Ray Quinn Dancing On Ice Wonder Boy. An Apology

Apologies to Ray Quinn for my intemperate outburst on Monday after I lost £60 on the Dancing On Ice final. How could he have the most smackable face on TV when Piers Morgan still graces our screens? Watching Piers drool over the luxuries of Dubai, Monte Carlo and Hollywood with near masturbatory pleasure was enough to make one rush for the sick bag although it was easier to find the off switch.



I did watch the Dubai episode in full however as, if there is one place in the world that deserves Morgan , this is it. I have never forgiven the restaurant that refused to allow Marion a seat on the grounds of her sex when we went to Dubai for a trade exhibition. This is the side of the country that is kept hidden from the visitor but we wanted to see the real Dubai and in the real Dubai as in many other countries, women are second class citizens. Not only did Marion suffer the humiliation of being seated on the other side of the road to the restaurant, she had to put up with passing men spitting on the ground and cursing her as they passed. (you might ask why we stayed but it was the only restaurant in the area and we had not eaten all day). The cgi vision of the place above is how it's supposed to look soon but I have a horrible feeling that, without oil and with the world in recession,fewer tourists, this place could become a modern day Tower of Babel and the city could easily return to the desert it sprang from.I don't want to wish ill on anybody but Dubai truly is the pits.



Another high on the list of slappable faces has to be Sir Fred Goodwin, he of the £750k per pension paid for by you and me.But you can't condone those yobs who went round to his house and smashed his house and car windows at 4 this morning. They should have done a proper job and torched the place.



The vexed question of discounts raised it's ugly head again this morning when Northern Sales Manager Peter was on the receiving end of criticism from a customer. It seems that one of our customers is advertising our boilers at extremely competitive prices on the Internet and the other customer says that he can't compete. The problem is that both customers get EXACTLY the same price and service from Instanta. We can't dictate what price our customers sell at. It's called a free market. If they want to sell at extremely keen prices and it works for their business model then so be it. I don't want our stuff devalued but we get a fair price from both customers.What they do with it once it has left Instanta is entirely up to them.



There were two interesting films about animals on TV last night. There was the one about the two Aussies who bought a lion cub in Harrods and released it into the wild and "Grizzly Man" on More4 about a bloke and his girlfriend who lived with grizzly bears and came to a grizzly end. I didn't see either but the lion story was a feelgood tale which could lift the gloom of the recession whereas "Grizzly Man", which I recorded as it was made by my favourite director Herzog, is more in the spirit of the moment. I tried to find a good spoof on YouTube but they were all a bit rubbish so here's a fantastic clip for everyone like me who moans about the speed of their computer. I want one of these.