Looking, admittedly, slightly less like a middle-aged woman with a poodle on her head than he did a few years back, Diego Maradona was still sporting a tremendous jet black mullet in the papers yesterday. Hard to believe the greatest footballer who ever drew breath has turned into a Seventies dinner lady, but there you go, the camera never lies. In fact, it was a fine day all round for mullet-fanciers. Our own Jonny Wilkinson, for instance, has become gratifyingly long-at-the-back during his latest layoff. Not quite Ian Botham circa 1986, but getting there.

And best of all there was the Spanish guy, Miguel de Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, allegedly the military head of Eta, arrested in the French Pyrenees. Miguel has gone for the little seen “Braveheart” variation on the basic Hasselhoff/Mel Gibson-in-Lethal Weapon mullet: the usual extraneous curly tendrils foaming down over the neck, combined with a No3 crop on top. Needless to say, he looks utterly ridiculous. Thirty-six years old, he should have grown out of all that nonsense by now. Never mind the bomb plots, they should send him down for the hair.

He's got a big hooped ear-ring as well. And his nom de guerre is Txeroki, which means Cherokee in Basque. It's so childish. They never calls themselves Geoff or Keith or Brian, these terrorist types. Left or right, it's always “Stalin” or “the Grey Wolf” or “the Jackal” or “Cherokee”. When adolescent rage, self-righteousness and fantasy endures into adulthood, cooked up with a little but not nearly enough education, that's when you have to watch out. Hitler, Karadzic, it's always right there in the hair.

Fascinating business, terrorist hair. IRA men in the Seventies used to favour the extravagant side-parting. No matter how long or how curly, they still put that parting in, as if to say they were good sensible boys really, with just that little twist of romantic cavalier psychopath. Elsewhere in Europe, the male members of Baader-Meinhof went for the basic East German midfielder cut: still a mullet, but more businesslike, spiky rather than shorn or flicked front and sides.

The women went long and stringy. Funny how these things stay with you. Even now, if I see a woman with long, dark, greasy hair, I think “Baader-Meinhof”. I can't remember the Red Brigade's hairstyles. Being Italian, they probably looked distressingly chic.

Worth a rocket

My house came under attack at the weekend, as it happens. It wasn't political, more your lone nutter scenario. One of our younger neighbours here in Hackney, East London, has a lively interest in fireworks. He lights the blue touchpaper on the balcony of the nearby flats in early October and, a fortnight past Bonfire Night, shows no signs of letting up.

This young man has what appears to be unlimited access to explosives, and he seems to have invented a sort of firework machinegun, a clever contraption that looks a lot like a homemade version of the Gatling gun employed by the US cavalry to massacre North American Indians in the late 19th century, or indeed the fearsome Katyusha multiple rocket launcher developed by the Red Army in the Second World War. Admirable light-engineering skills, no doubt, but I wish he'd test fire them elsewhere.

I told him as much on Saturday night. The shooting got so close I went out to have words. He was in the park, ten yards away, blasting away at two girls behind a tree. They seemed to half relish the attention from a boy presumably high up in the local teenage pecking order, but then again the screaming indicated they weren't too enamoured of the ordnance. The very picture of middle-aged, middle-class male outrage, I told their assailant to stop.

Without flinching, without hesitation, he turned his weapon on this tempting new target. Incoming! Fireworks started zapping into my front wall. Fortunately, his device was hopelessly inaccurate, he ran out of ammunition and scarpered. At the risk of sounding 108 years old, I think this lad should be doing National Service. Someone ought to teach him to shoot straight.

What a racket

What's Martina up to? This is a woman of immense substance and achievement: nine times singles champion at Wimbledon, winner of a grand slam mixed doubles title at the astonishing age of 49, one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, a global

superstar. Added to that, she was an early and courageous campaigner for lesbian and gay rights. Navratilova is an all-time heroine to thousands, me very much included.

So what is she doing mucking around with the wannabees, has-beens and the very sinister Robert Kilroy-Silk in the celebrity jungle in Queensland? Martina, someone has given you some very bad advice: you are a whole lot better than this. It's as if a once-in-a-generation thoroughbred had turned up among a particularly diseased bunch of donkeys on Skegness beach. No disrespect to donkeys.

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