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?

101 uses for an old spinnaker

Another Antiguan night, another party. This one is at the Nicholson's, the family that established yacht chartering in the Caribbean. I'm chatting with Marie Colvin, a veteran foreign correspondent at the Sunday Times. She loves sailing. We have plenty of people in common and worked on the same stories a long time ago, but I don't think we have met before.

She's wearing a bikini and, like some of the other girls who have been crewing alongside her this week, she has a sarong fashioned from strips of day-glow red spinnaker that was ripped apart in a race the previous day. Not Versace, but think Versace prices then add a bit. Spinnaker fashion could catch on. A Frenchman is wearing a spinnaker thong. Nothing else. He's not part of the crew but wants to fit in.

Marie wears a black eye patch these days, pirate style. Someone suggests it's part of the costume. "An RPG took my eye out in Sri Lanka, left some shrapnel in my brain," she says. Now that's a line you don't hear every day over cocktails. The party goer nods vaguely. Whoosh. Her remark has gone completely over his head.

I like Marie. She has guts - an old school war reporter, who tells the story how it is, where it is. This is how she got the wound. I know she would rather it never happened but the patch seems part of her and she can wear it with pride. They don't give journalists medals for reporting from the front line. Just scars.

Everything ends in the Pindar pool next door. But wasn't that the other night too? There's a bright Caribbean moon and the water is baby bath cool. I'd warn trousers, shoes, socks even, to be proper. But a pool is a pool and there's more rum and coke. I'm back early at 3am, up again at 7am staring in the mirror at panda eyes and a tongue that looks in need of a shave. My liver is demanding recognition for all his work. He's called Sarson's.

Virtual talent

I’ve created an imaginary “talent basket” for people with imaginary talent. To be internet trendy I might call it “virtual talent”. The idea is to have a balloon debate, chucking out those with the least talent, leaving anyone who has real talent in the basket.

Here are a few candidates: Jade Goody, Heather Mills, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, Piers Morgan, Pete Doherty, Liz Hurley, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Who should go and who should be saved?

Jade Goody and Tracey Emin, as far as I can see, have no talent whatsoever. Of these two, I think I would chuck out Emin first simply because - although I can’t find any evidence of her ever having said so - she believes she may have some talent. Jade Goody, on the other hand, I’m sure, has never given it much thought.

Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards had guts, no doubt about that, but there wasn’t any talent, not even any showmanship. He simply launched himself down a ramp with a pair of skis, bounced over the edge and fell over. So he has to go.

Heather Mills has a famous ex-husband-to-be but not much discernible talent as far as I can see. Out she goes. Liz Hurley? Like Mills she has good looks. Specifically she has a big chest that was shown off in a Versace dress with gold safety pins which she wore when accompanying her then boyfriend, Hugh Grant, to a film premier in 1994. Thus she became famous. But does she have talent? Well not as an actress, her chosen profession. For superior acting talent pick any one of the Woodentops. Goodbye Liz.

So what about Piers Morgan, former daily Mirror editor? I would contest that Morgan does have some talent. Not much; certainly nowhere near enough to edit a national newspaper. He has plenty of chutzpah which you could say of most of these people. In fact they are brimming over with chutzpah. But talent has to be more than that. Sorry Mr Morgan, I just don’t think that “a little bit more talent than Jade Goody” is quite enough to secure your place in this balloon basket. Out you go.

That leaves Pete Doherty and Damien Hirst. My eldest son tells me that Pete Doherty has some talent because “he writes good lyrics”. Some say he’s a poet because he steals lines from people like Emily Dickinson.

This is a bit from a song called Stix and Stones:

“They said that I was as good as dead
And there was hope, but not for us together
My friend, oh my friend, oh my true friend, my phony friend
Oh well you know that that's the end, that's the end,
so far away down, down.”

Great lyrics? Poetry? Whoops, he’s out of the basket. And that leaves Damien Hirst. I do think that Hirst has some talent. His spot paintings were original and nicely arranged, as were Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Even the dead animals Hirst suspended in formaldehyde had some originality in the arrangement. So what about his pill boxes on pharmacy shelves? No. They were just pill boxes on pharmacy shelves.

Comparing greatness in art is the hardest thing. How do you compare Michelangelo with Monet, or Vermeer with Rothko? Impossible. But all were talented. Against all my expectations when I started this blog, I’m going to leave Hirst in the talent basket for his spot paintings alone. I might be wrong here, confusing fame with talent as many do. But there you go.

If I can think of any other potential talent basket rejects I will list them here in the weeks to come. Or list some yourself. But the idea is that they have some fame. I’m looking for people whose fame and earnings (on the back of their imaginary talent) have surpassed their real talent by some margin.

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson would be a difficult candidate since she does have real talent as a classical pianist but she is famous for being famous, not as a pianist. I would argue that there is some honesty in that. She is not pretending to be an artist or a poet and that thought has led me to another candidate: Yoko Ono. There must be many more.