History is made as British Prime Minister gets Pope's go-ahead to marry his guinea pig. And Queen sensationally found hiding in Leicester car park

Well, the cat’s is out of the bag: David Cameron has pulled it off. He has persuaded the House of Commons to allow a man to marry another man and is now free to make an honest man of Nick Clegg, though what fiery Spanish Mrs Clegg (a one-time flamenco dancer, apparently, who can rustle up a mean tortilla) will make of it is yet to be seen. But who will now still insist that Britain is living in the Dark Ages? There will still be the nay-sayers, but please walk with me on this one and give them all the traditional two-fingered salute.

Our Prime Minister is now free to marry his Deputy and the fact that they are both men is no longer a barrier. I understand they don’t much like each other and bicker all the time, but are staying together for the sake of their principles, so it could well be a real, traditional marriage. I trust this will end all the loose talk that we still send our social workers up chimneys and have no idea what to do with vegetables except boil them for several hours until we can be certain they are dead. (Apparently, the latest scientific thinking is that vegetables do actually feel pain and the Dutch and Germans are already considering banning the practice of boiling them to death, although – surprise, surprise – the French and Spanish are dead against any such ban and claim the practice is a vital part of their natural heritage, like killing geese by stuffing them full of corn and teasing bulls to death.)

There are still many benighted fools who insist that marriage was, is and always should be between a man and a woman, and that if God had wanted man to marry his pets, he would have made them far prettier (the pets, that is, not man). But you and I, as intelligent,

‘Don't raise your hopes, Norman. I've got a feeling that Brad Pitt is already spoken for’
© Mac/Daily Mail/Associated Newspapers/Whoever gets the money rational, drinking people, know full well that whether you are for or against man marrying his pets is a generational matter: those of us who grew up with the traditional view that ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’ are simply incapable of adapting to change, whereas our younger folk almost to a man and woman regard it as an example of progress at its finest. (Billy Bragg has already written a song about it.)



To be blunt: opposing this legislation seems to me quite sufficient grounds for introducing euthanasia throughout the European Union. It would demonstrate quite clearly that nothing can stand in the way of progress, but there would be the added benefits that our struggling Western economies would see pressure on their pension arrangements eased considerably and it would be a very welcome shot in the arm for Europe’s funeral parlour sector who have been having rather a lean time of it of late, what with advances in medicine and the average lifespan growing ever longer. So a cheer all round please: thank you Mr Cameron and all the best for your future union with Mr Clegg

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 It is a measure of just how momentous the ‘man can now marry his pets’ legislation is that a similarly quite astounding piece of news has passed almost unnoticed. We woke up on Monday morning to be warned that although scientists were still performing tests and were remaining ‘tight-lipped’ on the matter, it seemed likely that the Queen has been buried in a car park in Leicester and had been there for several days.

What was particularly concerning about the news – and despite official caution, there can be little doubt that it was true – was that there were no reports at all from any of her palaces, castles and other residences that she had been missing. None. Not a sausage. Her Majesty of The Cinque Ports, Her Regal Holiness and Britain’s Favourite Granny (to give her some of lesser-known titles) has been leading an increasingly quieter life these past years (the word is that all the training for her celebrated parachute jump last August over Hackney rather took it out of here – she is, after all, well over 50) and is said to like nothing better these days than to retire to the Buckingham Palace conservatory with a copy of Woman’s World and a mug of tea. You would have thought that after she had not been seen for several hours, someone in the Royal Household would have raised the alarm. But apparently not.

The good news is that although she was completely buried in the car park, she was not dead. One report even claimed she was rather annoyed to have been discovered, the suggestion being that she had engineered the whole incident in an attempt to lead some kind of private life, but in a statement The Palace (you can find it in full here) confirmed that The Queen had indeed been found in the car park in Leicester and would appear at a special Press conference later this week. No further explanation was given.

Prince Charles issued a statement saying ‘one is relieved at the happy outcome of this matter’. When approached by journalists, Prince Phillip simply told them to ‘fuck off’, and Prince Andrew was out of the country. In a joint statement Princes William and Harry said they were glad that The Queen was ‘all right’, and Prince William’s sister-in-law Pippa Middleton revealed she had already been in touch with publisher to write a book about the matter. Should be a humdinger!

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These things are, of course, always a matter of opinion, but as far as I am concerned the rot started when darts began to be televised. It got worse: last week, admittedly on daytime TV when most people are dead, we had a documentary on a day in the life of a bailiff.

 Tomorrow BBC2 (once seen as the ‘thinking man’s channel’ now just the channel for conceited folk who think they have a brain and will only watch BBC1 if they’re sure no one will find out) at 8pm there is Planning Process. This shows the ups and downs of life as a town planner.

This week ‘officers in the Borders consider an application to erect a shed – for 169,000 chickens – while a homeowner has been dumping rubbish in his garden for 20 years’. And our broadcasters have been dumping rubbish on TV for quite a bit longer. You’ll gather that I don’t bother watching I’m A Celebrity …, Big Brother, Cooking On Ice or Celebrity Traffic Warden. I prefer to watch paint dry. I shall keep you posted on further not-to-be-missed programmes on TV here in the UK. Should get foreign visitors to the blog green with envy.

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I keep and eye on ‘the stats’ of this blog (should that be the ‘stats’ or ‘the’ stats? I don’t know. Suggestions please and all silly ones will be acted upon) and I am astounded to discover that one particular entry (this one) has been viewed more than twice as much as the next most popular entry — 4,031 times. At the time of writing this — March 2, 2013, at 10.06am, this blog as been views 38,128 times, so more than 10 per cent of those viewings are of that one entry. Why? Well, when I delve deeper into ‘the stats’ and look at ‘referring sites’, a great many of them are visited by people tracking down a well-known picture (left) of Mandy Rice-Davies (‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he’). So it has occurred to me to include that picture (and this preamble explaining what I’m doing) in every blog entry in an attempt to drum up visitors and encourage them to take a look at some other entries. It helps that when the picture was taken, she was a rather attractive woman.