News that British Gas is ripping its customers with yet another price hike, this time a record-breaking 22%, allows us to reflect once again on the bone-chilling Nonspeak in which these cheery announcements are couched. Some of the extra revenue generated by this megawatt increase has already been spent taking out full-page press ads to explain it, under the headline 'Your questions answered'. This gives BG's customers the opportunity to have their fury assuaged, while customers of rival energy suppliers can wonder whether the paltry extra 15% they are having to stump up might be better spent on an energy company that takes the time to soothe its customers while they are in the middle of reading the news.

The hand-wringing over the need to import wholesale gas, not to mention the restrictive practices of the European gas market, are rather thrown into relief when you notice that BG is going to be charging an extra 22% for electricity too, thus comfortably topping the extra 4.7% EDF Energy is asking for that scarce commodity, or the 8% wanted by Scottish Power.

BG say that they are helping the elderly by offering a winter rebate, which is kind of them, although as this latest gouge is being applied in March, there'll be an awful lot of layout to go before the pensioners get any of it back. The ad goes on to say that you should beware of other companies offering cheap deals, saying that the rates offered may well rise again - a frightful outcome that BG will be only too familiar with, as its customers are about to fork out for their fourth increase in just over two years. January 2004 saw a 6% hike in gas and electricity. They managed to do a little better than that eight months later with 12.4% on gas and 9.4% on electricity. A year later, it was 14.2% on both, and now that awesome, pulse-quickening, even rather sexy 22%. Way to charge, guys! Respect!

What BG's ads don't say - and here something about lights and bushels springs to mind - is that the gas and electricity they are offering comes with the assurance that it is being provided by a company that was once run in the interests of public service only. Theirs isn't just any old gas. It is the Rolls-Royce of gas, done up in ribbons and bows, lovingly piped and assiduously quality-checked before it comes seeping through the burners to warm up your Venetian-style prawn linguine readymeal. And if they need to make a few extra million for their shareholders as it does so, well, who would be churlish enough to deny them? What's more, that direct debit arrangement means you won't even have the pain of writing an inch-thick cheque. They'll just discreetly help themselves from your bank account on a date that's convenient to them.

Those reckless enough to consider going downmarket, meanwhile, will no doubt soon be hurtling in the direction of www.simplyswitch.com, where you can compare prices among a range of suppliers in your area, and perhaps even change to a cheaper one. But then some people have no shame.

At last the new year has begun.

Yours may have started on January 1st, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, but mine never does that. I spent that infernal night alone when a hot date with an old pal and some intoxicants fell through as she succumbed to flu (the human strain, not the avian). As the magic midnight hour approached, I was blasting the music system in an empty building, accompanying the molten exhilaration of Idlewild's 2002 near-miss, 'You Held The World In Your Arms Tonight', with an abstemious bottle of Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon. As the clock ticked down, I lurched into the bedroom in time for Jools Holland's countdown, immediately after which my dear friend Marc Almond, recovered from a motorbike disaster and a hole in his skull, performed a jumpin', big-band version of his 25-year-old mega-hit, 'Tainted Love'. After that, it was pretty much downhill.

The last weekend of January brought the Chinese new year, a chance to 'kung-hay-fat-tsoi' with my pride-and-joy and start all over again, if only he hadn't been in Hong Kong for a family reunion. So I nibbled wistfully on a moon cake (the kind with a bit of yolk-yellow peanutty gunge in the middle, to reflect the bitterness of solitude), and kept watching the skies. The Daily Mail astrologer Jonathan Cainer had advised me I was about to have the Best Year of My Life, and although I pretty much think astrology is horse-poo, I am advised that a word from him counts as good authority. As the weeks have crawled by, however, with each fresh provocation jostling the last for pre-eminence, I feel an urge to place a call to Mr Cainer and ask him to define 'best'.

Last weekend though, the hoped-for relief arrived, not quite on the scale of Mafeking to the disinterested observer, I grant, but good enough for me. My neighbour has taken down her Christmas decorations.

