I've had my fill of diets

A FRIEND dropped in with the January glow that comes of being on the latest diet. This time it's the 4:3 diet which involves eating a lot on four days and a little on the other three. Or maybe it's the other way around. It hardly matters because, by the time this appears in print, there will probably be an even newer, better diet which instantly relegates all previous diets to the dustbin. All science changes its mind from time to time but nothing changes faster than the science of humans trying to lose weight. Apart, of course, from the science of climate change.

TALKING of climate (or is it simply weather?), after yesterday's tale of finding a dead baby bird which had fallen out of its nest, I was doing some gardening and turned over an old fence panel to find a peacock butterfly stretching its wings. Some January.

ROD Liddle, columnist, smoker and public irritant, was in full sneery mode in a radio discussion about e-cigarettes. He denounced these hi-tech alternatives to fags and said the glow reminded him of the electric flame-effect fires which "you used to see in lower middle-class homes." I was reminded of an appointment at a big house in London many years ago when a flunky ushered me into a waiting room. Above the fireplace hung a print of The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown and the fireplace itself was graced by the sort of electric flame-effect contraption damned by Rod Liddle as "lower middle-class." My interview was with the Duke of Edinburgh and the big house was Buckingham Palace.

"SANDI Toksvig? I had one of those after a day at the beach." And after that one-liner on Vic and Bob's House of Fools (BBC2), will we ever think of Ms Toksvig in quite the same way again?

I RECENTLY wondered whether the late Mikhail Kalashnikov felt any guilt about inventing that universal killing machine, the AK-47 assault rifle. Now we know the answer. It is revealed that last summer, six months before his death, Kalashnikov wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, telling of his "unbearable spiritual torment." The Church breezily assured him that: "When weapons serve to protect the Fatherland, the Church supports both its creators and the soldiers who use it." So it's fine to kill your fellow humans – so long as they're foreigners. Here endeth the lesson.

ED MILIBAND, writing in that Tory bible the Daily Telegraph, says he will "rebuild our middle class." So who's looking after the proletariat these days? How does that old song go: "The working class can kiss . . ."

AND if Miliband can build new homes, cut the gas bill, create real graduate jobs and make us all more prosperous now, why didn't he do it when he was in power? This week's charm offensive is intended to persuade voters to hand the car keys back to the people who crashed the car.

TWO flashbacks to a pre-computer age. The first was moving my laptop on to a new desk and being worried, for a split-second, that there wasn't enough room for the carriage return (a reference to ye olde typewriters; ask your grandmother).The second was a real, old-fashioned poison-pen letter. These days, we are so accustomed to nasty emailers and internet trolls that we forget some sentimental old charmers still prefer the traditional anonymous letter, complete with postage stamp, bubbling with venom and usually daubed in green ink, although this one was red. It came from someone who, because I once made a light-hearted criticism of cyclists in general, holds me personally responsible for fatal accidents involving cyclists, which explains the letter-heading, a black cross and "RIP". A classic of the genre. I may frame it.