Spandau Ballet told us “always believe in your soul” - and in a very real sense to anyone growing up in the ’80s, the band WERE our souls. And now these, our souls, are on the comeback trail. To them these “gags” are dedicated; I’m sure you, gentle reader, can do much better…

Q - When the comeback hitmakers behind “Gold”, “True” and (erm) “Musclebound” first split, what did Tony Hadley suggest that the band should do for the next few years?
A - “Expand our bellies”.

Q - After their fourth album tanked (but before their fifth and sixth album had done so), what did the manager of the comeback hitmakers behind “Gold “, “True” and (erm) “Through the Barricades” suggest that Gary Kemp should do with the group?
A - “Disband now pal, eh?”

The latest G20 meeting is scheduled to take place in London next week (on April 1st; not sure if that’s just an accident of calendar, or a comment on the G20’s recent management of their economies) - and already thousands of policemen are being drafted into the capital to deal with some fairly serious and organised protests which are being run by an umbrella group, G20 Meltdown.

Now on the one hand, financial institutions have been given a riduculously easy ride by governments, starting with the complete lack of punishment and a Commons committee failing to get even a proper apology from the likes of Fred Goodwin, and culminating in massive bailouts, no new regulation of the markets or the bonus culture etc etc. And the public, brain-numbed by years of Friedman-Thatcherite “I’ve got mine, so fuck you” economic and social policies, seem to have forgotten how or why to protest - so maybe a bit of very public trouble might be a good thing.

But on the other hand, should respectable organisations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Salvation Army and Oxfam really be protesting under the same umbrella as some fairly shady “anarchist” groups whose members are quite often little more than troublemaking inverse snobs who fancy a ruck with some bankers? I mean, peace, man, capitalism is bad and save the environment and all that, but, given our horrible propagandist right-wing press, I can’t see how serious campaigners can expect to achieve anything other than a big publicity own-goal by throwing their lot in with a bunch of stinky dreadlocked ne’er-do-wells…

Thoughts welcome.

Calls are growing today for Bravejade Goody to be declared “The People’s Saint”as soon as possible. A group calling itself Tabloid Watcher’s Alliance for Truth and Sanity has called for an ad-hoc parliament headed by the People’s Prime Minister Jeremy Clarkson to be established in order for the beatification and canonisation of Bravejade to take place immediately, bypassing the typical lengthy bureaucracy imposed on right-thinking British people by those Brussels bureaucrats in the Vatican.

TWATS have also called for laws to be passed to allow the immediate public lynching of any member of the public who:

1) wouldn’t wish cancer on anyone and is obviously very happy about the increased uptake of cervical cancer smear tests which has resulted from this story, but still feels they have a right to speculate that a racist who marries a man repeatedly convicted of violent offences is not likely to be a particularly nice person,

2) thinks that allowing charity walks which encourage ordinary people to give money for your benefit when you’re already worth several million, sanctioning an “obituary” / “last words” issue of OK magazine before you’re even dead, and in particular allowing publicist Max Clifford to profiteer massively from the story of your death are all - at best - grubby in the extreme, or

3)  resents the constant impingement on his / her right not to give a shit about this story, and fears for a country which needs these fixes of vicarious hysterical grief on a seemingly constant basis. DIANA! MADDY!! JADE!!!

When interviewed, a sample of  TWATS also said “ZaNuLiarBoreGordonBrownhellina handcartPC-gone-madimmigrantspaedophilesliberaldegeneratecorporalpunishmentBBC boycottlicencefeesharialawetcetcetc”.

More hard-hitting reporting from Folkestone’s “Kentish Express”, the paper which brought you the most tangential link between a Victorian water-balance lift and a film about Roman slaves that you could ever imagine.

This time, it’s a report on a car crash. In case anyone can’t read the text in the pic below, the pertinent bits go as follows:

“A car ended up in a ditch after it hit a fox. According to police, the  car hit the fox, which ran off, at about 11.30pm, leaving the driver with an injured knee. The man was attended by an ambulance crew but did not go to hospital. The road was not blocked.” The End.

EH???? I mean, kudos to our volpine friend for escaping and all, but what the FOX kind of a “news” story is that? Perhaps I should ring chief reporter Chris Denham and let him know that I dropped a wine glass last night, cut my hand slightly, went upstairs to get a plaster but found that it had stopped bleeding by then, and incidentally at around the same time allowed a moth which had strayed into my kitchen to escape…

More amusing Itanglish, this time in the form of a spammy “buy some expensive replica kit”-style e-mail yesterday from Silvio Berlusconi’s bunch of ageing loser footie primadonnas:

Problem with AC Milan is that these days, they never seem to play with enough fire(place). The players are stove-rpaid, and aren’t nearly as grate as they think they are. And as for David Beckham; at whose behestia* was he signed?

(* - This pun is a) obscure, and b) crap - nonetheless, lots of VP points to anyone who gets the reference.)

An interesting, if slightly perturbing, caption spotted today on one of the myriad of slightly hippy toiletary products which I regularly use (despite being male); Italian talcum powder “Spuma di Sciampagna” -

Leaving aside the excellent “Itanglish” description of the product itself (”essential in the toilette of adults and children” indeed…), I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the warning just below the bottom of the packet - “POWDERY PRODUCTS: NOT TO BE INHALED BY BABIES.”

Two questions to the manufacturers; 1) - following the logic suggested by the wording, is it therefore OK for everyone APART from babies to inhale their “powdery product”? And 2) - why is only inhalation proscribed? Surely it’s going to do a baby just as much harm if eaten, drunk in a suspension with warm milk or indeed administered through any other orifice?

I honestly can’t fathom why they’ve plumped for such a specific warning; surely there are a hundred-and-one different types of misadventure which could potentially arise via the primal, almost Darwinian conflict of the diametrically opposed concepts of safe talcum powder use vs. unsupervised baby behaviour. Is Italy suffering from a plague of neonatal wannabe cocaine fiends or something? (If so, I blame Lily Allen.)