...and now back to a long-neglected and sorely-missed topic, namely Things What We Like Putting In Our Stomachs. Today, an ode to the humble Hula Hoop, a bag of which I'm munching right now. They are of the BBQ Beef variety, and despite having no genuine discernible beef content and the nutritional value of window putty, they are quite delicious. You wouldn't have thought it, but they are. The flavour is volatile, mustardy and tongue-titillating (helped, no doubt, by the generous heapings of of salt) and does, in fact, taste fairly convincingly of beef. The aftertaste is lingering, but in a pleasant way, rather like a fine Semillon Chardonnay that's been swum in by a cow. There, I've finished the packet, and already I'm tempted to go and get another one. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Bloody bad for you, I expect, but truly the king of the junk food shelf.

So I'm perching on the edge of my daughter's bed last night and reading, for the sixteen billionth time, that excellent children's tale "The Elephant and the Bad Baby" by Elfrida Vipont. If you don't know the book, basically there's this Elephant, right? (He gets a capital letter for being interesting.) And he meets a baby, and they go round some shops grabbing buns and sweets, and getting chased by the various shopkeepers. ("And the Elephant said, 'Would you like a pie?' And the Bad Baby said, 'Yes.'") It's an allegory about politeness. It's a vital part of the bedtime routine. She gets twitchy otherwise.

So anyway, I get to the part where the Elephant and the ice-cream man and the butcher and the grocer and the lady from the sweet shop etc. etc. all start having a go at the poor kid for forgetting to say "please", and I'm thinking - this little guy is going to have serious pyschological issues, okay? I mean, just look at them all. Look at their staring, frowning, judging, beetroot-red faces. Look at their pointing, accusing fingers, the bastards. He's only 18 months old by the look of him, for God's sake, and he's already being labelled a BAD BABY just for being a tad peremptory. He's going to be in therapy for years. Look, even the Elephant is pointing, with his big, grey, accusatory trunk. You're bad, he's saying.

And then it hits me. The Bad Baby is a stooge. He's been set up.

While all this is moral didacticism is going on, the ice-cream man and the butcher and the grocer and the lady from the sweet shop have all conveniently forgotten that the bloody Elephant has just spent the last ten pages nicking all their goodies. The three-ton tea-leaf has picked up some poor kid off the street and gone round half-inching a few pounds of tasty treats, and then dropped the poor wee tyke right in it by making a quick rabble-pleasing speech to the assorted tradespersons about the importance of manners, thus diverting all outrage toward his unwilling patsy. And just look at the Elephant. Look at his shifty, beady eyes. You can see the festering evil lurking within. He is a Bad Elephant. Having cheerfully shifted the blame onto the little fella, the larcenous pachyderm is doubtless about to bugger off sharpish and trade his ill-gotten booty for a giant economy-size bag of crack. And does he get told off? Does he have to face the shaming consequences of his pie-, bun- and lollipop-thieving activities? Does he bollocks. He gets away scot-free. What sort of moral message, I ask you, is that sending to our impressionable youth? It's okay to steal, as long as you're polite about it?

No. The message should be this: don't talk to strange elephants.

Personally I shall be reading Sarah a slightly modified version this evening, wherein the ice-cream man and the butcher and the grocer and the lady from the sweet shop et al get hold of the Elephant afterwards, drag him round the back of the sweet shop, and kick seven kinds of shit out of him. He's got to learn.

I am now a citizen of the second-smallest country in the world, namely the fast-growing nation of Lovely. It's bigger than the Vatican, apparently (admittedly not that difficult, since there are some youth centres bigger than the Vatican, but you get the idea). Pledge your allegiance to the King today!

IT techie alert...

Thought I should pass on awareness of a couple of extremely useful tools which I've come across in the last couple of days:

• yousendit.com - upload and send a file of any size up to 1GB to any email address. Free.
• tinyurl.com - turn enormously long URLs (e.g. most links to Microsoft) into persistent, easily-readable ones. Also free.

</public service broadcast>

My head hurts. My tongue feels like sandpaper coated in badger pee. At some point in the night my intestines have clearly been taken out and used as a tug-of-war rope by competitive giants. This morning there was a piece of twig sticking out of my left leg, which I can only assume was someone's idea of a joke and was doubtless truly hilarious at 1am, but which I confess has now lost some of its appeal.

This is what happens when England wins the Ashes and someone suggests a celebratory drink.

It was a different bloke! No more am I to have my gums hacked to shreds by the Nostril Woman! But before we all begin dancing happy jigs of unbridled joy, be warned - her replacement is not a man to be dealt with lightly. Indeed, I survived only barely, mostly by use of the esoteric Zen meditation and mind-over-body techniques taught to me long ago by the Mystic Ancient Masters of Tibet (I used to do sandwiches for their Bridge club on Thursdays). In the end I escaped with my body, if not my sanity, intact.

