Making lemons into lemonade

Today's jolly Friday column is brought to you in association with David Hasselhof, living proof that you can make a fortune from people laughing at you rather than with you, and still be a boozing wife beater. Hoff, I salute you.

So, it's September - I would like to take the opportunity to be the first to use the phrase "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", which will appear in every third story in the UK press over the next six weeks or so. More prosaically, six months of commuting in the dark beckons.

Nevertheless, most serious journalists are still dozing in Cornwall, Tuscany or Barbados, releasing column inches for such earth-shattering stories as the bunch of firefighters (didn't they used to be called 'firemen'?) getting into trouble for refusing to dole out fire safety leaflets at Pride Scotia 2006. They now have Archbishop Mario Conti weighing in to support them. I'm not sure whether refusing to hand out leaflets anywhere should result in disciplinary action, but given that the alternative is mandatory diversity training, maybe it's better to stand there for a couple of hours and take the verbal beating.

I wonder what the Gay & Lesbian committee of the Fire Brigades Union makes of it all?

On the subject of diversity, I'm struggling to see how a government clipboard nazi can determine whether I'm 'welcoming' rather than merely 'accepting' diversity. Is there some sort of test? A great time to be a lawyer, I should think.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have decided that aeroplanes are bad, and are busy advocating 'painful tax rises'. Good to see that they are still determined not to win an election. Even the Great Gordo wouldn't go so far as to use the word 'painful', except perhaps in the context of his awful public grinning these days.

Apparently the way to spend our way out of environmental disaster is to build a MagLev train line to Glasgow, at a cost of £30billion and a couple of million gardens, fields, meadows, copses, lakes and woodlands churned up and cemented over. Good work boys.

The ongoing dressing down I'm receiving at the hands of my over-achieving 16 year old cousin continues. She looked decidedly underwhelmed when I explained to her what my job entails this morning (Q: "So do you just count things all day?" A:"er, not really, I'm kind of like a surveyor, but of companies not houses"), then suggested in rather strong terms that A-Level Business Studies (yes, I've got one of those) is a complete waste of time, "like psychology". Also, aeroplanes are evil, as are the Conservatives. Sounds like Cameron's boys still have some work to do on the youth vote.