I've been away from our dear town of High Wycombe for a week and have been completely out of touch with what has been going on in the world of news. Great I thought.

Once I come back there will be a whole new lot of stories in the national papers, loads of things going on, something fresh in the papers.

Like hell. Helen from Big Brother is still everywhere and if it's not that it's trouble in Northern Ireland and the boring, boring Tory election contest.

To make matters worse my house has digital telly and my housemate is addicted to BBC 24, the round the clock snooze service.

Honestly you have to have the memory of a goldfish to watch it as they seem to say the same thing every eight seconds.

Close calamity

People are so competitive these days, even over a bombing. News of the Ealing bomb set tongues wagging and it is amazing how many people have been involved in one.

One person mentions they were near the sight of the Docklands bomb and soon someone else says that they would have been close to the sight of another bomb if only they had caught a different train and worked on Sundays.

I don't understand why but people do seem to have an odd desire to be as close as possible to tragedy and survive it.

My bomb story is that my sister's boyfriend came out of Ealing Broadway station just before the bomb, heard the explosion but was too drunk to recognise what it was.

I'm sure someone you know will be able to do better.

Football hope dribbles eternal

ONE of the few fresh things on is the return of the football season, which as we know, took a break of about five minutes over the summer.

Just a few short minutes of peace and now the office is full again of the merits of 4-4-2 versus 6-8-4, or something like that, and whether 'our lads' will win promotion.

The expression hope springs eternal seems made for football fans.

They spend two weeks having their brains softened by the sun in Ibeefa and become convinced that their team, last year's no hopers, have suddenly become transformed into world beaters.

Fans conveniently forget that Hopeless United were unable to kick the ball out of their own penalty area last year and instead point to the pre-season tour of the Australian outback when they almost beat a team of sheep farmers.

Let's face it. Most teams are going to have another mediocre season in which fans toil up and down the motorway to watch a useless bunch of overpaid no hopers make up the numbers.