ah, the gift of laughter; and booze.

Couple of additions to the blog sidebar for you: firstly the consistently amusing Daily Mash, whose latest stories include more Pope-baiting as well as a pop at Ryanair's increasingly deranged plans to squeeze even more money out of their passengers while simultaneously making their travelling experience even more grindingly stressful and miserable.

If I remember rightly the latest actual news story related to the airline removing their physical check-in desks from airports and making everyone check-in online, instead of the current arrangement whereby they employ people to sit at check-in desks shouting AHA! at people when they turn up and then charging them a fiver each for not checking in online, thus increasing the cost of their flights by 50,000%. They do seem to have backed off on the scheme of charging people to go to the toilet, though, and probably just as well. You can push the great British public only so far before they run whooping through the aircraft waving their genitalia around and urinating freely (actually some stag parties do this already); you don't really want to be arriving in Perpignan on a hot afternoon in a plane festooned with faeces.

Secondly, Dr. Whisky's blog. I'm not a big consumer of, or expert on, whisky, but I do like to have a nice bottle of single malt in the house. My current one is a rather unadventurous but very palatable 10-year-old Macallan; the previous one was a 10-year-old Bushmills which I bought after getting back from the Irish trip mentioned above. Much lighter and paler than the Macallan, but I still liked it, though Dr. Whisky isn't so keen. Anyway, as always the tasting notes are a hoot - if I'd gone for the Fine Oak 10yo Macallan I could have sampled flavours that are, simultaneously "like kissing a woman (man?) wearing lipstick" and "like sucking a wooden spoon". Or I could save 30 quid and just go and suck a wooden spoon.

Whisky preference is a very personal thing, of course - I know Andy is a big Islay fan, Laphroaig and Caol Ila in particular, while beardy Phil is a Talisker man. My Dad, despite being (like me) a devout beer drinker by habit, has a bit of a taste for Ardbeg, while my brother-in-law Ben, as befits his Irish ancestry, drinks Bushmills.

The Macallan isn't far off being finished, so if you have suggestions as to what I should try next, feel free to leave them here. Sainsbury's in Newport have an Old Pulteney for a bargain £23.99 which looks quite tempting.