Remember the zip-slap?

RESEARCHERS in California have discovered that polar bears have evolved uniquely to live on a high-fat diet that would kill any human. This, according to one report, is why polar bears never need to diet. Another reason polar bears never need to diet is that they stand nine feet tall, have razor-sharp claws and nobody ever calls them a lardarse.

RICHARD Littlejohn's autobiography, serialised this week, is exactly what you'd expect of a 1950s childhood; poor but happy, jumpers for goalposts, nightmare dentistry, holidays in a Ford Prefect to Rhyll, etc. But he has failed to mention that 1950s phenomenon, the zip-slap. Any child who pulled his cardigan zip up and down more than three times was told: "Don't play with that,!" and smacked around the head. Strange but true.

THE Tories may have pulled ahead of Labour in the opinion polls but that it not enough to win an election. Britain's electoral boundaries have become so unfairly skewed against the Tories that David Cameron needs to win millions more votes than Labour to form a government. In the 2005 General Election the Conservatives won a majority of the vote in England – 35.7 per cent to Labour's 35.4 per cent – but Labour took 286 English seats and the Tories only 193. If this were happening in Zimbabwe or Ukraine, Ed Miliband would be denouncing it as an affront to democracy.

OF COURSE, if Scotland votes for independence, that great gang of Scottish Labour MPs will be removed from the Commons and we will probably never again see a Labour government at Westminster. But that's not going to happen. I believe no more than a third of those on the electoral role will vote for independence.

AND that's as much space as I'm giving Scottish independence today. To my surprise, I get fewer letters and emails on the Scottish referendum than just about any other subject. The only possible conclusion is that the English don't care.

GORDON Ramsay is taking some stick for his latest hair-transplant effort which involves removing hair from the nape of his neck. I sympathise. In 1983, before a TA camp, I couldn't find time for a proper army haircut and did a DIY botch-up, using scissors and a mirror. First I cut one side too short, then the other. By the time I got the neckline level it was half-way up my head. By chance, something called The Black Adder, featuring a medieval prince with a very similar haircut, had just been on telly. For the duration of that camp the lads called me Captain Blackadder. This was six years before Blackadder Goes Forth, set in the Great War, was made. One of my very few claims to fame is that I was Captain Blackadder long before Rowan Atkinson.

ANOTHER year older. My birthday haul includes: Fairtrade Divine 70 per cent dark chocolate, 1938 edition of Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Visconti di Modrone after-shave, M&S baggy old jeans for baggy old men, bottle of 18-year-old Spanish red, birthday card showing boats in Whitby harbour. How rich life is.

WHITBY. Sweet memories. In my life I have had three memorable portions of fish and chips. One was on the harbour wall at Whitby, another was on the harbour wall at Portree, Skye, and the other on the harbour wall at Lyme Regis. Our national dish is 10 per cent fish, 20 per cent stodge and 70 per cent ambience.

ON the day I opened my birthday presents, a piece of medical research was published proving that neither red wine nor chocolate extends our lives. I guarantee that within a few weeks another piece of medical research will prove, with equal certainty, that they do.