Daniel Hannan, MEP, slagging off the Prime Minister to his face. Damn he's good.

I can do 'notes' and it's more or less okay. But there's no eye contact and it doesn't work well in terms of delivery.

I can do 'noteless' but there are ums and ahs throughout and some of the content gets 'deep sixed'.

I wish I could do this!

You don't choose your neighbours

Mind you, you can't blame the entire country for the existence of Fox News either. That would be like blaming Canada for the existence of Don Cherry (although he never claims to be bringing you the news, either).

This exchange has allegedly provoked an official complaint which seems a shame.

It wastes a perfectly good opportunity to rise above these bozos in dignified silence.

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Monday, March 23rd, 2009

There’s no avoiding it.

The story of Jade Goody’s death in hospital yesterday morning is on the front page of every newspaper today.

It was certainly in the minds of the younger women in my congregation at our Mothering Sunday service yesterday morning: that two small children are now without their mother on a day when our children were distributing posies to their mums and grannies in church.

How much water has gone under the bridge in the last few years with the story of this woman’s life? Gallons – tons - heaps, it seems. Whether you were turning the television on to watch a story about Jade or turning the television off when some story appeared you couldn’t avoid being party to it.

We’ve witnessed the “usual celebrity business” of making sure that a name and a face get as much air time as possible. Of late, though there was a very determined attempt on Jade’s part to provide stability and a future for her children which she could not – for a variety of reasons – have provided otherwise - a series of very normal and understandable attempts at putting things in order. She wanted to end her life as a married woman. She wanted to complete her chapter with herself and her children baptized.

In the long run we all end up trying to do more or less the same thing when faced with our mortality. The threat of death has always been a great leveller and a source of accelerated maturity.

We all want to ‘sign off’, so to speak, with our I’s dotted and our T’s crossed – with something in the bank and the education of our children assured. And that is the done thing.

At the end the cameras were excluded from the room and the ‘blow by blow’ reporting ceased. There remained simply an individual trying to make sense of her life and struggling very hard to leave things in order for her children.

And she seems to have managed that rather well.