That makes you a voyeur, Mike.

@stephencollins.bsky.social already has that covered.

Psycho-Hector? I should have known: I’ve seen one of your plays.

Is there a character who is very logical, a bit spectrum, mostly right, drily humorous, with an excellent command of grammar and syntax and a fondness for fromage? Is he the hero? Please say “yes”!

The brothers at the posh end of my council estate had Choppers (they’d earlier had pedal cars with pneumatic tyres and a steering wheel, which I deeply envied). I had a go once. I found it heavy, unstable and no match for my rusty, third-hand racer. Even then I thought the gear lever was a gimmick.

The WA gets my vote, mainly because Francois has been such an enduring, twinkling grump since I started frequenting it in my 20s (a very long time ago). I’ve enjoyed the many times he’s banned my colleagues and me - eg for not bringing glasses back from across the road and for “working for The Tax”!

And Macca came! Can’t Buy Me Love. Bea-Street Band!

They’ll be renaming Opal Fruits next…

In most cases, probably not, since they are informed that this will happen and still make a deliberate choice not to pay up. Some people have neither integrity nor shame.

For info, the published list of deliberate defaulters are those who make deliberate errors/fail to pay tax owed AND have already incurred £25,000 in penalties. They’ll have been pursued by HMRC with multiple opportunities to sort it out. Only then is their tax confidentiality waived to expose them.

Me too. But definitely not among the same 4% who organise their books by *shakes head in dismay* colour.

My regret, having done an Ancestry DNA test, tanning easily, while being partial to grammatical exactitude, is that there is neither Italian nor German in my genetic makeup. Molto schade.

As a mongrel, I celebrate my diverse ethnicity. My Talbot and Maddox heritage is English/Welsh borders. I’m also Irish, because of my Cork grandfather, Murphy (thank you, Grandad, for my EU citizenship). I’m proud to be a distillation of millennia of disparate immigrant ancestry.

In my day (somewhat earlier than yours) we did vox pops of actual people in the street, when the print deadline was looming and we were light on copy. Even then we did them with context. What I see today is lazy, meaningless shit - and it’s polluting the BBC and broadsheets too.