Better Sex With This Here

Our regular reader will know that we recently signed up to Twitter - this despite not really understanding what Twitter is, or why people use it. It was all at the prompting of our enthusiastic young intern, Tim.

This morning I arrive in the office to find that we are 'tweeting' to anyone who cares to know that we are 'having better sex and longer with this here'. We don't explain what 'this here' might be, which is galling - a small part of me would like to know.

I also discover that we have sent out 'DMs' suggesting that we are '24, female and horny' and inviting interested parties - roughly 50 per cent of the adult population, I assume - to contact us via something called Windows Messenger. Until now, I didn't even know what a DM was. You live and learn.

I think it might have come about because I received a 'tweet' from Harriet Harman yesterday asking if 'this' was me. Being stupid, I clicked on the link to find out what the 'this' was that the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party was on about. Aaaarrgghh.

Anyway, I'd like to make clear that suggestions that anyone at Monday Books is having sex of any kind, be it longer and better or shorter and worse, are wholly false. I also don't know any horny 24-year-old females. But I am prepared to keep digging until I find them.

Meanwhile, PC Ellie Bloggs reveals that she was at the Theodore Dalrymple/Daniel Hannan event. (I hadn't mentioned this in case she didn't want it known.) Where she talks about me accidentally revealing her name, she may be referring to an incident (incidents, actually) when we met lots of TV types to discuss turning her book* into a sitcom. I kept mentioning her first name, the the point where it progressed through stupid, to embarrassing, to giggle-inducing. Luckily, I think the TV types thought it was all part of a clever misinformation strategy. (* Free extract here.)

Alice Azania-Jarvis (Indie journo) has also mentioned the event in her diary. I don't think it's fair to describe Dan Hannan as having 'snapped' at her. I'll have to listen to the tape. Mind you, she doesn't even seem to know what day of the week it was.

On an unrelated note, while sending out all those obscene twitterings last night, I also had one eye on the telly. I'd recorded Evan Davies' programme The Day The Immigrants Left, which examined the oft-repeated line that 'they' are 'coming over here taking our jobs'. Davies - the best presenter on the BBC, I think - went to Wisbech and tried to persuade unemployed Britons to work as (among other things) asparagus pickers and potato boxers. At the end of the show, despite lots of Jim Royle talk about grafting, none of the Brits was kept on, because they were lazy, chippy and unreliable, where the foreign workers were keen, happy to have jobs and worked like Trojans.

In the case of the asparagus pickers, who were paid by results, the British workers collected £25 or £35-worth of spears, which meant the farmer had to supplement their wages (or else would have been paying them below the minimum wage). Meanwhile, an eastern European chap had recently picked £150-odd worth in the same time.

Of the three potato boxers, two showed up late, but at least they showed up. The third sent a text at midnight saying he'd just got in, felt poorly and wouldn't be taking up the offer of work. He was 26 years old, living with his mother and spent his day playing computer games. He had been unemployed for five years and said he 'shied away' from boring jobs. I cannot believe that anyone could watch this programme and think this is acceptable, or even sane. The welfare state was not designed to keep able-bodied young men sitting on their backsides because the available work is not interesting.

The programme is available at BBC iPlayer and is well worth watching if you missed it. (One quibble. The foreign workers were clearly excellent, and were keeping local businesses going which would otherwise have folded. However, the headmistress of a local primary school where [from memory] a third of the children were foreign, and eight languages were spoken, and foreign-language teachers had had to be brought in at some cost, said that this had improved her school. I just can't see how this can be the case.)