Another little joy for British citizens to come from the London Olympics. The Border Agency (whoever heard of not being actually totally in control of your borders but handing the responsibility out to an agency) has said that it will roster all staff for the period of the games. But after the festival is over, all the staff who didn't get leave during the 6 weeks of "sport" will want to grab what little is left of what passes for summer. There will be a desperate shortage of staff, at the same time as controls are stricter and the government is demanding a reduction in staffing. Well duh! One way to get you to stay at home.

Tory Minister for Drought Richard Benyon, who is the great great grandson of Lord Salisbury and who lives in the house shown (yes, that's all one house, not a block of flats), has been accused of leaving a hose running for two hours, the day after a hose pipe ban was introduced, presumably by him! He denies it, and insists it was a plot by a  newspaper to stitch him up. The house has extensive grounds including ornamental gardens which are normally open to the public at this time of the year (for a fee), but mystifyingly they are not this year. I wonder why...

For some reason the mother of these two little ducklings abandoned them only hours after their birth. But as luck would have it they were found by two animal lovers and taken to a wildlife centre where they are pictured swimming around in a sink. They will be looked after and returned to the wild when they are ready to fend for themselves. [I thought we should have a story with a happy ending for Easter!!]

The fact that the toffs' race, Oxford and Cambridge's boat race had to be  stopped yesterday is a matter of supreme indifference to me. I didn't even know it was on or indeed that it had happened until I saw the incident at tea time. What is worrying is the way that this London government is driving wedges between people more than I've ever seen in my lifetime. The haves and the have nots; the toffs and the plebs, are being marked out in a way most of us haven't experienced before. (Mrs Thatcher managed to divide, and cause misery in her doing of it, but it wasn't a Downton Abbey kind of split; a class thing.) What worries me is that those 'beneath stairs' are hardly likely to take this lying down for very long, and the boat race incident is, I suspect, just one of many protests against the elitism that the government of Old Boys. I suspect that protests may make this a very difficult year for the Botox Toff.