I met a woman with a deathwish today. She jumped in front of me in the ten-items or less queue with more than ten items in her basket. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked the cashier, ignoring me. He didn’t, apparently. It was painkillers that had pushed her up over her limit. So many packs that the till got suspicious, beeped in a very accusing manner and refused to sell them. It serves her right, anyway - when they were taken out of the basket it knocked her down to 10 items.

The Evening Standard has written a guide to the most stupid things Prince Philip has said over the years. He really is quite shocking.

• “It looks as if it was put in by an Indian” - pointing at an old-fashioned fusebox in a factory near Edinburgh in 1999.

• “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed” - during the 1981 recession.
• …and plenty more…

When I visited, the ad banner above the list of slanderous, libellous and generally derogatory statements was for legal advice. How appropriate.

It’s been a day of little jobs and tidying around. Paul and I were playing Project Gotham on the Xbox when Andrew appeared at the front door this morning with his tape measure and a ratchet screwdriver. I’d been telling him about my wobbly shelves last week and he had offered to cut a backing board from a large sheet of plywood in his garage to hold it all together and said he’d come around to measure up.

In the end, though, the measure was never unwound, because while my screwdriver had been rough and cheap and had cut a hole into the palm of my hand, Andrew’s was rather more complex and had been worn smooth with age. This smooth and more experienced screwdriver had strengths mine did not, and it sunk the remaining loose screws deep into the wood. It made me think again about how well I’d done with my DIY last weekend. I had been rather impressed, but now I’m not so sure.

The charts this evening closed with the inevitable news that Will Young has made it to number one. Well done to him, but it’s not really an achievement, is it? His achievement was in winning Pop Idol. After that, and the half-year build up to the final I can’t believe circumstances didn’t guarantee a number one single, regardless of what it was or what it sounded like. Don’t get me wrong. The song is fine. It’s just nothing special.

Whoever won Pop Idol would have been number one today, which just shows how little we often have to do with our own destinies. Even if he’d not wanted to be at number one there is such a momentum of public interest that it could probably not have been stopped.

He doesn’t see that, of course, and neither would I if I were him. The BBC News web site quotes him saying ‘To have broken records with my debut single is incredible.’ That’s perhaps a little naive.

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