Mea culpa! Mea culpa!

For those of you never cursed with having to learn Latin, that means "It’s my fault".

So … it’s my fault you never got the story about the stripper and me being stabbed.

It’s my fault that I wrote most of it then didn’t save it on my computer (again).

But it’s NOT my fault that I’ve been fiendishly busy.

However, please blame me if you don’t like what comes next, which is from the site of a friend, Denny Hatch - www.businesscommonsense.com.

His is an excellent site, mingling lots of good business advice with comment on all manner of things. I recommend it as a reassuring insight into how many thoughtful Americans view things.

Anyhow, here’s a sample which I hope will strike a chord with you, as it did with me, because it shows how we and the Americans are all in the same dismal, politically correct boat.

It seems Wall Street Journal writer Stephen Moore wrote about an Independence Institute bash in Colorado where there was “a whole lot of drinking, smoking and shooting, but thankfully not in that order.” Then he stated: These people are just dog tired of having the government tell them what to do: Buckle your seat belt, wear your bike helmet, don’t smoke, don’t shoot, teach your 8-year-olds to wear condoms—and, most of all, stop complaining and pay your taxes...

There was a discussion over lunch at my picnic table about how Congress is regulating nearly every basic household appliance—refrigerators, washers and dryers, toilets, hair dryers, shower heads, lawnmowers—to make sure that we are not, God forbid, wasting water or energy.

A woman told me that she is stocking up on cartons of incandescent light bulbs, because soon it will be illegal to buy them. (The poor lady insisted on remaining anonymous so that the light-bulb police don’t come to search her home.)

At least they don’t have snoops coming round to their houses to check if they’re recycling properly. And they can still shoot’n’smoke over there in quite a few places without being arrested. Nor are they watched by the astonishing number of CCTVs we have in place to substitute for the poor old plods who are too busy filling in forms to catch criminals.

Having got that out of the way, and apologised for failing to deliver any startling revelations lately, I now faithfully swear that before I fly to the US next week I will rewrite the chronicles I lost and carry on with my multi-stranded story.

What’s more, if you sit still and stop fiddling, I’ll tell you about the time I nearly bled to death – not as a result of the stabbing, but from another unprovoked assault.

God, considering what a devout coward I am I seem to have been in harm’s way far too much.