Space Age Bake Off

All those millions of miles away from home and little Philae is planning a bit of cooking. There's a sample to be collected and baked in her onboard oven, to see what gases come off a comet.

How homely is that? This amazing machine the size of a fridge is settling in nicely. We hope. We'd like her to stay put, but by the time we realise she's off to party among the stars instead it will be half an hour after it happens and we can do nothing about it.

But - what a wow moment that was! How brilliant are we to send something into space and after ten long years link up with a comet travelling at 34,000 miles an hour?  Awesome ! Those nerdy scientists lost it when the moment arrived. Academics were wetting themselves with excitement and really who could blame them? 

Pity the poor soul who built the harpoons though. They didn't work. While everyone else was dancing and celebrating, chances are he slipped off early for a silent weep under the duvet. His stuff may yet all come good and Philae will still get her gases done to a turn. If not, it was a hell of a ride!

London Earning, London Earning !

There are binmen living in London. Hospital porters, cleaners, nurses and teachers. How? How do they afford it? People living on £15,000 a year - how do they find a place to sleep?

This genuinely puzzles me. Do we all make up their wages so that they can afford a bed, a room somewhere? My son is a student in London. He's looking at £600 a month for a room in a crummy, converted, council flat. If he can get it. Rooms this cheap are snapped up within hours.

I used to have a bedsit in Knightsbridge. It was one room in Beaufort Gardens and it cost me £45 a week. I bought my loo rolls in Harrods. Long time ago. These days Knightsbridge is dark at night, streets of expensive properties stand cold and silent, earning money for their owners abroad. Empty shells.

Nobody lives there, they just accumulate wealth for investors. I want people to invest in Britain. We need their cash. Do we really have to sell them our cities, our souls, just to keep the coffers full? Can we keep some of this for us, so we can look our kids in the eye and say, yes, if you work hard, you too could have some of this.

Not now they can't.

Crappy Way To Go

On fireworks night a few years ago a young guy thought it might be fun to stick a rocket in his anus and light it. He paid a heavy price. He's probably still paying it. 

Frankly trouble with the pipework is no joke. We should all be massively grateful when it all works like clockwork. When it all goes too fast or too slow we don't laugh much. 

Lovely Linda Bellingham died of colon cancer last month. She was brave and smiling to the end, cheering up the friends who found it hard to hold back their tears.

 Why, when it is a universal part of the human condition, do we still find our waste so embarrassing? So much so that we ignore signs that things are not well and refuse the tests that could save our lives?

Sticking a piece of cardboard into a poo and smearing it on a card to be scanned for cancer is a step too far for many of us. That's what all over 60s are asked to do. Almost half refuse.

Bonfire night turned into a tragedy for one young man. He was probably drunk. Too many of us don't have that excuse.

Bride Wanted Dead Or Alive

China has come a long way - but maybe not far enough. Want the proof?They dig up corpses to marry them to their dead relatives - ensuring them a partner in the afterlife. The fresher the corpse, the more attractive they are. Skeletons need not apply.

It's Match.com gone mad. Offer up the recently deceased and you could be looking at £2,000.

We all knew women were in short supply in China after their disastrous one child policy lead to too many boys, unwanted girls being dumped in the gutter. 

Men are dying without ever knowing a woman, so gangs prepared to do the dirty deed are raking in big money, so that the rotting pair can be buried together, problem solved. It's not legal and eleven grave robbers in Shandong province are looking at three years in jail. Who said romance is dead!

Roll A Newspaper To Fight Ebola

There's no underestimating the imbecility of the British public is there? Sometimes it's jaw-dropping how stupid people can be. Take the pensioner who came into the cafe my daughter works in on Saturdays. 

Seeing the odd fly, this daft bat said: "You should stop those flies coming in with all that ebola about."

What! She knows there is this terrible, devastating disease called ebola - and absolutely nothing else about it.

Brave journalists walk the line in Sierra Leone and Liberia, telling us via our screens every night of the horrific toll this is taking on poor Africans living in appalling conditions. Their streets run with sewage. There will be a few flies about.

Who could possibly see their courage and not realise that contact with the ill, and especially the dead, is what causes the contagion to spread?The heroic grave diggers in their plastic suits running with sweat do their job, often unpaid. Flies are the least of their problems.

Despair at the ignorance of the rest of us must surely come next.

NHS Waste - Blame the Patients

Patients - they are the worst thing about hospitals. It's not poor care, though that still happens, or waiting times, but the people who take up the space. 

Harsh? Not really. A recent visit to A&E was a traumatic affair, not just because of an urgent need to be admitted. A huge, scary guy was ranting and raving, rampaging about and crashing into walls. A kind nurse put us in a side room for safety, saying: " He has been in here every night for the past week doing the same thing and every time he gets treated like royalty."

Shocking - but even more so was the discovery that Mad Dog, as we called him, was given the next bed to my sick son. He continued to rage and abuse. On the other side was drug addict Dean, in with a sore foot and still there well after he should have been sent home. He kept finding symptoms. After ten days we left him to it.

Yes the system needs reform. Today the Government admits to mistakes. There is waste on a grand scale, but with patients like this, who's to blame?

It Might Cure Cancer But ...

God knows I'm up for a cure for cancer - but maybe not at any price. There's this rat you see that doesn't get cancer. It lives for ever too, well thirty years or so, which is an eternity for something four inches long.

 It can wiggle its teeth independently and run backwards really, really quickly. It also produces masses of jelly-like hyaluronan, which we have too, but not in such huge quantities. So this rat is a born survivor which may hold the answer to cancer.

It is also ugly. And hairless. The other animal that has loads of hyaluronan is the shar pei dog Yes, that's the one, that has a face like a ploughed field. Not just wrinkles, more crevasses. Oh dear.

It's going to be a hard sell, isn't it?