Clement Freud in The Guardian on January 24th: "Will you come upstairs and make love to me?" used to be my favourite proposal. I now answer this with "One or the other."

i absolutely adore ancient gentlemen able to joke about their age. i have to link this with the other two, and possibly also to the quote (if i can find it) where david kovacs explained that tom lehrer was popular when he [kovacs] was in school but that was in the middle ages.

i feel tremendously sad that there are only 2 more shows left in the current series of just a minute, and that of the 9 that have been broadcast so far i have missed 2. it'll be the middle of july before the new series begins. that is a terribly long time away. thank goodness there's still bbc7. i tried out easy radio which really is as easy to use as it looks, but it doesn't work with archived shows. i did find the bbc radio ripper - what i like about this is that you simply enter into it the the location of the clip - and it goes to work quietly in the background, while you listen to something else, or even toodle off somewhere, and when you look at it later your show is all ripped and converted to mp3 and it never made a noise. i'll try and collect as many "just a minutes" as i can before this trial version expires. and if they ever bring back paul temple and the lawrence affair i will get them all. (the ones i have were taped from the broadcast on NPR and they - outrage of outrages! - did not use the coronation scots! imagine the temples going overboard and steve believed drowned and paul is bobbing up and down in the water shouting her name in a cliffhanger ending and then instead of dramatic theme music this cheerful jaunty NPR music comes in at the the end! it's enough to make anyone hopping mad, let alone someone like me.)