The blustering Mr Blair

PERILS of shopping at open-air markets on wet days. I return home to find I have bought one pain au raisin and one pain au rain.

THE anger in Kiev turns to agony with the first deaths in the latest riots. How bizarre it is that half of the population of Ukraine is dying to join the EU while half the population of Britain wants to get out.

CHILDHOOD is a succession of puzzles and one of the strangest, when I was a lad, was my father going through a phase each morning in the hall when he muttered something sounding like "bloody perfume!" and confiscated the Daily Express. Some time later I figured that "bloody perfume!" was actually "bloody Profumo" and my father was hiding the juicy details of the sex trial from me and my brothers. If I had kids of an impressionable age, I might just have hidden the papers at Chateau Rhodes this week as the trial of barrister Constance Briscoe turned into an examination of the married life of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce. It was, allegedly, a scratty saga of bisexual bonking, marital punch-ups and the transmission of pubic lice. It makes Benefits Street (C4) look chic and sophisticated.

FROM this column February 8 last year: "When gay marriages become legal, all sorts of changes will have to be made to English law. The scrapping of 'marital coercion' must surely be one of the first." This week the Justice Minister Lord Faulks said the defence of marital coercion, as used by Vicky Pryce, is to be abolished.

AFTER the item earlier this week on delays in paramedics arriving, a reader tells me he had a blazing row on the phone a couple of years back when his partner fell ill but the ambulance service insisted the symptoms didn't merit an ambulance. He contacted his doctor who whistled up an ambulance PDQ. When his partner got to hospital she was found to have a perforated bowel, peritonitis and heart failure.

THIS column is not always kind to Auntie Beeb. However, Dan Snow's First World War feature on the BBC website is a masterclass in redressing the bunkum of 100 years. It's called Lions and donkeys: 10 big myths about World War One debunked, and it's here.

IT WAS one of those Should've Gone to Specsavers moments. I thought the headline said: "Batman tries to arrest Blair." I felt a brief moment of joy that, as every other inquiry and legal process seems to have failed dismally, the Caped Crusader of Gotham City was at last fingering the former prime minister's collar. No such luck. On closer reading, it was not Batman but a barman at a London restaurant. Twiggy Garcia tried unsuccessfully to make a citizen's arrest on Blair for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair apparently attempted to turn the conversation around with a breezy: "I think you should be more concerned about Syria." That's a typical bit of Blairism. If things get sticky, let's all smile, bluster, change the subject and move on. The problem for about 500,000 Iraqis is that the only place they moved on to was the grave. There will be a reckoning, Tone.

WE TOOK our old moggie for his annual cat-flu jab and he has not been the same cat since,. As I write this he's in full flump-mode, lying on the warm top of the stove as limp as a rag. An online search reveals that loss of appetite and inactivity are common side effects of the annual booster injections and there's some debate as to whether older cats really need them. Pet-insurance companies insist on these jabs but what do vets think?