Who Rules the Roost? and House of Tiny Tearaways are examples of how the BBC is polarising viewers into chavs and the chav-nots. In Beebland, being a bad parent is something "they" do for "our" nightly entertainment.

By "them" I mean mums and dads from housing estates (it doesn't matter if they are private estates, so long as the parents have never read a book or cooked a vegetable). By [...]

Friends come to see us in the Dordogne for a "break" with their children. They don't get one. Instead of chilling out, we all spend 72 hours enslaved to the kids. I prepare breakfasts of fresh fruit salad, porridge and brown toast, and it's off to the farm one day, a playground the next. My nerves are at breaking point by mid-afternoon when it's time to prepare special teas and [...]

So you want to make a difference to the world? You're bored of your books, fed up with politicians, and the only "party" you're interested in is at the union bar. Around a table of beers, you and your friends vow to do something. This year, with the focus on Africa and Make Poverty History, you heartily join the G8 protests in Edinburgh and buy a ticket to Live 8. [...]

A recent incident gives a clue to how British expats in France would like to vote. It was a 50th-birthday dinner. Over duck, chips and cases of wine, the talk inevitably turned to crime back in the UK: the expat dinner-party equivalent of the English "schools and house prices" whinge. Everyone apparently had an elderly mum or dad back home "too afraid to go out because the youngsters are out [...]

The Conservative Party spent the conference season trying to shrug off its image of blue rinses, blue blazers and varicose veins. Yet it is not just the boy-band Busted who the Tories managed to woo to their cause. I saw with my own eyes a phalanx of bright, attractive, intelligent youth pouring into the Tory embrace.

Take Suella Fernandes. Fernandes is 24 years old, a member of the Brent North [...]

It's been nine months since I left London for the gastronomic heaven of the Dordogne. Craig, my husband, still amuses the locals, waving his hands when he's lost for vocabulary (about 80 per cent of the time), but both daughters speak fluent French. Holly's first full phrase came bubbling out after she sent a bowl of cereal smashing on to the tiles. She gasped, looked at me and, with all [...]

My computer was downloading a picture of Janet Jackson's breast from the internet (well, it was funny, seeing her pop out of her black leather top - thanks to a bit of a pawing from Justin Timberlake) when my eyes latched on to two Post-it notes, side by side, in my diary. The one on the right has a reading list. The book titles are all copied from the back [...]

Regular readers will know that I have great respect for minicab drivers. In the past six years, I have learnt more about ancient Greek philosophy, Islam, nutrition, spirituality, economics, Iraq, Afghanistan and eastern Europe while being driven across London than if I'd studied at the Open University.

One evening recently, my Pakistani driver explained what those posters in Asian newsagents for phone cards are all about. And guess what: they're [...]

Clare Short has again labelled page three as "porn", incurring the wrath of the Sun editor, Rebekah Wade, who has since devoted pages of the paper to photos of girlies in hot pants yelling abuse outside Short's home. Short's head was then superimposed on to a photo of a topless model, creating a sort of soft porn Frankenstein. It's doubtful, even in the darkest reaches of the internet, that there's [...]

There is little more cringe-making than an A-list superstar reduced to a sideshow freak, willing to be humiliated for big bucks and sending themselves up at every opportunity. I used to cringe whenever Elton John appeared in those TV ads for Royal Mail (or whatever it's called these days). There he was, the man who wrote "Your Song", the love anthem of the 20th century, flouncing about like some camp [...]