Hi maintenance. Bye maintenance

I have just paid the last of my monthly maintenance payments after 17 years. Blimey, that seems a lifetime. Well it is, in some ways. Not my lifetime, her's.
I could have bought a Ferrari or two, or a house in Leytonstone with that amount of money. But instead I have got a well-balanced, beautiful and talented teenage daughter who has never asked for anything and is worth a million times what I've spent and who hates me talking about her in public. So I'll shut up. And save up for her university fees!
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Strange thing this privacy lark. Everyone has a right to a private life so why should newspapers be allowed to expose secrets of the rich and famous? At least that's the argument.
A lot of the injunctions - and all but two are genuinely 'superinjunctions' - are not about sex. Many relate to victims of blackmail, children, company law, rape cases and other matters which should rightly remain out of the papers where innocent people could be exposed to the glare of publicity.
It has been suggested that witless bloggers (guilty!) and the Twitterati could expose them just like they've exposed so many others so far. But have you noticed? Social media users don't seem that bothered in exposing the dying non-famous woman who has an injunction against being named, the child victims of a paedophile ring and other injunctions. That's because we're talking about gossip. What the posh papers like to view as downmarket, scummy, tabloid gossip that they wouldn't touch with a bargepole. Until it has been in the redtops. Then they can name them, using the justification of social commentary - 'oh how awful those tabloids are in naming Ryan Giggs. That's Ryan Giggs, the 12-times Premiership winner who has been having an affair with a reality TV star.'
The trouble is that when it costs something like £40,000 in legal fees to get a judge to impose a blanket ban on newspapers, it becomes a law for the rich and powerful not for the likes of you and me.
But then I suspect you and I haven't cruised the streets of Los Angeles looking for a hooker who can perform a 'sex act'. If you want the full, unadulterated meaning of that, read a broadsheet.
And of course, there's the old chestnut of public interest. Now, I have a confession to make - I actually agree that who Ryan Giggs has sex with is not in the public interest. But then, most things in the newspapers are not either. That's not the point of newspapers. Z-listers flashing the flesh at a premier, birds nesting in a traffic light, the latest phenomeon on YouTube, what Princess Bea wore, none of this is in the public interest.
The greatest censor for newspapers is the public. Stop buying them and they'll stop publishing what they publish. Only when a backlash comes from the masses will this change.
But let's not use this as an excuse to allow footballers or politicians to cover up their indiscretions. Imogen Thomas may be a slapper but she's not the one cheating on a spouse and children. He may have a personal life but if he doesn't want to be exposed as a cheating adulterer then he shouldn't sleep with a publicity-hungry reality TV show contestant. And he shouldn't be allowed to use a law that it meant to protect the wronged and the abused.
A privacy law would protect errant footballers and posh TV actors who like to pay prostitutes £175 to bugger them with a sex toy but it would also protect MPs squandering public money on duck islands, companies paying backhanders to drive competitors out of the market, arms dealers buying votes in parliament and bankers letting their sex lives distract them from the business of not fucking up the economy.
If judges showed a little more tact in dishing out the injunctions then we might have a more equitable law. But they don't.
No one is saying that Ryan Giggs can't have secrets. Who knows, he might have loads of secrets, many of which don't have third party involvement. If he kept it in his trousers it could have saved him north of £150,000 so far. But you can imagine his lawyers licking their lips when they suggest he try and sue Twitter users and he simply agrees.
Now he faces being remembr, when he finally retires, as a third rate shagger rather than the finest footballer of his generation and perhaps that's the biggest crime in this, the crumbling of his legacy.
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Apparently there's a film coming out called Cockneys V Zombies, along the lines of every other 'versus' film of the past few years. As long as it doesn't star Danny Dyer, I'll watch it. It has led to criticism of all these Alien v Predator movies but hasn't it always been thus. We used to have Tommies v Hun, Cowboys v Indians, Humans v Aliens, Good cowboys v Bad cowboys and so on. Except they were called The Great Escape, The Searchers, Star Wars, The Magnificent Seven and so on. Though I have to admit, I was disappointed with Kramer versus Kramer.
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I see the Obamas landed in Essex for the UK visit. Being black, they probably spent seven hours getting past Stansted's notorious lesbian ninjas (or immigration as I believe it's known) and Michelle got a vajazzle at Femme Fatale in Loughton. Hopefully they avoided some of the rougher pubs in nearby Harlow. They used to be named after breeds of butterfly and moth I recall. We used to avoid them to when we were at college. Particularly the ones nicknamed 'The Flying Bottle', the 'Cabbage Whites-Only' and 'The Racist Admiral'.
Time gentleman please....Solly