Plastic fishing in Greece is a bizarre step in the right direction – Zella Compton

Instead of tipping it straight back in, they’re being funded to bring their haul back to shore and send it on its way to recycling.

It’s not much money to be honest, but it is an incentive and isn’t that what we all need to help save our oceans?

Clearly plastic is an international problem which politicians and governments are letting us down on – they need to collectively ban single-use plastic.

It’d be a faff for a bit as we returned to paper and cloth bags, but given the universe managed until about 50 years ago, I am pretty sure we could work it out.

Balls to tired old testicle jokes from tired old men

Is it an age thing of the person listening, or the age that we live in, which makes some patter so grim these days?

I was at an event last week and a table magician appeared. As if by magic? Unfortunately not.

His arrival was hailed by himself as a great event for us all.

Except it wasn’t.

He quickly identified me as his victim and then reclassified me with some speed as ‘one of those’.

My interpretation of that is that I was not impressed with his unsleight of hand.

Honestly, if you’re going to stand there and pretend to shuffle cards at least work on your hand action so it vaguely looks like you’re shuffling cards.

I’ve always wondered how so many of these tricks are done, and now I know.

Spoiler alert, the smoke and mirrors is all in the fact that the pack isn’t actually shuffled.

None of the cards swap places. But, politely, I sat there and smiled. Like you do when you’re waiting for someone to move along.

But I wouldn’t be telling you this if I hadn’t been so utterly peeved with the rest of his crass act.

He gave up on me fairly quickly as not being wide-eyed enough, and moved onto one of the other women on the table.

He presented her with small foam balls, and proceeded to make testicle jokes as they got bigger and smaller and multiplied and decreased.

When he started talking about the dampness, I thought my starter was about to reappear back on my plate.

It was gross, and it wasn’t just about the age gap – the fact that this guy could have been her father plus a few spare years.

It was about the grottiness of the situation, we were all sitting around not knowing what to do in the circumstances.

A fancy awards dinner, paid entertainment, and more and more grim jokes about male genitalia which no one was laughing at.

If it’s magic you’re after, at least go for someone who knows what year we’re living in – and that men’s privates are not the best thing to whop out as dinnertime entertainment.

The spring forward clock changes are just such a drag

Will I ever get used to the leap forward into spring and changing the endless clocks?

The oven is a particular bind – the instructions were lost a decade ago, and all the little symbols next to the buttons have rubbed off.

Changing the times takes setting the oven to come on and off about seven times during the day, and only when that bizarre sequence of craziness is completed do I luck out on the actual time change.

Don’t even get me started on the car clock, or working out why my digital alarm has gone off-grid this spring.

I don’t care deeply about the time change, and I would happily say goodbye to it to avoid the pain of dealing with clocks.