Is there any sicklier token of time's relentless tread than festive adornments that have outstayed their occasion? Slanting winter sun picked out the purple baubles on the massive tree, the tinsel was way past the twinkling stage and had begun to to pant feebly for want of being thrown into a box in the wardrobe, while the Christmas stocking hung at the window was a daily affront to passers-by, grim memento of the gifts they didn't receive - and even grimmer perhaps of the ones they did. I note though that, even while the fairy-lights have gone, the tree itself still stands. Denuded, but not quite stripped of its dignity, it is possibly now serving the place of a token of springtime renewal, the reinvestiture of hope, a cheery defiance of the bare plane trees across the street. I can't bear to ask.

At any rate, there is at last the feeling of knuckling down to the year ahead, or the eleven-twelfths of it that remain to us. As each day brings bracing new challenges, it is at least a comfort to know that those around me have now joined me in an awareness that the game - like we it or no - is on.

Men's Fitness magazine, for want of anything better to do, has established that Bradford is the fattest city in the UK. In a report compiled from sales of junk food, incidence of heart disease and levels of gym membership, the home of Hockney, Delius and the Brontes has now been named and shamed as the Lardbucket capital of our adipose isle.

Residents of Bradford do not reap. Neither do they sow. All they do is sit on their fat arses necking fast food and booze, the notion of 'exercise' a mere mythical chimera to them. Reflecting on the ghastly findings, MF deputy editor Michael Donlevy sent up an anguished lamentation: 'You can ban smoking in pubs and arrest drunks, but who is to stop people gorging on junk food in their own front rooms?'

This rather begs a question. Would it not be possible to establish a national inspection network, rather in the manner of those eminences grises who apparently choose deliberately awkward times to doorstep people who haven't got TV licences? In a warning ad for the system, we see a lonely old dear in her kitchen, abstractedly stirring cake mixture, stopped in her tracks by the doorbell. Apart from a haunted glance in the direction of the sound, she doesn't move a muscle. This is a surveillance world in which anybody who comes to the door might be about to ask you a question you can't answer, haul you off or do you in, like thugs posing as meter-readers.

In a world run by the fitness industry, there would be a similar army of inspectors who might at any stage have the right of entry to your home, where they would hope to catch you in the very act of unwrapping a Kit-Kat or stuffing down crisps, impound the offending materials, and issue a caution or a spot-fine. Initially concentrated in Bradford obviously, these teams would eventually be rolled out across the country, the data they collect being stored electronically on our ID cards. It would only need a small modification in biometric technology to enable scanners to recognise not just iris colour and facial shape, but our body mass index too. Anybody above the crucial 25% BMI cutoff point could then be denied access to social services, medical care, even passenger aircraft or theme-park rides (where their obscene bulk can only be accommodated in two seats rather than one).

Fat is such an ugly word, but if the inhabitants of Bradford know what's good for them, which seems highly unlikely, they'll mend their sedentary ways as fast as their inflated physiques will allow. Either that, or just take out gym membership. Whether you actually go near the treadmill is up to you, but the annual subscription itself will help to bring down the shameful statistics next time the fitness inspectors come snooping.

Stuart Walton 

Postmodern jokes are becoming a bit post-postmodern these days. One wonders how long it will be before jokes come back, and whether we'll understand them if they do. In the meantime, there's plenty more mileage to be had from savage irony, which turns out to be as nutritious as spinach in today's televisual world.

The emergence of Chantelle Houghton as the 2006 winner of Endemol's Celebrity Big Brother (Channel 4) adds yet another new convolution to the intricate masquerie of reality TV. It often has to be explained to me who 75% of the participants are on any show with 'celebrity' in the title. I haven't ever read the right columns, and it's far too late to start now. This one's famous because she has unconvincingly denied having an affair with a Premiership footballer. Another's fame derives from the ten months he spent in a band that had one middling hit before splitting in acrimony. But then the whole point is that, if they were more famous than this, they wouldn't need to go on celebrity reality shows. It isn't quite true that nobody at the peak of their renown is involved, but there is a disproportionate admixture of the ex-famous and the half-famous mixed in with the soap stars and Germaine Greer.

Chantelle is neither ex- nor semi-famous. She is pre-famous, or at least she was until this week. Now she is famous. And will fairly soon, no doubt, be ex-famous. What matters is that it doesn't matter. Celebrity reality shows are deconstructing the whole concept of fame in a more ruthlessly efficient way than even spoof news shows ever managed. When Brass Eye proved that you could get the famous to demean their fame by credulously giving their names to any apparently worthy cause - no matter how blindingly preposterous - a complex and instructive point was made about the nature of being in the public eye, the opportunities and responsibilities it throws up, and most of all, what attitudes it leads the famous to have towards the nonentities. Celebrity Big Brother isn't half as vindictive as that, but appears to be mining fresh and surprising nuances from the whole grubby business of the production and reception of fame.

