The unkindest profession?

TOMORROW sees another screening of The Eagle (Film 4) , based on Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 novel of a Roman legion's lost standard. There is a persistent rumour that the film-makers wanted to use the book's full title, The Eagle of the Ninth, but were worried the Yanks would think it was about golf.

A FEW days without a razor and Graham Norton gets gravitas. Hosting the Baftas and looking like a dead ringer for George V and Tsar Alexander, he could have passed himself off as one of the Windsors. What a difference a beard makes.

I PICKED up an old copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and for the first time in more than 30 years, re-read Douglas Adams's description of the Guide. He wrote that it was "a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about 100 tiny flat press-buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice." When Adams was writing that way back in 1979, mobile phones were barely invented. Adams, who died 14 years ago, attributed the Guide to hugely advanced civilisations capable of interstellar flight. It turns out he was describing perfectly the smartphone and the internet.

STILL the analysis goes on. Yet no-one, as far as I have seen, has commented on what for me was the abiding image of the General Election. It was the momentary expression on the face of Justine Miliband as she accompanied her defeated, dejected, downcast husband back home after the worst day of his life. It was pure relief.

AND who's surprised? What a brutal, nasty profession politics can be. You start the day as deputy prime minister or Leader of the Opposition. You end it as just another backbencher with no office, no driver, no car, no authority and feeling personally responsible for some of your best mates losing their seats. And just when you'd like to go home and cry yourself to sleep, you are ordered to stand next to the Cenotaph, shoulder-to-shoulder with that unbearable Tory toff and that wee Scottish harridan, the people who have ruined your dreams, and try to look brave. Gawd, what a job.

BRILLIANT forecasts of our time. I wrote on May 1: "I would not be surprised if Cameron won an outright majority."

SADLY, I spoiled the above prediction by adding that nor would I be surprised if Miliband won or the Coalition was re-elected. Too many horses, too many bets.

IT was the perfect 48 hours for the Tories. First, their election triumph. Next, the flag-waving patriotism of the VE-Day celebrations. And finally, the icing on the cake, rent-a-mob went on the rampage in Whitehall, injuring honest coppers and scrawling "**** Tory Scum" on the women's war memorial. So these are the sort of people who oppose a democratically elected Conservative government, eh?. That one demo was worth a thousand party-political broadcasts for the Tories. David Cameron must have gone to bed in Downing Street a very happy man.

"PUT down the siccsors David." Anti-cuts placard in the Whitehall demo. Yeah, we don't need no edukashun.

BEFORE long the weekend's self-proclaimed anarchists, class warriors and levellers will appear before the magistrates I wonder how many will turn out to be posh middle-class kids who will be defended in court by wealthy barristers who went to public school with Daddy.