Guess who has the most fun - and pays the price?

I don't know whether I've said this before, but when I used to bang out six marketing columns a month someone asked me how I managed it.

I said all I had to do was open any marketing publication anywhere in the world and it would take about two minutes to find something stupid which I could then write about to general amusement.

Actually the principle doesn't just apply to marketing, although I suspect the industry has far more than its fair share of posers, fuck-wits, pompous idiots and all round tossers, too many of whom, by the way, rise mysteriously to high office on the shit floats principle.

One field where idiocy flourishes to an extraordinary degree, and which is not restricted to the madcap world of marketing, is research. Yesterday morning I saw in the paper that the Health Protection Agency (one of the many bodies employed to waste taxpayers' money on fatuous "initiatives" of one kind or another) has done some research that discovered something perfectly obvious to anyone not terminally stupid.

It seems that "young people accounted for fully half of all sexually transmitted diseases", despite making up just one eighth of the population.

Well isn't that amazing? Who would have thought that young people screw around a lot more than older people? Could this explain why the only times I managed to get a couple of doses were over 35 years ago when I was jumping into bed with anything that said "yes"?

The only fact of interest here is that in those days we didn't have the benefit of the Health Protection Agency and we did have a better educational system, so we tended to think a little more for ourselves. Maybe that's why there was a lot less disease around.