Ted Max

Peat-arsed lamb shunters Clunge worriers Tink-eyed fraggers Smeg bakers Jizz-haired marsh-clags Toenail eaters Clinkered snarf-hounds Knob spongers All common currency where I grew up.

I think he's being held captive on a ranch for the sexual gratification of the rancheros. And to cook the huevos for breakfast. It's not how Operation Raleigh said it would be at the recruiting day at Charterhouse.

*Bob*, I've gone off the Lib Dems after I read about all the racist trees they have been planting in Peckham.

If Nigee does drop a mill on a pad round here, who's going to be the one to break it to Alan?

If you like, but I'm sure Ted Max will be along soon to correct us both. I don't get it.

Parents these days, eh? I blame their parents.

And also more like a Robert Ludlum novel.

He might need to buy them a stately home as well. For the lazing in. I make no comments about likely availability of a big fat momma.

Put them on self-assessment, Quids, warning them they will need to put a bit by each month for the taxman. Then leave them notes at various times of the year reminding them that if they miss the deadline for completing the form they'll be subject to incremental penalties. After all that, 18 months after they've submitted their form and payment has been agreed, send them a huge rebate. Then demand repayment of the rebate, that was paid in error. Then give them a phone number in Scotland to call if they have any queries.

It was a submission to a comic writing prize, not a real admission letter, Wolf. But I'm sure Jah can invoke the T.LS defence here. It was so obviously cribbed that it was never meant to be taken as his and therefore can't be plagiarism. Plus he's one of the non-existent in-crowd and therefore immune.

"Black Bag - The Faithful Border Bin Liner". "The Drunken Bakers" was very dark.

And butlers. Although perhaps rolling one up for your employer is an old buttling skill.

Homophobic shit, you say?

Ruth Kelly tried to kill you? I think people like to feel part of something bigger - and there comes a point where it feels perverse not to have read something. I can't see the harm in it. I suppose you can argue that publishers cut their lists to a few banker genres and stop investing in new writing. But there still seem to be plenty of books piled up in Chener, Review, and so on that haven't rolled out of a lorry straight onto Tesco's 20% off shelf. (Naturally I haven't read any Rowling or Brown myself, chiefly spending my time at the moment reading 19th Century Ghazals in the original Urdu)

Wasn't there some stuff at the time of people leaving the DVC on park benches and the likes, for others to find and discover the "troot"? Or was that marketing guff.

Thankfully, due to opposition very much from some of the British themselves, Ref: Emily Hobhouse, and the radical wing of the Liberal Party (David Llord George). Although Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader at this point, waited until public opinion swayed until he spoke out against military stratey. At a late point in the Second War, the British military actually started refusing women and children entry to the camps. They justified this as responding to objections about conditions in the camps. But of course it burdened the Boer military with ill, starving and immobile civilians, slowing them down, and making them less effective. A double result for the British. Admitting them to the camps and then feeding and treating them, of course, was the other (untaken) option.

5. Mark Lawson 6. AnnaJ (EDF) 7. Dial-a-Johnson (Frank, Rachel, Boris, Anthony & the...) 8. Mark Kermode 9. David Aaronovitch or... 10. Matthew Norman (yes, I looked.)

I'm going to try and guess who wrote that without opening the link. 1. Hitchens (C or P) 2. The Liddle 3. The Marlboro Man 4. Peregrine Worsthorne (where is he now?) Any of them?

It was introduced by Neath's conservative government There's lovely. No wonder they vote for Peter Hain these days.

Cheers Wolf. (sets watch till someone tells us he was a veggie) Muley, you mean Rick Stein, of course. I'd like to pour impotent scorn on him from behind my sweaty keyboard, but he seems a decent sort of chap. That Chalky was a right bellend, thoughbut.

Anyone got any other pics of men with moustaches?

A Brian Turner lookalike. Ye Gods. He's not bad - he's even trapped the look of mournful missed opportunity, the sense of being born a decade too early. Like those ex-footballers forced to carve out a living commentating on their vastly inferior but vastly more wealthy successors. http://www.fakefaces.co.uk/images/lookalikes/fullsize/54-1163.jpg

Kevin Woodford - in standard "contract assassin" pose. http://uktv.co.uk/images/standarditem/L1/530682_L1.jpg Ross Burden - possibly doing him a dis-service with the gigolo remark. Second lead in BBC soap Eldorado, perhaps. http://www.ownersperspective.com/images/reviews/rossburden1.jpg

Early on in the recent wave of TV chefdom - say early to mid 1990s? - there was a grumpy bloke called Kevin who never seemed to grasp that you had to at least pretend to be likeable, and to like other people. He had a programme called "Can't Coook, Woern't Coook" in which his exasperation with the bovine contestants was outshone only by the naked flame of his ambition. I'm sure he had some early gigs on Ready Steady Cook, as well, probably in a dream duo of grumpiness with the enormous, yet strangely preening, Brian Turner. No doubt Fern had him shipped off to some cruise ship to cook paella for the rest of his life for retired policemen from Braintree. This made room on the programme for Fern's husband (a small reedy man called Phil), Ross Somebody who looked like a down-on-his-luck Riviera gigolo, and, of course, Ainsley himself.

Speechless.