Just when you thought it was safe to scratch your XXXX in public - I'm back! And what a notable time you've had whilst I've been away, haven't you?
I see Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was named as Britain's most powerful woman, and the 29th most powerful woman in the world by the business magazine Forbes in its third annual list. Cherie Blair seems to have dropped right out of the running.
In a mouth to mouth contest Margaret was always expected to beat Cherie, wasn't she? Although Cherie may know how to lay down the law, Margaret is really the one who knows how to get her teeth into an argument, isn't she? And I'm betting she comes far cheaper too!
And during my absence Pop star Boy George has enjoyed cleaning the streets of Manhattan as his five-day community service punishment for wasting police time over there. I'm wondering: did he find an irony in every coke can he had to pick up?
George, who is reported as saying, "I think people didn't expect me to actually work, but that's what I came here for. And it's turned into a good experience," has also been attributed with telling us: ""The media has this image of me as this big faggot sitting on cushions all day eating grapes." - No! Really? Surely not? - and for also going on to say: "But I'm a real person - I have a Hoover, I don't have a cleaner. So the idea that I can't pick up a broom and shovel is ridiculous."
Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Hoover bother to make anything out of that last statement. Not a cleaner, indeed! Poor George - he does seem to like putting a foot in his mouth, doesn't he? Whoops! There go those innuendos again! Never mind, we still loves you, darling!
Talking of things in mouths: what fell out of another person's mouth live on air is an entirely different matter. In a faux pas far greater than what any mention of the combined weights of the Weather Girls might produce, during an outside broadcast for ITV's Central News at Stoke's Trentham Gardens, Joanne Malin informed her television audience that it was "ping it down".
Apologising for her first serious gaffe in more than eight years, Joanne, who had meant to say: "tipping it down", is reported as saying, "To be on the safe side, next time it rains I am going to call it precipitation."
Careful now, sweetie pie! In your neck of the woods everybody understands exactly what "ping it down" means - start firing "precipitation" at them and they may think you're being rude!
Perhaps a precipitation was responsible for what recently washed up around the shores of Rhos on Sea and Shell Island - ambergris! Now, if you haven't met this before, it is quite simply: whale vomit - the puke of a mammal! And, as if to prove how stupid humankind can be, it has started a bit of a gold rush. Ambergris is used in the production of perfume. With this waxy substance secreted by the sperm whale fetching more than