Kipper Addiction

I HAVE JUST REALIZED I AM ADDICTED TO KIPPERS... haddock, mackerel... smoked fish of all kinds. this is terrible! What am I going to to?!

Like a clucking junkie this morning I trawled the supermarket in desperation along the chilled meats isles. Finally I found smoked mackerel with peppers all over it (coloured and black, yes you can even get chili-peppered mackerel these days)... my eye drifted along to haddock and then "kippers". There is no such fish swimming in the sea as a "kipper". It just means smoked herring. Tescos yesterday wanted £3 for 200g ie £15 a kg. Morrisons own were 78p for 200g ie £3.90 per kg or nearly a quarter of the price.

I took them home gleefully and indulged in my habit with toast, behind closed doors.

What am I going to tell Narcotics Anonymous? Hi I'm an addict and I'm addicted to heroin, crack (as was, gave that up January 1 2009), drink, the odd Valium and KIPPERS! Ukh. But they're so moreish....


NAOMI CAMPBELL was in a crimes against humanity court today. Hurrah! I thought. Finally the beautiful monster is getting nailed for her offences to fashion, music, novel-writing and film. But no, it was some silly case that she would inevitably answer no to, because no-one will admit in front of the taxman to a potentially multimillion pound gift, that the President of Liberia gave her a whacking great blood diamond.

She says no (quelle surprise!) But she did wake up in the middle of the night at the Presidential Villa in South Africa with two mysterious men standing over her (she didn't lock her door, what a tart!) who handed her a "bag of dirty stones".

Hmmm...

I bet she gets more in free gifts off her millionaire boyfriends than she ever earns on the catwalk or in front of a lens. I heard she only makes £2 million a year, which sounds fine and dandy till you realize her agency takes a whacking cut, then the tax man ~ 50%! ~ which can't leave more than about £700,000 a year. And how are you meant to live and buy a decent house on that!!

Those horrible "real housewives of New Jersey" were boasting of the value of their homes. Well one was. And I translated dollars to pounds and thought, hang on a minute one of my old houses was worth that.

Yes a standard £500,000 London home, housing the poor and destitute!

Illustrated: kippers, Naomi Campbell ~ mobile-phone lobbing queen of mean, Millennium Star diamond ~ 203-carat D-flawless!


Naomi Campbell talks cocaine addiction with Oprah Winfrey



Vauxhall Corsa: the new supermodel 1992 commercial
Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington et al... and a car

The World's Most Beautiful Game

IF YOU ARE FEMALE OR AMERICAN OR YOU JUST HATE SPORT, this might have made little if any impact on your consciousness but ...

FOOTBALL'S WORLD CUP... (that is soccer-football to you Americans ~ but of course) kicked off about ten minutes ago with South Africa v Mexico.

Crowds of 94,000 are packed into Johannesburg's Soccer City stadium blaring away on plastic horns named vuvuzelas. Detractors claim the cheap "musical" instruments (a post-apartheid South African tradition) sound "like swarms of angry bees" or like "a herd of elephants breaking wind". European TV companies apparently went nuts when they realized the soundtrack to all games would be blighted by this noise and attempted to have the windy trumpets banned. They were not successful and instead label the strange sound the "authentic voice of Africa" ~ haha!

Traditionally soccer is a Big Deal on three out of six continents: Europe, South America and Africa. In recent years the sport has taken off bigtime across Southern and Eastern Asia ~ where the British team Manchester United is said to have fans numbering tens of millions.

More recently David Beckham has done a great deal to raise soccer's status as a professional sport in America.

If you do live in middle-America you might be surprised at the level of passion this Beautiful Game evokes. Imagine the Super Bowl crossed with the Olympic Games and you're starting to get some idea of the sport's ubiquity across most of the planet.

World audiences may exceed TWO BILLION.

According to Reuters, the 2006 World Cup in Germany pulled in 26.3 billion (were 20,000,000,000 of these on another planet? Because there's fewer than 7,000,000,000 people on earth).

Whatever. It's a lot of people.

So crack open a cold beer. Have a blast on a plastic pipe. Click on the telly and enjoy ...

(I'd love to join you, but I will be watching Lindenstraße and Marienhof instead ...)





(ANM. DEUTSCHER INHALT KOMMT NOCH SPÄTER)