Honestly, I would rather this week does not turn into an anti Lord Adonis spring festival and fayre, but I fear, inevitably, it will.

After all there's no reason to get personal. But what the hell.

NOW that Amy Williams has doubled Britain's gold reserves by riding a Japanese occasional table to victory in Vancouver you may well feel that we are out of, if not the financial woods, the dank undergrowth of recession.

Wrong. Apparently.

Look, I told you, it's the new climate change
Smithy Lane in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire may be Britain's most pothole-ridden road with more than one pothole per metre of road, drivers find themselves navigating the back of the moon when they may well have been expecting a bold as brass, salt of the earth Yorkshire thoroughfare.
Well come on, the council is doing its best to stay true to stereotype. It's too tight to spend owt.
Actually Kirklees Council says it has set aside £3.5m to fix an estimated 10,000 potholes.
Blackburn eat your heart out.
What particularly amused was that halfway down this leafy boulevard is a Smart dealer. A Smart dealer no doubt dreaming of being a Land Rover dealer

They used to say there were 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. Using this exciting information it was calculated just how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. We were never officially told. The people do not automatically have a right to know.

Ask Jack Straw.

Early in the 1980s a guy who worked in PR for British Telecom washed up at my office full of the excitement only generated by the white heat of technological innovation.
When he left I was the confused borrower of what could well have been a ballot box. With wires and an annoying beep.

It was, in fact, a mobile telephone. Mobile in the sense that it was so heavy if you dropped it from a window it was unlikely to stop falling before trains were disrupted on the Metropolitan line

Your eyes may be glued to Geneva and the latest developments on motoring's swing from horn section to Electric Light Orchestra but I would prefer to deflect your gaze to the stylish city of Milan and a more fundamental matter.

Potholes.

In the time honoured tradition of Driving Passion giving a motoring alternative view of the show circus I bring you Not Genva and the exciting story of how local authority traffic wardens, possibly the finest example of the alpha homo sapien available, bravely battled global warming in defence of the realm.

The Association of British Drivers, an august body which should be given its on spot in the Trooping of the Colours, marching in highly polished ceremonial goggles and tan string backed driving gloves, has drawn attention to the importance of four-wheel drive in bad weather.

They also point out that many more people would be driving off roaders were it not for the threat of being taxed to within an inch of destitution and having social services remove their children on the grounds of climate crime.

Right were off again lads.

Hot on the heels of the memorable but soon to fade away scrappage scheme comes the snappily named Plug-In Car Grant, part of cry-baby Gordon's £230m ultra-low carbon programme, or walking as many know it.

At first glance Ann Summers, the superior ladies hosiery retailer, and Peugeot are not two brands one normally expects to find in the same sentence.

And at second glance this is confirmed.
.