YOU may be familiar with the summer silly-season, when there is so little news that newspapers suddenly develop an interest in alien 'encounters', large cat sightings and images of various religious leaders in pieces of toast.
But most of us today, working away over our keyboards, have the Bank Holiday Blues - the dread knowledge that while we work, everyone else is enjoying themselves, and nothing, and I mean nothing, tends to happen. (Of course, I could well be proved wrong now that I have committed this to print, and my colleagues are busily praying to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes which sums up journalists).
An examination of newspapers over the Easter weekend has thrown up just some of the space-fillers of which even the nationals are guilty: * Grey hair is now 'in' - but only for women who have little need to worry about the impending need for HRT patches - thanks to Kelly Osbourne and Peaches Geldof. The little minxes have the cheek to call it 'granny chic'.
* Forget vampire literature, teenage girls are about to become obsessed with angels thanks to a new trilogy of novels about to be published. Perhaps they'll mope about less then...OK, that would be a full-blown miracle rather than an angel sighting.
* Milk is the reason we have become taller and taller over the past 2,500 years. Actually, it's improved farming conditions, but hey, it is Easter silly season and milk is shorter for a headline.
* The 'fact' that Teri Hatcher and Kelly Brook's behinds look very similar. Guess which worthy publication that was in, and no, no, no, it wasn't just an excuse to use their pictures in their pants.
* 'Barmy' Brussels bigwigs want to rename the English Channel 'Le Pond' - and, of course, there must be a subtext that this would signify a European superstate. Paranoid, us?
* An eco-sex guide recommends natural aphrodisiacs like ginger and saffron. Headline: Now you can really moan about global warming - bored sub-editor, and lots of theories in newsrooms around the UK about those who talk about it and those who do it.
* How those evil Germans are taking over the supply of rhubarb because of our late spring, and Delia Smith and her Waitrose adverts are helping them do it. We're all eating 'der Rharbarber' and we didn't know it. What next...Delia Schmidt?
AND finally...
THE trouble with political poster ad campaigns, as David Cameron will tell you after his shiny-foreheaded disaster, is that they can be hi-jacked.
So Labour's poster showing Eton's finest on the hood of an Audi Quattro a la Gene Hunt with the words 'Don't let him take Britain back to the 1980s' was always going to be a gaffe.
DC's spindoctors loved the idea so much, they replaced words with 'Fire up the Quattro. It's time for change.'
Doh.
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