Chris Martipellow

Anyone else think Chris Martin is gradually turning into Marti Pellow? Or is nobody else old enough to bear the cross of remembering Wet Wet Wet? If you need to be told, the latter were a cheesy Scottish pop group fronted by the pretty boy Mr Pellow, who made a career out of pouting, gurning and tossing his carefully tousled locks for the Laydeez. Many of whom were sufficiently taken in to provide Marti and the boys with a very substantial income, for a while.

And now it seems the diffident young man who warbled "Yellow" is heading the same way, his amour propre presumably buoyed up by being shacked up with a Hollywood starlet. Designer stubble, writhing for the camera, pouting and gurning. "Look laydeez, I'm a rock god". Oh well, it must be tempting...

Smoke-free Amsterdam

I've spent a fair amount of time in Amsterdam lately so I've been conducting a straw poll of bar staff's opinions on the UK-style smoking ban that came into force on July 2nd. Purely for research purposes you understand. I am now in a position to report. I enclose my findings in quotes because their response is unanimous and almost identically expressed: "It's schit. All the staff in this bar smoke. Before, we could have a cigarette inside and carry on working. Now we have to take a break. And the customers all want to smoke too, so they're outside and the atmosphere inside the bar has died".

I hear conflicting reports about what's happening in the city's well-known coffeeshops, ranging from no change to air-conditioned cubicles for the staff to smoking spliffs being allowed, but on no account with tobacco - pure ganja only! You know Gobbag never frequents places like that so I can't comment on any of these rumours, including the last piece of entertaining lunacy but I can tell you that there is a lot more weed being smoked on the streets, which was banned anyway. What's happened to the Dutch?

Airports

Everyone has grumps about airports, mostly to do with the fact that they aren't as convenient as teleporting and you don't get treated like the royalty (sorry, that should read "celebrities") everyone seems to think they are now that Andy Warhol's famous prophecy has come true.

My complaint today, however, is more specific. It's about the people you share the lounge, gate and flight with. It's not pissed-up Brit holidaymakers. It's not fat, braying Americans. It's the 20- and 30-something Jack-the-lads in cheap suits and expensive mobiles, gobbing off about their triumphant business trip as if they were something between Bill Gates and Gordon Gekko (did the writers of Wall Street imagine we wouldn't know a gecko was a type of lizard? If they wanted to indulge in that kind of crude sub-Dickens literalism why didn't they just get on with it and call him Sam Snake?) Said mobiles rarely get used for a phone call of course - their purpose is to illustrate how expensively you can announce your latest text with a poorly-reproduced chunk of shitty production line R 'n' B (funny how that term started out meaning Chuck Berry, then the Stones, then The Who and now, inexplicably, over-produced, under-inspired clone warbling). The man who does speak into his phone is these blokes' fellow traveller Mr Middle-Aged-Bottom-Rung-Executive. You'd think he was really really important by the way he continues to conduct a booming team conference with his minions all the way from the lounge to the tarmac, but you know he's a fraud because he's travelling on Jet2!

You've never got a Glock when you need one, have you? I'm not sure why these people get my goat quite so much. I think it's the pretence. You just know the young guys would love you to believe they're cool jet-setting movers and shakers but really they're about as sophisticated as Wayne Rooney and ninety percent of their cerebral activity is devoted to footy and pulling that blonde down the club with the massive tits. And Mr Exec probably goes home to his lawnmower and a bottle of mid-priced whisky to drown out the fact that he's still travelling by Air Scunthorpe after decades of service to the company.

I should let it go. Imagine what they're writing about me. Well, maybe not writing, then...

Joan Hunter Dunn

It's sad to hear of anyone "passing on", as they say, (unless it were, oh... Robert Mugabe) but what struck me most about the obituaries of Joan Hunter Dunn was that she existed at all. I had always supposed her to be an invention, as her name seemed perfectly designed to evoke exactly the kind of tweed-clad, horse-faced, treetrunk-thighed, braying public schoolgirl that one would imagine John Betjeman engaging in ineffectual pursuit - when he could drag himself away from his teddy bears and his doggerel.