So what is happening this week to take our breath away?

Well for starters there's our wonderful Royal Family adding yet another ludicrous passage to the book that will one day surely be titled This is Your Strife. The Duchess of York it appears, is broke and to repay the £3 million or so she has managed to spend on the pistM-N, she is selling her wonderfully entertaining stories about a helicopter called Budgie to an American businessman!

Princess Diana (or whatever she likes to call herself now) is thinking of clearing off to the South of France for good - not a bad place for the future queen of England to be. Perhaps she could start a new branch of the Hugenose!

Elsewhere we have the fragrant shadow health secretary Harriet Harman revealing the New Labour New Britain doctrine of do as we say and not as we do. No doubt her defence will be that she was playing Follow My Leader.

We have the laughable Maxwell Brothers cocking a snook at pensioners everywhere with a court decision that left the Serious Fraud Office looking as competent as Inspector ClousM-Nau.

We have rock star Berri complaining about superbrat Liam Gallagher after he'd used her then ditched her in an unseemly episode in a public lavatory - what a surprise Berri! Nobody could have possibly have seen that one coming - poor love.

Closer to home we have a man who has locked himself in a cage because he claims there's no other way of making the council see his point. We have congested streets and we have the highest number of knives handed in during the amnesty.

Who could have anticipated the Albert becoming a school for Moslem girls? (Certainly not some newspapers around here that's for sure). And what about the referee who nearly blew his last whistle in the Lancaster fixture on Saturday?

Unbelievable stuff but its all true and they even tell me that a newspaper is well on the way to funding the structure of a life-size statue of Eric Morecambe in the resort! Would I lie to you?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.