The main problem was the smell. Not halitosis, but B.O. I'm talking at least 800 mAr^* on the stench scale. This guy could clear a caveful of Al-Qaeda fugitives faster than a precision-guided smartbomb. My eyeballs started shrivelling the minute he came closer than four feet. The dead folks in the nearby church graveyard were getting up, knocking on the surgery door and complaining. By the time I was ensconced in the Throne of Oral Agony and he was peering myopically into my cringing jaws, I was semi-conscious, and only avoided a complete blackout by breathing though the soles of my feet.

The other thing I couldn't help but notice, even through the sense-fogging haze of the mystic ancient Floating Yak breathing technique, was the bloke's moustache. It didn't look real. I mean, this thing couldn't possibly be real, it looked so ridiculous. Imagine Groucho Marx crossed with a really exotic caterpillar, you know, the Amazon-rainforest kind with four hundred legs and enough toxins in its bloodstream to kill a hippopotamus, and you'll get some idea. So I'm lying there with this hairy and patently fake moustache about an inch from my nose, and it begins to dawn on me that the damn thing is going to fall off. It's actually going to drop right off the guy's face, land in my throat and choke me to death. Frankly, I don't know what would persuade any self-respecting false moustache to perch precariously upon the upper lip of a sweaty dental hygienist and dangle itself over a patient's razor-sharp incisors. I imagine it would feel much as did the heroic Skywalker, about to be cast into the cavernous maw of Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi. Perhaps it was some sort of specially-trained stunt or ninja moustache. Anyway, I managed to prevent the bushy monstrosity from detaching itself by staring at it balefully, thus shaming it into remaining in place.

Oh, yeah, and my teeth are now sparkly white.

^*mAr = milliArijunas. The Arijuna is the S.I. unit of stench, and is named after a cataclysmically smelly bloke I used to go to school with. In the decade-plus since I left high school, I have travelled to the far corners of the planet, and I swear I have never yet encountered anything quite as smelly as Arijuna. Therefore, most stinks are measured in milliArijunas, as one whole Arijuna is simply too large.

Today, another visit to the legendary and dreaded dental hygienist, she of the bushy nostrils and the earwax-melting halitosis.

I've been trying to put it off for months. I postponed several previous appointments citing medical reasons (i.e. panic attacks). Then the dental surgery started sending me reminder notices, which I threw in the bin. They persisted in sending the letters, in tones of increasingly ominous Nostradamus-like doom and portent, foretelling great suffering should I fail to pitch up and submit my mouth to their hellish torturements. I phoned them up and told them that I'd moved to John O'Groats, become a druid, and had all my teeth ceremonially removed and replaced with birch twigs. They sent me another reminder letter exhorting me to rejoice in the opening of their first North-East Scotland branch, and extolling the virtues of their new birch polishing treatment.

I considered emigrating to Peru, but knew they would have poncho-clad dental agents, clutching briefcases full of horrible tools, waiting for me at Lima International. I considered faking my own death, but knew they wouldn't buy it. I briefly considered causing my own actual death just to shut them up, but these guys are clearly omnipresent and I wouldn't put it past them to have bat-winged celestial dentists at the ready to poke, prod and otherwise maul my oral crevices, deceased or otherwise.

So I have no choice. I'm off in twenty minutes. Once more unto the breach, dear friends. Remember me kindly.

Earl Grey tea, right? It's crap. It's flowery, over-aromatised, poncey crap. I can't understand why anyone in their right mind would actually drink the stuff, except that it's got some upper-class cachet and apparently that's reason enough. Ugh. Never tried it? Well, imagine, if you will, taking a bunch of daffodils and a couple of freesias, mushing them up nice and hard and soaking them in a mug of water with (and this is the important secret ingredient) just a hint, no more than a quarter-teaspoon, mind you, of petrol and then you have some idea of what Earl Grey tea tastes like. Allegedly the distinctive flavour comes from bergamot, but that's just a smokescreen. Honestly, it's petrol. Trust me.

Incidentally, Earl Grey tea is named after Charles Grey, who was British Prime Minister from 1830 to 1834, and who abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. Never let it be said that I don't teach you anything.

Have just downloaded the mind-boggling Google Earth, which (for anyone who doesn't already know) is a detailed photo-replica of our lovely big planet, crammed nice and tight into a few hundred megabytes and installed on your PC, and ready to do some serious spying on neighbouring countries' secret military bases. OK, maybe not. But it's still pretty unbelievable. It's got elevation data, so you can rotate Manhattan in the vertical plane and see the skyline. It's got driving directions, including a preview function which'll 'fly' you along the calculated route. But the real killer is the sheer level of detail available. I mean, I've just seen a picture of my mum & dad's house, big enough so you can practically see the garden azaleas, taken from space. From fucking space. How cool is that??