her high-powered executive hubby keeps himself busy.