Adventures with the Daily Mail

Perhaps it’s because I’m a bad person, but I took rare delight in this article about Bono, narcissist and overrated singer:

His humanitarian campaigning has earnt him the nickname St Bono. Off duty, however, the U2 singer seems to have been tempted into a spot of hell-raising.

Pictures show the 48-year-old with his arm round two bikini-clad girls as they carouse at a beach bar in St Tropez. He also joined his angel-faced companions for more drinking and dancing aboard a private yacht.

Sure, you may tell me that the Daily Mail is just a rag, and you’d be right; it’s like something out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. However, unlike some pitiful publications, it is not actually contracting Bono to write columns.

Also in the always-entertaining Daily Mail is this oddity, about unscrupulous teachers playing Humbert Humbert with their underage charges. Now, I don’t mean to make light of this, because it’s truly a crime, and in more civilized eras, such men would have been dealt with in proper fashion.

However, I couldn’t help but notice the rather dramatic photos embedded in the article (just scroll down), which turn out not to be the actual students and teachers but models portraying them. Which begs the question: how awkward must those photo shoots have been?

And another: would any other paper think this was even remotely a good idea?