Where's the cat?

IT is 1,000 BC and you have just paid good money to the embalmer in Thebes to mummify a moggie to accompany you on your final journey to everlasting life. You expect a decent product. Roll on 3,000 years. Scientists in Manchester analyse 800 of these mummies and discover one-third of them are fakes, stuffed with nothing more than twigs and cloth. There was no consumer protection in ancient Egypt, (no Anne Robinson and Watchcat), so we can only speculate how many lost souls in the hereafter have spent the past 30 centuries asking in death, as they once asked in life: "Where's that bloody cat?"

DAN Jarvis. Right age, right face, right career, right medals, right name. It's a pity the ex-Para from Nottingham has decided not to stand as leader of the Labour Party, but who knows what the next five years might bring? Jarvis ticks all the boxes and is the sort of man who could win the 2020 election for Labour. They would be mad to let him slip into obscurity.

WHEN your team has taken a right old kicking, why not kid yourself that the winner will have a miserable time? At the Guardian, veteran Leftie Polly Toynbee snarls: "It's far from clear that Cameron will relish his victory. He has won it at a dreadfully high cost. He was forced to concede an EU referendum that risks taking Britain out of the EU." You reckon, Pol? Isn't it far more likely that Cameron knows full well the EU referendum will be a damp squib, a mere formality, delivering a decisive majority to remain in Europe but outside the eurozone? By the time the referendum comes around, the eurozone will be morphing into a true superstate with common laws and one continent-wide budget. Just by standing still on its borders, the UK will appear to have moved a bearable distance from the heart of the EU.

SO what will happen in Britain's long-promised in-out referendum on the EU? Simple. Cameron will claim he has negotiated a totally new relationship between Whitehall and Brussels and 60 per cent of Brits, who basically want a quiet life, will duly vote to stay in. You can cut this prediction out and keep it.

IF you're not entirely electioned-out, do catch The Vote (More 4), available for a few weeks on All4. It was staged at London's Dolmar Warehouse and the election-night performance was broadcast live in real time as the final 90 minutes ticked away to the close of polls. Set in a polling station and studded with stars including Catherine Tate, Judi Dench, Mark Gatiss and Timothy West, The Vote is a comedy based on what happens if someone is accidentally given two votes and the poll clerks spend the rest of the night trying to juggle the contents of the ballot box to make things right. By far the funniest 90 minutes of the entire campaign.

ANOTHER birthday. It's not a significant one (although the Beatles wrote a song about it), just another little step on the road to what Kipling called the Great Perhaps. When I was six I got it into my head that I was the immortal, all-powerful King of the World but the system was waiting until I was mature enough to hand me the global reins of power. This would obviously happen on a significant birthday. Significant birthdays came and went: 10, 15, 20, 21, 30, 40, 50, 60 and so on. Still no word. It is beginning to occur to me that I may not, after all, be immortal or omnipotent. Maybe I should face up to the reality of mortality and start mummifying a cat.