Who's afraid of the big bad wolf children's stories?

I have two small children, or "employees" as Mrs A and I like to refer to them on tax forms, and since we're tremendously middle-class in our house, naturally enough both our children simply love books whether they like it or not.

However, the pleasure of reading stories to them is often tempered by the fact that many of the books of fairytales you can now buy for small children are so mimsy as to make The Famous Five look like The Wire.

An example. As I recall matters from my own childhood, at the end of Little Red Riding Hood the woodcutter kills the wolf and extracts the two trembling idiots from its belly. Not any more, friends. We have two modern copies.

In one the grandmother and Miss Hood hide (narratively this works because wolves are famously scared of looking under beds in case of monsters).

In the second, the woodcutter cuts the wolf open carefully while he's sleeping and sews him up, giving him a good telling off on waking.

As you might expect, the books also have several dents in the spine from where I've thrown them at a sit'n'ride Thomas the Tank Engine in disgust.

What are the publishers worried about? That children might not be able to distinguish between a fairytale world and the real one, what with the large number of actual talking wolves they encounter on a day-to-day basis?

Or that those old tellings unacceptably appear to condone violence towards the talking wolf population (a community already under attack from their relentless characterisation as wanton destroyers of porcine accommodation)?

Perhaps they imagine that with the old tellings seeds of violent behaviour will be sown. Not to be solipsistic or anything, but my parents read me those original versions and I've never killed anyone.

I've come close a couple of times - on learning the result of the 1992 General Election and when I couldn't find a parking space at Waitrose on Saturday - but I've never gone through with it.

This won't stop here, you know. By the time Young Mr A is reading to his own children, the woodcutter will be scrubbing up, having anaesthetised the wolf using 7mg of sodium thiopental, before undertaking a long and arduous personectomy, following which the wolf will be offered a range of counselling, an apology, an attempt to put his behaviour into some sort of socio-economic context and the number for Injury Lawyers 4 You.

I would like to suggest to the bowdlerisers of these fine old tales that for the sake of those of us who still realise kids like a bit of grisly pantomime and can make the distinction between a story and real life, that they put some kind of warning symbol on the front of their books.

And might I suggest it be a picture of a limp leaf of lettuce?

Highway 61 revisited - by satnav

How many roads must a man drive down before he bears left on to the A21? The answer, my friend, is apparently going to be coming out of satnavs voiced by Bob Dylan.

The existence of such an object raises a number of questions, the most obvious being why would you trust your journey to a man famous for telling us that there's no direction home?

More importantly, why is he doing this? He doesn't need the money.

It's not like Iggy Pop doing those insurance adverts. That can be excused because Iggy clearly can't even afford a shirt, poor chap.

Whatever the reason, the good news is this is bound to annoy and embarrass that coterie of dullards who are forever appearing on BBC4 documentaries to tell us the Sixties were ace and everyone turning up since has had no integrity.

All we need now is Marianne Faithfull to be the voice on the helpline thanking us for holding and explaining that our call is important to British Gas, and Mick Jagger actually to start doing the adverts for the haemorrhoid cream he looks like he's been using all these years.

Stumped by the Ashes

Thank goodness the cricket is over. I am a We Won The Ashes! huge fan, as it happens, but I We Won The Ashes! can't help feeling that while it is being played, people's minds are not on the We Won The Ashes! work they are supposed to be doing.

Their We Won The Ashes! concentration goes and instead of working on the We Won The Ashes! document they have open on the screen in front of them, they start sneaking off to the web for We Won The Ashes! scores.

Now, at last, they can get back to what they're doing, their minds focused on the We Won The Ashes! We Won The Ashes!! WE WON THE BLOODY ASHES!!! job at hand.

Hey, you! Perfectly healthy-looking girl with the persecuted look in her eyes! Are you needlessly insecure about your weight?

Do you always know what your BMI is? Do you know what BMI means, even? Then have we got a way for you to lose the weight you don't really need to lose!

No, not this "exercise" you keep hearing about, not so-called "dieting", it's a lip balm. That's right, a lip balm has been developed which is going to help you lose weight by, according to its manufacturers, helping suppress your appetite.

How is the miracle stick going to achieve this? I confess I don't know exactly know, but they're not that big and at £4.95 a pop you've got to hope you don't have to eat more than three or four at any one time to achieve the desired effect.