Smash hit

A steak knife stuck into smug soirees

They were never about fun, but presenting an inauthentic version of what people felt their lives should be like

Obese want their equality cake and eat it too

Being so irresponsible that you make your children obese is absolutely reprehensible and deserving of punishment

One gust and our fears go soaring

On Thursday, six-year-old Falcon Heene was believed to have been cruising at 8,000ft

Slavering cougars leave women caged

The female gender are no longer allowed (by anyone, themselves included) to be anything other than sexual

We’re cruel to fill their little heads with dreams of fame

The combination of reality television talent shows and the abundance of drama courses means everyone thinks they can have a go

The kids are seething and it’s our fault

It’s weird that the world of fashion should present such a stark image of inter-generational awkwardness and discontent

So I say chin-chin to all you tiresome moralisers

How marvellous to go through life eating and drinking and being raffish, and to die gently during a postprandial snooze

The simplest of delights can cure

We live in a culture where moaning is deemed the appropriate response to most things

Spare tyre has blown fashion apart

Magazines are crammed full of the super-skinny because women like the fact that the £2,000 dress is being modelled by a size 4

Let’s hear it for the weekly stag night

Outside of mosques with questionable links, there’s a lot to be said for segregating the sexes

Family values return online

Checking Twitter updates isn’t wildly different from listening to Radio 4

A vain bid to outrun age on the gym treadmill

I find it weird that female celebrities have not embraced middle age gleefully, hurtling towards smocks and thirds for supper

How Peyton Place changed women's lives

Grace Metalious' s novel affected the way women saw sex and showed desperate American housewives they were not alone

Oh sister, have I misjudged beauty queens

Beauty pageants have become the last remaining area where women feel they can sit in judgment on other women

The swine flu panic button

I start wondering whether we couldn’t maybe put red 'X's on the doors of the infected, plague-style

All around, a senseless waste of young lives

I opened up a paper last week and read that two boys had died in Newquay at the time when my son was there

Looking better through a heat haze

Of all the clichés about the British the only one that remains absolutely irrefutably true is the one about the weather