Texas comes to Surrey

REJOICE, for enormous quantities of oil have been discovered in Surrey. In time, this could make us far less dependent on oil extracted from unstable parts of the world with civil strife, bizarre religious practices and wild tribal divisions. I refer, of course, to Scotland.

IT is all very well Transport Secretary Patrick McCoughlin suggesting traffic wardens should "take a more understanding attitude" and issue verbal warnings rather than fixed-penalty tickets. This sort of stuff sounds excellent in Whitehall committee rooms. In the real world, however, following the new guidelines, wardens would carry on dishing out tickets to little old ladies while giving kindly warnings to large gentlemen with tattoos.

GRISSOM, White and Chaffee. For those of us born into the space age, the names of the doomed crew of Apollo 1 echo in our memory. Gus Grissom, Edward H White II and Roger B Chaffee never even made it off the launch pad. They were burned to death in a cabin fire during training for their space mission in 1967. They died at ground level in man's ascent to the stars, bit-part players in the creation of a world which today takes space travel, satellite technology and mobile phones utterly for granted. Sometimes, when I hear people wittering endlessly into a mobile, I silently recite those three names. This is what you died for lads, for a world where one fat lady can block the DIY aisle in Wilko's, yattering to her mate on her mobile about which of three varieties of squeegee mops is best.

ANOTHER day, another round of a new political game, Terrify the Minion. With the party leaders racing around the country pretending to be normal (See! he drinks tea from a mug. Behold! he buys fish and chips), Ed, Dave, Nick and Nige can't be expected to answer every piffling issue at a moment's notice. So this campaign, more than any other I can recall, features lower-grade party members being plonked in a studio, trembling and wide-eyed like rabbits in headlights, and being asked for their views on what the Great Leader has said overnight. The fun begins when the Great Leader says one thing and the Great Leader's second-in-command says the direct opposite. So tell us, lowly minion, has the Great Leader got it right? Or has his deputy got it right? Put another way, which of the two most important people in your political career is a liar, a fool or a wazzock? Even over the airwaves you can taste the fear. I swear we will hear sobbing before this campaign is over.

SNORING, too, I fear. There can be no doubt that this is the least predictable General Election for decades. We could end up with England effectively being ruled by Scotland. And yet where's the buzz? In the pubs and clubs, is anyone discussing it? An entirely unscientific analysis at my local suggests the real issue troubling Joe Public is not the state of the nation but the state of our lawns.

NB: The above does not apply to Scotland where politics, post-referendum and pre-election, is a tinderbox. There are some angry, angry people up there.

THE lawn is green. You mow it. The lawn is yellow. How does that work?

WELCOME back to Nick Robinson the BBC's Political Editor who has been off sick having a cancerous tumour removed from his lung. It wasn't the same without him