Excuses

I was watching a tv programme last night about a fat woman who was a spendaholic. She was £27,000 in debt on various credit cards and had a £14,000 a year job as an office manager. The idea of the show was to send in a psychologist and a "lifestyle guru" to sort her out. Why do people subject themselves to this kind of humiliation?

The lifestyle guru was your standard low intelligence hippie woman spouting a combination of utter cobblers and the bleeding obvious. This is to be expected, all "lifestyle gurus" are the same in my experience. I had higher hopes for the psychologist.

The psychologist started by digging deep into the subjects childhood. No surprises there. He found out about all sorts of problems she had as a child and came to the conclusion that her addiction to shopping was down to depression and guilt.

Now I'm no psychologist (although I do have an A level) but here's what occurred to me. If you have someone doing something stupid that is threatening to ruin the rest of their life, you need to get them to see that they have to take responsibility for their actions. Does that sound hard? I watched this psychologist giving his patient ready-made excuses for her behaviour and came to the conclusion that it was precisely the wrong thing to do. Just thought I'd run that by you guys.

Talking of A levels, results are out today and they are up for the 24th, yes 24th year in a row. Now just under 25% of students are getting the top grade. That's an attendance certificate, not a qualification. The authorities are threatening to add a new top grade above the existing A-grade, called A*. The more cynical amongst us are wondering if that's just so that next year the grades can't be meaningfully compared with this year's and the annual argument about standards slipping will be avoided.

Last night I elected to record Dr Who instead of trying to watch it while feeding the boy. There are two reasons for this; firstly, I can never hear or watch the tv while my son is struggling with his bottle, and secondly, he always appears to be more difficult to feed while the Dr Who is on. The up shot was that I recorded 45 minutes of static and missed the war with the daleks completely. What a knob!

Penn Jillette says the way to deal with those Christians who knock on your door and ask you to talk about Jesus is to answer the door stark naked and invite them in. He says you get put on some kind of black list after that and you never hear from them again. I thinK the idea has possibilities.

I've attempted to speak to someone at the job centre every day sonce Monday to inform them that I am now working again. So far I have been treated to endless busy tones, a "number unreachable" message, a bimbo on the switchboard who can't help me at all, and about 30 mimutes of Vivaldi in a continuous loop. I have not however been able to inform them that I'm working. I have discovered that "they don't do e-mail" and that I can write to them in Cornwall by snail mail. Wouldn't it be ironic if I had to take a day off work to inform the job centre that I'm working again!