Another nightmare shopping trip to London; stuck in a queue in John Lewis behind hundreds of MPs desperately attempting to spend their yearly expenses on soft furnishings, kitchenware, rugs and flooring. I’d already run away in terror from the music department. “Technics? Are you out of your bloody mind? I want to play Arctic Monkeys,” one northern backbench Labour MP was screaming at a poor salesgirl. “And I’ve got £750 to spend. Now, where’s the Bang & Olufsen?” I left him to it.

Upstairs, someone who looked like Lembit Opik was buying lilac Egyptian cotton bedsheets and checking his House of Commons notebook to see if the budget stretched to a valance fit for a Cheeky Girl. Back in Romania, girls expect a nice cotton valance at the very least. And a £600 Heals coffee table, just like the rest of us have. And £550 for a Neff fridge-freezer, maybe with one of those swish ice-making things, and nearly £800 for a sideboard, preferably one with a handy little side-drawer where you can keep your receipts.

Oh, and Kennington, SE1, gets terribly hot in summer, don’t you think? That burning desert wind cruelly whips in from Littlehampton - so how about £300 for a spot of air-con. Okay? Good.

None of us knew how much our elected representatives were able to claim from us in the way of expenses until these details were revealed by force majeure late last week. For reasons we can only guess at, the MPs wished this sort of stuff should remain secret as if it were a matter of national security - like what goes on at Porton Down and the sort of deals we’ve struck recently with the Saudis about arms.

And so the fact that once they’ve stung us for the price of a flat in London, and can then sting us for another staggering £10,000 to do up the kitchen (pasta maker, little spotlights over the hob, nice blender for an additional few hundred quid, all claimable), they don’t have to tell us about it unless they want to through one of those Home of My Own features in the property sections. (Their allowance for flooring is £35 per square metre, by the way. I looked online for flooring which cost more than this and couldn’t find any. Maybe only marble is good enough - or otter skin or something.)

It is argued by some - largely MPs, oddly enough - that they do not get paid enough and so this is a sort of compensation. Well, maybe. But these nudge-nudge, wink-wink, under-the-counter deals on expenses, shielded from prying eyes, were done away with in the private sector years ago.

At the moment MPs get paid collectively what we think they are worth: if they believe they are worth more, then they should ask for it as everybody else must do, rather than surreptitiously claw it back via John Lewis.

*****

In the flat and dusty Midwest state of Kansas, a new species has been discovered. Pam Babcock is the world’s first half woman, half toilet. She sat herself down on the lavatory seat in the bathroom two years ago, declined to come out and her skin physically melded with the porcelain so that these two separate entities became one.

Apparently she gave no explanation for her behaviour and seemed perfectly happy sitting there. Her boyfriend passed her a sandwich every so often but otherwise refused to get too closely involved, which is usually the best course of action when women do inexplicable things. Eventually, though, he rang the police and said that there was “something wrong” with his girlfriend.

We’ve all been tempted to make similar calls, I suspect, but probably stopped ourselves, believing that to do so would be to compromise her independence and sovereignty. After all, it is every woman’s very real right to become a woman-toilet hybrid creature if she so wishes.

There is no suggestion that Babcock was confined to the toilet against her wishes and the two are still, as they say, an item. Perhaps they will mate and Pam will become the loving mother of creatures which are half baby, half potty. A useful innovation.

Dear Delia, half-baked won’t do

Delia Smith’s new cookery programme has caused great consternation among Britain’s vibrant community of cretins - people who have had their brains sucked out through a straw by aliens, or were born with the IQ of shrubbery. In her exciting recipe for tinned minced beef and frozen mashed potato, she devoted too little explanation to the problem of removing the mince from the tin.

As a result, up and down the country, cans of minced beef have been impotently hurled at walls or placed bodily in the microwave, thus demolishing entire blocks of new-build, middle-class housing.

Meanwhile, Delia - who once wrote some very good cookery books - has been championed as a crusader against effete and overelaborate cooking as if she were a cross between Mrs Beeton and Rosa Luxemburg.

But tinned mince and frozen mash isn’t “cooking” - it’s what is known as “reheating”. There is not a family in Britain too rushed for time or too stupid to boil a potato and then mash the bloody thing with some butter and black pepper. Even Alistair Darling’s family could do that after the orgasmic excitement of watching him deliver the budget. Maybe Delia’s next programme will be how to order in a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

West turns a blind eye to China’s brutal vision

If anyone knows where Teng Biao is, could they give his family a call? He was bundled into the back of a police wagon in Beijing recently and nobody has seen him since. He’s a human rights lawyer - which, in China, makes him about as popular with the authorities as an alcoholic Jew in Riyadh.

Teng is just one of the Chinese lawyers who have disappeared recently, or been roughed up by police thugs. The difficult journalists are in prison already - this vile, totalitarian country has by far the largest number of prisoners of conscience in the world. Protesters over China’s brutal repression in Tibet hope the world will sit up and take notice, with the Olympic Games in Beijing about to kick off.

Not a chance: western companies connive in Chinese censorship, the athletes agree not to criticise their hosts and western governments cravenly beg for trade and mention human rights only sotto voce. Those Olympic races will be run beneath a literal and metaphoric cloud of filth - Tibet, Teng Biao and thousands of others will remain imprisoned.

*****

This is going to be a busy year for Tony Blair. He has taken up a senior academic post at Yale University. Also, he wants to be president of the European Union. Plus he’s in charge of a plan to make Jews and Palestinians love each other. Now he is to head a team of climate change experts who will save the world from turning into something resembling a smoky bacon crisp.

Don’t you feel a lot safer as you tuck yourself into bed of a night, knowing that while you sleep Tony is zipping around the stratosphere like a rabid bat on amphetamine, saving Europe, the Middle East and the rest of the planet, pausing only to lecture a few students and rake it in from his consultancies at a private bank and an insurance giant?

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