Mask fever

Gill says there has been strong demand in her local pharmacy for surgical masks among people afraid of contracting swine flu.

I can see the surgical mask becoming this year's "must have" fashion accessory. Someone somewhere stands to make an awful lot of money making customised masks for those who wouldn't been seen dead in white or pale blue.

No, if we are to be seen dead in our masks we might think of going out in style with something a little more original. Some will want slogans on their masks. How about a Bluebottle mask in memory of the Goon Show, with the immortal line: "You rotten swine, you deaded me."

Masks will come in very handy for thieves who want to hide their identities from CCTV cameras.

Those who sell scarves to football crowds could make a killing (or save one) by supplying masks in team colours. We could see a revival in football crowd violence as gangs of mask-wearing hooligans happily kick nine bells out of each other undetected by police cameras.

There will be job opportunities too. Now anyone can become a ventriloquist.

I expect those in the House of Lords will want velvet face masks and the catwalks will have masks designed by Versace. The police will love them in black for crowd control as long as they don't display any identification numbers.

But there is a problem. How will we possibly identify the surgeon in an operating theatre now that anyone can wear a mask?

Cricket - England's answer to global warming

For two weeks now the sun has been cracking the flags, the mayfly have been hatching, I have even resorted to watering the lawn. Shoes and jeans have given way to shorts and sandals. Sun cream, sunglasses and straw hat have been essential in the garden.

And today? Today it's like winter again - rainy, miserable and perishing cold. The reason is obvious: today is the first day of the first test match of the season against New Zealand. Rain delayed the start of play.

So I'm getting my thermals, gloves, big jumper and furry hat and flask of soup ready for Saturday when I have a ticket for the third day at Lords. Worried about global warming? Just bring on the cricket.

A sign of the Times - Lords reform

"The cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it," Walter Bagehot (1826-77)

My first visit to the House of Lords was in the early 1980s as a guest of Lord Kagan, the man whose factory made and supplied the famous Gannex raincoat to Harold Wilson when prime minister.

It was during this visit that I realised that the House was doubling as a magnificent Gentlemen’s club for a privileged few, including Kagan who, like Lord Archer at a later date, could not be stripped of his peerage for something as trivial as a stretch in prison. Kagan had served a jail term for stealing some batches of indigo dye.

Sharing a glass of port with Kagan and some of his cronies, I met Lord Saint Oswald, the fourth baron ( the family seat is Nostell Priory in Wakefield), who told me how he had been singled out to face a firing squad during the Spanish Civil War only to be reprieved at the last moment.

Another of Kagan’s pals, a Lord Morris (there are several and I’m not sure which one he was) showed me around the rest of the place. He pointed to some bound copies of the Times and asked my date of birth so he could look up the birth notice. It was inconceivable for this blue blood that my parents might have neglected this social convention in favour of a line in their local newspaper.

I know this is silly but I never forgot that episode and, when our first son was born, one of the first things I did was place a notice in the Times. If it was good enough for Lord Morris it was good enough for my lad.

All of this might explain why I greeted the vote in favour of a wholly elected second chamber with a sense of joy. The patronage and ostentatation is an anachronism that should have been done away with years ago.

The Lords are to discuss the proposal next week. I expect they'll be against it. The huffing and puffing and not "not done yet", "constitutional catastrophe", "end of our great democracy" rhetoric has already begun. I just hope the Government now has the stomach to go with the will of Parliament. There should be no reprieve this time.