I appreciate that my only significant post yesterday was urging people to, in effect, give me a pound. I'm sorry about that. It won't happen again, well, not until the album comes out, at which point I'll urge you to give me £14.99. But appropriately, as the name of the new single is “Fireman”, I've been thinking about firemen.

This chap, Gary Mann, who was given a 2 year jail sentence in Portugal for football related violence and then promptly deported back to the UK, is barely mentioned in the media without a reference to the fact that he's a fireman. If he was a housing benefit officer, we'd all be totally ignorant of the fact. He's been able to hold his head up and be pretty sure of not being labelled a vicious animal, simply because he's a fireman. Obviously I don't have a clue as to whether he was involved or not, but one paper interviewed some residents of his home town and one guy said “There's no way he could have done it. He's a fireman, for god's sake. He's the best.” OK, firemen are brave, and they save lives, but it doesn't automatically disqualify them from being bigoted and prone to lager swilling and head butting. I imagine that the predominantly male working environment breeds the odd moronic lout in the same way that the police force does. All I'm saying is note well: someone being a fireman does not guarantee they're not going to throw a chair at you at 1.30am in some far flung holiday resort after their team has lost a football match. In fact, the only thing you can be certain they're not going to do is set fire to you.

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A double haiku to celebrate 10 minutes of extraordinary celebrity activity at Heathrow Terminal 1 International Arrivals yesterday:

Carrying a bag
Pseudo-archaeologist
Tony Robinson

On her mobile phone
Suzi Quattro's furious
Driver isn't there