Kittens!

It’s a goodish day today, if you leave aside the issue of Gaza which seems to be developing with a distinct lack of outcry from the West. This could turn very nasty indeed very quickly. There’s no going back from this invasion.

However, there were far-reaching and excellent legal decisions in the High Court and the US Supreme Court which for once bode well for democracy , it’s a gorgeous day, the garden’s looking lovely and I’m feeling physically not bad at all, considering.

So I’m sittting here doing my usual early-morning routine; drinking tea, smoking and swearing at Labour’s poison dwarf, Hazel Blears, who’s bleating on about how yesterday’s loss of the Blaenau Gwent seat is really a victory and all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Lord, I loathe Blears – she’s what happens when you elevate a particularly smug and bovine borough council housing benefit clerk to undeserved national office. I can’t begin to describe the bathetic shallows of the woman, she’s everything you ever hated bout the lower-middle class in one evil little ginger package.

Simon Hoggart would know what to say about her.

I’ve always loved Hoggart – cerebrally, obviously, not in some sleazy Kimberly Fortierian way – and I and millions of others were very sad to hear he’s no longer to host Radio 4’s News Quiz something I’ve always looked forward to on Fridays. It’s not the weekend until the theme tune plays at 6.30.

Although the hilarious Sandi Toksvig promises to be a worthy successor, she doesn’t have the same parliamentary background that makes Hoggart such a cynical, amused radio presence. On the other hand, to have an out lesbian fronting over BBC radio’s flagship satire programme is pretty good too and she is bloody funny – “in February 2006 she joked that, as a result of being Danish and having studied Muslim law, in the light of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, she had never been so sought-after. ”

Toksvig also has a monthly column in Good Housekeeping, which is about as jam and Jerusalem as a women’s magazine gets. I buy it for the recipes, of course.

But we still have Hoggart’s parliamentary sketches in the Guardian to enjoy, and his is the first column I turn to every morning, before spending the next half-hour spitting and cursing it’s ‘hold on to nurse for fear of something worse’ editorials.

I need a good pun to start the day and today Hoggart excelled himself:

“Robert Flello, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, had a question about drug use among young people. I listened tensely. Would the question or answer make possible an unspeakably bad pun? Mr Flello wanted more money spending on drug rehab work in Stoke. The minister, Parmjit Dhanda, praised his concern for his constituents, but said flatly that there would be no more money.

That was it! Thank heavens! It was, at last, a case of freeze a jolly good Flello.”

Ack, ack ack. I’m going to be wincing at that one all day.

Right, off for a stroll to the shop to enjoy this gorgeous blue and gold morning and get some milk – otherwise I can’t have coffee, and I need serious coffee to get stuck into reading the US blogs. It’s just not possible to read about the wingnuts’ latest depravities without a good head of caffeine to buffer the outrage.

Oh yes, and since it’s Friday, while I’m away, here, have a cute kitten. I’m too good to you people.

Awwwww.