Summer’s Almost Gone

… as Jim Morrison once sang, rather miserably. I’m not in that mournful place yet, but I have been away for what seems like a whole season, physically and mentally (and no, I haven’t been sectioned yet). So, a quick list of the highlights of the summer, in no particular order:

• Britain has been torn apart by rioting, including the barely reported attempted torching of an Audi on my street in Oxford. I’m convinced there was a media conspiracy after about Day 3 to hide minor incidents from the public in order to besoothe the nation’s over-excited criminal underclass. A friend of mine dubbed it The Chav Spring. It made me laugh, so I’ve been repeating it to anyone who will listen. This is not to say there are no issues with the word “chav” – some of which I concur with – just that (1) there are also issues with the issues; and (2) IMHO, it just has an irresistible ring to it.
• going way back here, it seems the world’s erstwhile leading media mogul is actually a kindly and vulnerable old man, who occasionally thumps his fist on the table in frustration with modern life, while axing titles for the wider public good.  His senior staff meanwhile have been recording a series of Celebrity Come Dine With Me, featuring most of the upper echelons of the Met and the Conservative and Labour Parties. So in recent years it’s been MPs, then the City, the Met, then journalists … all these people we, um, trusted and looked up to for their, um,  impeccable moral credentials … Once again, it will be left to market researchers to save the nation. Same old story.
• I holidayed in Sicily, where I stayed in a mouse-infested house. When I remonstrated with the local agent in charge of the house, I started off being assertive, telling him we shouldn’t have to pay the full whack for the house. I then remembered I was effectively getting into an argument with a Sicilian over money, in Sicily, and we still had two nights to see out. In light of the phrase “Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes”, I backed down pathetically.
• England won at cricket.
• The bloke out of the Arctic Monkeys broke up with Alexa Chung. I always thought he was too good for her. Still, she has the Monkeys’ superb Suck It And See as a breaking up present. If you want to date acerbic indie stars, you’re going to get to end up on the wrong end of a lyric or two.
• Wayne Rooney has acquired hair but lost my seven-year-old son’s affection for good, along with Ryan Giggs, “because they have both done adultery”. He now favours the chaste (seeming), home-spun Mexican child-man Chicharito.
• As I write, a bemused and appalled John Humphreys is appearing on Shooting Stars – the pinnacle of anyone’s career – and forced to look at an erotic, if inaccurate, drawing of a rear view of himself by Vic Reeves.

What a summer. Can’t remember the rest.

Back to work in earnest this week and the first job is on … incontinence.