A group of the famous have been made, over the course of the last few weeks, to accept a happy, smiley girl off the streets as one of their own. Her victory perhaps shouldn't surprise us because we like an underdog, especially one from Essex, and while we quite enjoy razor-tongued cattiness when delivered with the Scouse aplomb of a cosmetically reconstructed ex-pop star, we ultimately like to see politeness triumph over rancour, and sweet smiles win the day over comedy lips that look like they'd burst if you sprinkled salt on them. Plus, it's not hard to see which way the lad vote went on Friday night.

But let me get this right. A non-celebrity has won the celebrity version of Big Brother. Presumably she wouldn't now be eligible for the other Big Brother series in the summer, the one that features non-celebrities who are on their way to becoming celebrities. I don't pretend I don't understand this, and nor do I think it a force for evil in a world with Kim Jong-Il in it. While I have no interest whatsoever in sitting through the nightly transmissions from the Endemol house, it's less because I think it's beneath me, and more because it feels like being stuck in a lift with people who won't shut their yaps. Julie Burchill puts a lack of interest in Big Brother down to rancid snobbery. 'Is it all too too ghastly for you, darling?' she asked me last year. Not ghastly, just brain-shreddingly boring. George Galloway has not become one iota more interesting or forgivable for having engaged in an act of public humiliation with Rula Lenska.

If I'd had £1.50 to waste on a text vote last night, I'd have voted not for Pete Burns, whose 1980s turn in the sun was indeed a thing of beauty, but for that boy I'd never heard of from the Ordinary Boys, whose songs I've never heard. I only saw the final, by the way. But then that of course is the other post-postmodern thing about reality TV. You don't have to watch it to know what's happening. This too is an advance for contemporary culture.

A Whale in the Thames



They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. (Jonah, 2:8)


The unprecedented appearance of a bottlenose whale in the Thames in the first month of the year would undoubtedly have been seen as some form of portent in times gone by. Like storms of scarlet hailstones, or untoward silver showers of mackerel, it would have provoked mingled excitation and foreboding. It would have spoken of the Lord's benediction, or his wrath, depending on whether the temper of the times was benign or malcontent.

In Christian myth, the whale is a fiend, known as the devourer of Jonah in the Old Testament story (Jonah, chapters 1-2), still cited as fact by Jesus (Matthew12:40). In the early years of the twentieth century, an English Jonah, a fisherman named John Killam, was alleged to have been swallowed by a whale in the South Atlantic, and later safely disgorged when the beast was harpooned by his shipmates on the Star of the East. After medical attention, he went on to live a normal life, although it is said his skin was stained a bluish-white, supposedly by cetacean gastric acid. The tale was thought to give retroactive credence to the biblical myth, until it was given the lie by Killam's wife in an interview with a sceptical journal, the Expository Times, in 1907.

The hardy persistence of Jonah stories reflects a wish to believe in a benign form of predation, in a utopia in which ravening beasts, having swallowed us whole, will obligingly spew us forth once more, largely unharmed if perhaps a little digested. A rorqual whale that ran aground off the Norfolk fishing port of Gorleston in 1891 was put on public display for several days after beached exhaustion had finished it off. It was then stuffed and carried in triumph to the London Aquarium and thence around the country, so that all could see its devouring days were done. The Thames whale, thrashing its way under Chelsea Bridge and beaching on the shingle beneath Battersea power station, lay at risk only of the indignity of being rolled on to inflatable cushions for re-immersion, rather than succumbing to the taxidermist's tender mercies.

As onlookers crowded the bridges to view the whale's progress, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society cautioned against the temptation of the news media to give it a name. 'It would be too painful if it passes away.' And lo, before very long, it passed away. A whale in the capital is no longer a divine portent, only the potential star of a real-life animatronic movie unfolding before us. This, and not the disproof of some whiskery old maritime yarn, is the true evidence of secularisation.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10940878/