IN order to keep up with the gossip in the office I've realised I'll have to watch TV's Celebrity Big Brother, or at least bits of it. Otherwise it's going to be Mrs No Mates. So I flick onto it occasionally, marvelling at how intelligent, cultured people like my colleagues can possibly watch more than a few minutes of a programme which seems intent on bringing entertainment down to gutter level with no chance of looking up at the stars. The initial Big Brother was actually quite a good idea; isolating a bunch of strangers in a house and watching them 24 hours a day to see how they would react. I seem to remember there were all kinds of serious articles in the upmarket broadsheets about the values of such psychological exercises and pointing out the similarities with George Orwell's 1984, which of course was where the 'Big Brother' name came from. I wonder if those people who wrote such erudite pieces then are now wincing as they watch a well- known MP pretending to be a cat and licking a once-well-known actress' hand. I don't know about yours, but my cats left the room in embarrasment. Once the first Big Brother became a success it was inevitable there would be more and that a Celebrity Big Brother would follow. Now we have a bunch of people who obviously need either the money or the career boost or perhaps just a few weeks of rent free living. I don't know most of them – my age, I suppose – but I can recognise Michael Barrymore, who by now should have learnt that all publicity isn't necessarily good publicity, George Galloway, who possibly ought to be in the House of Commons doing his job and Rula Lenska, who ought to know better than to appear under harsh lights. Then there's a young man who wears dresses – nothing wrong with that as long as they're not mine – and who seems to have had some kind of augmentation to his lips. I can't work out why people feel the need to have their lips blown up like a balloon, or how they can possibly think it makes them look more attractive. Perhaps it's what I call the salon syndrome. You go into a hair salon and ask for a new look and before you know it you are shorn like a sheep and given a hair style reminiscent of a poodle in a gale. I once came home looking like Jimmy Hendrix, so I can't talk. Then, just as you look in the mirror and prepare to faint, a little flurry of other assistants rush over and start cooing about how you look just like some film star or other, the first one they can think of at the time, and you crawl out of the salon hating them and everyone else and kicking yourself all the way home because you know you've just paid loads of cash for a dreadful hairdo and been humiliated into the bargain. In the interest of personal safety, I should say that this doesn't refer to my present hairdresser, who's called Carol and who I wouldn't like to upset, especially when she's wielding the scissors. It's the same in dress shops when over-powering assistants try to persuade you that some ghastly outfit is just so 'you' and that pussy bow necklines are in again when normally you wouldn't be seen dead in them. This, I'm sure, is why so many brand new dresses end up in charity shops. I think the lip thing is like that, once the blowing up is done all the other salon people wax lyrical about how absolutely fantastic they look, waiting until the owner of the new-look lips is out of the door before retiring to the tea room to have a jolly good laugh. Anyway, this young man's lips have been inflated so that I'm sure if you chucked him against a wet pane of glass he could stick there indefinitely defying the forces of gravity. Then there's the one who isn't a celebrity and was put in the house as a ruse, or a bit of a joke or to get more publicity for the show. You choose. Anyway, she is now a celebrity for not being a celebrity, which is a bit ironic in itself. She seems a nice girl, so I hope it doesn't go to her head. As for the rest, I only know the page three girl who isn't Jordan, who I saw on another channel's reality show being an absolute little madam. Still, they shouldn't bully her, especially not with all that make-up on, there might be a mud slide. So that's it. I watched a bit of it, just so I could join in the conversation in the office but I haven't bothered since. It was the same with Celebrity Up the Jungle, or whatever. All you have to do is find out who the celebrities are on the first day, which allows you to make a few comments, then not bother to watch it at all until the finale. Nobody will notice, as long as you know who won, who nearly won and who did the silliest thing to win. And, actually, I really can't carry on with it knowing that previous Big Brothers have always slid into hanky panky the longer it goes on, which might be more than I could bear. George and Rula? George and the one who isn't Jordan. George mistaking the one who has the lips for the one who isn't Jordan. It doesn't bear thinking about.

On another subject entirely, has anyone else noticed how people who drive cars with four sets of headlights seem to have some kind of death wish? They're always the drivers who suddenly appear in your mirror and come so close they could easily see the hairs standing up on the back of your neck. Then, when you've established a safe distance between you and the car in front, they pass you knowing full well they can't possibly get past the other car as well, so they veer in front of you and then spend the rest of the journey swerving in and out trying to get one more step ahead. It's almost as if they think that the four sets of headlights somehow make them immune from being impaled on the front of an oncoming ten wheeled truck. This has happened to me so often that I'm beginning to become paranoid that its the same car, like something out of a Hollywood movie by Stephen Speilberg. Four lights winking menacingly in my interior mirror appearing out of nowhere. They make white van man look like Noddy.

Someone asked me how the cats were faring, because I've not mentioned them for a week or two. They are just about speaking to me after my Christmas absence. Their obsession at the moment is to get into my granddaughter's room and catch the goldfish. I find TJ sitting on the shelf next to the new tank with his head going back and forward like a fanatical Wimbledon supporter. He's already been caught with his paw in the tank and next, I suspect, will try lapping up the water. Let's hope he doesn't find a straw. The odd thing is that he won't eat fishy cat food, which probably is good news for the fish as they'll only get a sniff and a lick and be pushed on one side of the plate should he ever get to them.