In particular I love how the house next to Chez Adolf (the one on the reich!) looks ever so slightly shocked.
It works best in low res and blurred. The Mail took a decent pic of the house and it ruined the effect. Which you can tell by the negative comments from the online readership on the lines of 'Worst. Story. Ever.'
Best comment was the one which slammed the Mail writer for calling the house a semi when it was clearly an end-of-terrace. And the subtly naughty comment from one who said 'I have a semi that looks like Kojak wearing a rollneck sweater.' Very good and got past the moderators.
Of course these kind of stories attract the 'going to hell in a handcart' comments about what makes news and why is this news on a day when so much is going on in Libya and Japan and blah blah blah.
That's not the point and hasn't been for some years, particularly in a world where the BBC and other 24-hour news channels cover the heavy stories round the clock so that by the time you open your paper they are old news.
And if newspapers want to gatecrash on what people are talking about then, unfortunately in some people's eyes, that means the trivial and often very funny topics hotfooting it round Facebook, Twitter and other social networks (of which there aren't any others worth mentioning, let's face it.)
So that is why papers carry stories about the worst roundabouts in Britain, The House That Looks Like Hitler, Britney Spears in very tight clothing and some bollocks involving Jersey Shore, the Kardashians or The Only Way Is Essex.
And good for them!
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Talking of TOWIE, as it is apparently known, they were filming it last night in our local hostelry The Nu Bar, previously known as The Crown.
The place is shut on Monday but they opened specially to film two of the Essex girls having a mock conversation as if they were in a crowded late night venue, rather than an empty bar at 6pm with white van drivers and pedestrians going past shouting 'oi oi darling' and other Wildean one liners.
I still can't bring myself to watch more than ten minutes I'm afraid.
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Two things to mention to Andy Townsend. You don't need to start every summary with the word 'yes' or 'yeah'. And when there is one of them, it's a 'goal' not 'goals'. He's wankers.
Loads of Ghana fans heading to Wembley tonight from stations in East London. Very colourful as they swarmed around Leyton and even outnumbered the Eastern Europeans at Stratford, and that's saying something. And typically the Jubilee Line went down between Stanmore and, yep, Wembley at about the same time.
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I've never been a big fan of Neil Morrissey but seeing his programme about his childhood in a care home was moving and genuine. I suppose it hit me because it was set in Stoke and Stafford, where my family are from (on my mum's side). But it was both shocking and warm at the same time. It brought back the whole 'pindown' scandal which I'd forgotten about but which should never be forgotten. What people did to kids in care during the 70s was horrific.
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I have to hand it to my boy, he was wonderful as Ben Gunn in his school's production of Treasure Island last week. He had the funny lines and seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention and making people laugh. Strange that.
Now he's had his first taste of acclaim, I fear it's going to become a habit. Lots of late night rehearsals, fretting over lines, being all melodramatic and arty. The next few years are going to be tough, I can feel it.
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Norman Tebbit is 80 today. A lot of people will go on about how he should have been Prime Minister and how that would have sorted us all out. People remember him being tough and how brave he was after the Brighton bombing, and he was. But he was also a nasty right winger. He railed against the BBC for only putting across the left wing view. I know this because he was constantly on the BBC saying so. He would rather we had not signed a peace deal in Ireland, preferring a situation which would have led to 100 more Brighton bombings. And everyone bangs on about his 'get on your bike' comment which he made at a time when his government was responsible for closing down British industry and raising the jobless total to post-war records. So while we should sympathise with the injuries he sustained in the unjustifiable terrorist atrocity, it should not blind us to the kind of man he really was and how lucky we were never to have had him as Prime Minister.
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Reunions are all the rage, probably thanks to Facebook reuniting friends (now that's a good idea for a website) but I'm not always sure how good an idea it is. My old college mates are arranging a get together in September to 'celebrate' 30 years since we arrived for our year's journalism course at Harlow. Sensibly we are not having the event in Harlow as it is a shithole that no one wants to go back too (and I say that as a parent of three kids all born there). Instead, one of my contempories is going to have it at 'his club' in London - and he's the former anarchist and football hooligan. I'm a member of two clubs - Tottenham Hotspur Football and Athletic Club and Epping Video. Neither of them are suitable.
The class of 82 didn't do badly. We have a Daily Mail columnist and a Guardian one, a very high flying PR guy, a couple of local newspaper editors, a TV journalist or two, some specialist national newspaper writers and me. And not a degree between us.
The thing that I find a little unsettling about reunions is there is always someone who finds a way of saying, in not so many words, 'hey, you lot never thought I'd amount to anything, well look at me now you bastards.' And then I realise the desperate person doing this is often me and I feel ashamed.
So yes, I'll probably be there in September.
See you there guys...Solly
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