Please, Mr Blair, can I stay up to watch the election?

So the Labour Party is eager to tell us when to put our children to bed. If they get in at the next election, how long will it be before we all have to put up our hands if we want to go to the loo? They might as well turn the whole country into a boarding-school and switch off the lights at 8pm. There's never anything on telly anyway.

But they seem to take a very short-term view. The children forced unwillingly to bed today are the voters of tomorrow.

And, as we all know from experience of Mrs Thatcher, while the nation sleeps, Tories do deals.

WHAT a royal variety show they are, the expensive soap opera that is the Royal Family. First there are Di's mothers. Frances Shand Kydd, who is loosely connected with the disgraced Bishop of Argyll, is facing drink-driving charges. Her stepmother, Raine, the former Countess Spencer, was divorced in no time from her third count (or whatever). Both are seemingly in need of some spiritual guidance.

And then, while newspaper editors and their wives fall over themselves to get their hands on Fergie revelations, Prince Charles, for light relief, tries on weird clothes in even weirder countries. Every day brings us another vision of him draped from head to toe in a new embroidered Kyrgyzstani robe with a matching hat, and news of his latest efforts to eat foreign food. It's as carefully choreographed as the burials on Brookside or The Archers' arch attempts at humour. A conspiracy is afoot to entertain us.

But I'm digging in my heels. It's embarrassing enough when the Royals reveal how little they deserve their elevated status but Fergie is so tirelessly suburban, she and her compulsive spending disorder. "My sister- in-law may have got bulimia; other people may have been on drugs, some people have become alcoholic. With me it was overspending. I think what I did was bury myself and say, `Oh well, when in doubt, go shopping' ... Each to their own." Which would all be a lot more forgivable if WE weren't paying for it, and if she didn't use the Motor Neurone Disease Association as her alibi. According to last week's Sunday Mirror, she once asked the MND Association to track down some sufferer in Cork for her to visit, so that she could cover up the fact that she was actually going to Ireland to buy a horse. That disease is no joke. But Fergie was never known for tact.

My kingdom for a horse.

THIS is a very subjective matter, I know, but it begins to look like ladybirds have the best sex. Sounds a pretty good deal to me. You get to live a whole year (not bad compared to gnats), so you see all four seasons once, which is enough really. You get to be one of the few really cute bugs. And, particularly if you're a male, it's party, party, party. According to a Cambridge ladybird expert they can have three orgasms in a row, each lasting one and a half hours. So, not only are you in a continual state of ecstasy, but everyone likes you because you eat aphids.

WORRYING to think, when your cat follows you to the toilet and stares at you critically, that all that lies between you and mortification here is the fact that cats don't talk. Seems to me animals are getting ever closer to crossing this boundary. Chimps who've learnt to use sign language and Yerkish (a language of symbols on an electronic keyboard) turn out to be creative thinkers with firm views on things. One said the snow outside the window was "ice TV", and that the hair on some woman's head looked like a mushroom. Can our schools accommodate the increase in apes eager to learn?

Three paintings are now on show at the National Gallery by an artist born in 1932, who began his career as an actor starring next to Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan films, and later had a major role in Doctor Dolittle with Rex Harrison. He retired to Palm Springs in 1991 and took up painting "apestracts". He's a chimp. It's at times like this that one longs for a return to figurative art. I wish he'd paint a woman with hair like a mushroom.

DEAR MARJE,

I'm writing to you because I have a pathological fear of claustrophobic relationships with women. This is due to the fact that my mother wore a wig. The connection, I'm sure you'll agree, is obvious.

As a result, I suffer from a constant sense of betrayal. I was in Washington recently, reporting on the American presidential election and found myself doing my usual in-depth analysis - of people's heads, rooting out wigs, toupees and hair extensions. You can't trust anyone these days. It was while I was languishing in the Georgetown Holiday Inn that I finally recognised the fact that my father's moustache was probably not his own either. A memory came back to me of finding something like it behind the clothes hamper once when I was very young. He must not have been able to grow a bushy enough moustache, feared no one would marry him without one, so resorted to a lifetime's sham.

I now suspect that my brother's trainers are not his own, just a pair he found at the gym, that my greengrocer does not floss, and that the milkman is not all that he seems. I feel so betrayed.

I returned home with a bunch of new ties (of the cloth variety, not family ones, thank God) to find a big rumpus going on about something I wrote about my mother for an anthology. My mother's cross because nobody asked her to write an essay about me. And when I got home, my wife complained that our relationship isn't claustrophobic enough for her. She senses a new barrier between us. It's the tie, I told her. She hadn't even noticed it!

But how long can I hide behind my ties and my nice shock of white hair and my general air of sweetness and compassion? I have deceived everyone. I am actually a cold, callous fellow. I...

What? Marje dead? God, I feel so betrayed.