FLYING TO KABUL IS EASY - IT'S THE CHEQUE-IN THAT'S HARD

Prince William is pictured above piloting as he makes a secret flight to Afghanistan to meet British troops . Well, unless there was a stag party scheduled to take place in Kabul why else would he go there ? Anyway, in following in the footsteps of his brother Prince Harry Hewitt, Prince William can now claim that he's actually been to a real war zone ( as opposed to the in-family one at Windsor Castle ) , albeit for only 3 hours . Still, if his spin doctors and handlers really believe that members of the public are going to erase images of his helicopter flying antics from their collective memory because he's been cajoled to go to Afghanistan on an overnight milk run flight more fool them .

Of course Prince Harry Hewitt is set to receive an "Afghanistan Medal" in recognition of his recent ersatz tour of duty, when he was covered constantly by SAS minders and BBC film crews . Will Prince William now be entitled to the same "honour" or will he have to settle for specially produced gongs to celebrate getting drunk on duty at a stag party on the Isle of Wight or perhaps a "Middleton Medal" for landing safely in his girlfriend's garden ?
The most recent survey has revealed that UK house prices are now 1% down on a year ago . A whole ONE PERCENT ! . So after bombarding us with bad news for months, all the doom mongers like the BBC, the newspapers and economic "experts" prattling on about the "credit crunch" and the "sub-prime disaster" have managed to cause are incredible levels of anxiety over a piddling 1% . Maybe now they'll shut up for a while and stop trying to talk us into a recession - or have they all got money saved up and ready for the time they hope to engender when house prices have crashed and they can step in to make a fat profit on the back of other people's misfortune that they will have caused ?

Josef Fritzl, the old Austrian pervert who imprisoned and abused his daughter for 24 years, is apparently refusing to answer any more questions from the police after making a statement . No doubt at some stage he'll quote his "rights" as he refuses to co-operate . So to give him his "rights" why not just lock the swine up in his own cellar and throw the keys away ? That way he'll be where he evidently was most happy and justice would be served .

Another record for British Airways . New figures just released show that you've a 1 in 34 chance of losing your baggage with BA . In fact the airline lost 270,106 pieces of luggage in the first 3 months of this year . Punctuality was another issue, with 40% of all BA flights either leaving and/or arriving late . All this raises 2 interesting questions - Why are any senior BA executives still in a job ? - and - assuming the trend in lost baggage has been going on for say the last year, that means that maybe 1 million pieces of luggage have gone astray - WHERE ARE THEY ?

It's only May 1st but already the prize for idiot of the month might be allocated to Mr Jonathan Hambly, a bungling UK would-be fraudster who walked into a bank in Kent and tried to cash a stolen cheque for £400 . He might have got away with it except it was a "Midland Bank" cheque and that bank hasn't existed for 9 years since it was taken over by HSBC . He told magistrates that he had "drunk 6 cans of lager and got confused" , but they didn't buy that and sentenced him to community work and to pay costs . Looks like Jonathan had his own little personal bank induced credit crunch, about the same size as his brain !