Cost of living crisis? What crisis?

DECEMBER already. Keep this web address for Xmas. It's a quiz on the AbeBooks website to find which fictional literary character you most resemble. Thus, my wife is Eowyn, the warrior princess from Lord of the Rings, and my daughter is Harry Potter's pal, Hermione. With uncanny accuracy, the quiz likened me to that rarest of things, another journalist who never uses a mobile phone. Modesty forbids.

OKAY, if you insist. I'm Superman.

AT LAST the security on my computer is kicking into life. The email, allegedly from BT, which arrived a few days ago with the heading: "We're switching your BT account to broadband" has been dumped in the spam basket. It's a scam. Bin it.

IF SOMEONE were using your name to run a criminal activity, wouldn't you be outraged? Wouldn't you do everything in your power to alert people, if only to protect your reputation? BT must be well aware that criminal gangs are using its name and logo on an industrial scale to extract personal information such as passwords. Yet, although there is a warning on the BT website, I can't find a single public alert issued by BT in the past two years. Are they worried about damaging their product by drawing attention to the fact that a BT email account (or any email account) carries certain risks?

FOR Labour, all hardship is the result of its favourite slogan, "the cost of living crisis." But while no-one denies that inflation is outstripping wage rises, are we really worse off than we were five years ago, as they claim? Council tax has been frozen for years and mortgage repayments are low. If the cost of living is such a crisis, why are the money experts forecasting that this Christmas will see a 3.5 per cent rise in shopping compared to last year, breaking the £40 billion barrier? It is a reckless politician or pundit who asks: "Crisis, what crisis?" but many folk are not so hard-up as Labour would like us to believe.

AND yet some, undeniably, are in despair. How odd that Hull, nominated last month as UK City of Culture, is now revealed as having the highest level of serious debt, with 43 per cent of its people struggling to meet repayments. England is a divided nation, but in an age bombarded by online gambling and payday loans, the gap is not so much between rich and poor as between those who can manage their money and those who cannot. In Whitehall and Hull, how many of the sort of people who campaign for City of Culture status have the slightest inkling of the debt and desperation just a few streets away from the theatres?

INCIDENTALLY, does anyone else find the old biddies in the Wonga ads vaguely sinister? These animated puppets are presumably meant to look like kindly grans. Yet the moment they appeared, I found myself reminded of those evil old bags who were rounded up in Germany after the war and exposed as concentration-camp guards. I couldn't figure out the connection. Then I remembered that one of the wickedest female guards, hanged in 1946 for war crimes, was Jenny-Wanda Barkmann. Wanda / Wonga. You see the problem?

WHAT a piece of work is a cat. Our tabby entered the living room, went into full hunting mode and slipped silently behind the sofa, emerging a few seconds later with a large moth on his paw. It took off and the cat enjoyed a few moments of play until the moth, rather unsportingly, flew behind a radiator. What sort of creature is it that knows exactly how to react to the minutest rustle of a moth's wing but when a human bellows: "Get off that bloody table, you fleabitten old moggie!" comprehends nothing.