I occasionally find myself biting my tongue when some English person excitedly tells me about their plans to emigrate to Australia. I think I should be pointing them all to this article:

More than 20 per cent of employees work 50 hours or more each week, and more than 30 per cent regularly work on weekends. When these measures of long work hours and weekend work are combined, Australia ranks as the most work-intense high income country. About 2 million people now lose at least six hours of family time to work on Sunday, and those hours are not fully compensated for during the week.

There’s very little “throw another shrimp on the barbie” going on…

… as observed on the No 134 bus.

Heading for yesterday’s meeting, I was at the back of the bus and surrounded by a group of four girls, three of them perhaps 12, with a younger sister of 10 or so – rather excited to be out on what was probably one of their first excursions on their own. They were scrubbed, neat-haired, tastefully dressed in what were certainly expensive labels.

They were excitedly having staring competitions with each other, innocently hanging off the railings (the bus was almost empty for much of the trip), having a great display of youthful high spirits.

They probably go to private schools, and if not to posh, hard-to-get-into, all-girls’ public ones.

Then at Kentish Town another group of youngsters got on – about the same age, but mixed-sex, two boys and two girls who didn’t look like siblings – much less groomed, wearing nylon parkas rather than woolen coats.

So far as I could tell the two groups didn’t know each other – indeed it would be surprising if they did – but there was instant, aggressive interaction.

One of the boys from the new group – a boy carrying a considerable amount of weight – came up and yelled a bit of abuse at them, and this new group took control of the prime space around the exit, while the girls shrank back to be around me and hardly said a word until they all got out at Archway, the younger one looking particularly anxious.

Class conflict starts young in north London.

Hillary can’t win the White House it seems, because Bill’s cookie recipe will never come up to scratch.

… based on the curious fact that the result of a women’s magazine test on the recipes has thus far been 100% successful in predicting the presidential election result.