That bit about leapfrogging sieves, incidentally, is courtesy of an over-excited (aren't they all this week?) reporter on Radio 4.

I spent some time puzzling about how leaky sieves could leapfrog, being generally legless (that's the sieves, not me), and then some more time worrying about how a sieve which wasn't leaky could justify its existence.

It would clearly have to relaunch itself as an expensive, completely useless, must-have kitchen accessory which, given the right marketing, would sell like hot cakes once did, before people gave up practical eating in favour of air-headed accessorising, so that objects, if style-approved, need no further justification at all.

But all this wrong-thinking worship of false gods, this love of luxury, this carelessness of consequences must come to an end, as the prophet gloomy Jeremiah was keen to warn us, even before the invention of the DFS sale.

If the City bonus boys have to go on the social, then all sorts of associated trades will go down with them; extravagant, show-off Anglo-American capitalism being a package involving a conspiracy against prudent living and good sense.

It's an ethos which encourages uselessness because if uselessness were to be recognised as such, where would hedge-fund managers or futures traders be? Thus unviable, bloatedly-rich societies, teetering towards a fall will sanction spending on all sorts of nonsense, such as Easter Island megaliths, Marie Antoinette palaces, Faberge eggs or Damian Hirst cadavers.

Designer

Then there's boutique hotels, ludicrously over-sold beauty products, hip dentists, designer pets, designer clothing for designer pets, cooker hoods, cars too big or too small to be useful as anything other than statements, banks, which, in a 'We're banks and can do as we please' spirit insist on spelling their names in hugely annoying lower-case letters... there will be a bonfire of the vanities and nobody will be able to say they weren't warned.

All this would be a thoroughly good thing were it not for the possibility that you and I might end up losing our job or our house or both, in which case being on the right side would be little comfort because there is only so much fun to be had from laughing at bankers.

Actually, I think I might have been wrong about cooker hoods, I just, like the rest of the world and his dog, got carried away.


Giving you what you want

MY friend Andrew emails me to tell me (wrongly) that I probably know that "the word oxymoron is both a name and an example of what it is naming... oxy meaning bright and moron meaning dull."

He develops this theme in a way which I don't want to go into because it ends with him deciding that in last week's column I may have inserted a fart joke into a discussion about naked breasts, which "would surely be sinking very low indeed."

Listen, mate, I give my readers what they want – and if that means fart jokes and naked breasts, it's more of a comment on them than it is on me.

Andrew passes on two jokes which are examples of themselves, although you have to read the first one very carefully and possibly twice and you will probably have heard the second one:

1. A freudian slip is saying one thing when you mean amother.

2. A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre so the barman gives her one.

Incidentally, I think a similar idea may have inspired the the crazy, surrealist building supplies company which labels each of its site hoarding panels in big letters with the words 'Hoarding panel'.