Do plain girls get good A-level results? Or are all the As awarded to sylphs with impossibly thick waist-length blonde hair? Plus the occasional foxy Bollywood type for ethnic balance? All of whom enjoy jumping in the air in unison while clutching a piece of paper?

Just as the nigh-on perfect nature of the results arouses suspicion, surely it is statistically unlikely that among a half dozen 18-year-olds who’ve done well in their exams not a single one is less than gorgeous? Or does the photographer, arriving to capture the ecstatic gaggle for posterity, ask if the ugly one wouldn’t mind stepping aside? And isn’t that incredibly embarrassing?

I know women have always suffered from the sexist idea they can’t have both beauty and brains, yet going by recent front pages girls are now not allowed to have brains without beauty as well. Or maybe a sinister new master, or mistress, race is evolving.

Yo, dishwasher

Ed Wardle spent seven weeks alone in the Yukon wilderness before being airlifted out because he’d started talking to insects, scrawling “Be Strong” on his forearm and starving to death. I know how he felt.

In solitary confinement this Bank Holiday weekend, wife and children up north (Hull rather than the Canadian forest) I didn’t touch hot, let alone fresh, food for three whole days. Cheerios, cheese sandwiches and tins of tuna did the necessary.

Moreover, with my usual playmates, for a variety of reasons, unavailable, I began to talk to the cats. Not just the cats, the plants, the fridge, the dishwasher, and the dishwasher is frankly a bit thick.

The return to work couldn’t come soon enough. I bet they’re all there now — flora, fauna, white goods — hugely relieved the mad git has slung his hook.

Castration chorus

An unintentionally comic article in The Observer catches my eye. Analysing Nancy Garrido, alleged co-abductor of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard, Phillip Hodson, fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, considers various explanations for Garrido’s alleged actions.

Hodson examines the various tools of his trade — low self-esteem, Nietzschean free will, and so forth — before concluding perhaps none of these has any explanatory power after all and that “some people are, in the old-fashioned lingo, evil”. Well, precisely.

Hodson’s argument reminded me of the old Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch, in which an interviewer asks a no-nonsense copper, then an apparently archetypal social worker, what is to be done about delinquent youths. “Cut their balls off,” says plod. “Oh come on,” says the second character, “I know these kids, their families, their environments, their problems ... I think we should cut their balls off too.”

Chalk and cheese

Having interviewed both brothers, albeit separately and several years apart, I think of Noel and Liam Gallagher as epitomising the two faces of the British working class. Both men are poorly educated, capable of considerable self-discipline, witty and swear a lot, but there the similarity ends.

Noel is clever. Not just streetwise clever, analytically clever too. He is intellectually and spiritually curious, thoughtful, seeking, without jettisoning all aspects of it, to break free from the confines of his culture.

Liam, however, while possibly as gifted as his brother, is determined not to show it. Instead, he glories in a mulish bolshiness, happy to slump in front of daytime television, rejecting any notion of growth or experimentation, personal or professional.

Where Noel seeks middle-class approval (which is why he accepted Blair’s invitation to Downing Street in 1997), Liam looks you coldly in the eye and stares down everything he thinks you stand for. In short, Liam thinks Noel is a sell-out, Noel thinks Liam is a dinosaur. And Noel is right and Liam is wrong.

Speak up

A phrase both Gallaghers used a lot in our meetings was the plaintive “Do you know what I mean?”. You hear this mantra so often I don’t think it is fanciful to suggest many people have terrible difficulty making themselves understood. They’ve got something to say, but they don’t know how to say it. Not many people are stupid. A great many are inarticulate.

A suggestion: before schools even think of teaching pupils a foreign language, they should teach them properly to communicate in their own. Never mind French or Spanish, students should be taught to express their thoughts in clear spoken English. And then be given the chance to gain a qualification for it.

No matter how pretty they are.

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