Fashiontrends2013

On the morning of Margaret Thatcher's funeral, I awoke a little broken. I didn't awake "to find myself" a little broken – that took two days, and several bouts of vicious denial, to realise. I just couldn't properly use my right arm.

The arm, the hand, simply wouldn't make coffee. I actually giggled, albeit laconically. I went to fill, from the cold tap in the kitchen, the glass percolator, and my cuffs (now I come to think about it, they had been a real bugger) managed to catch two plates from the night before and send them, breaking, to the floor. I was rubber man, seven-leagues-boots boy: my right arm could, for all I knew, have managed to snag every twitch of crockery and jibble of condiment in sight other than the correct ones. I concentrated, with my left hand and some faint nagging worries, on getting java bubbling.

"I really don't think about my performance," she tells me in her grand office – two sofas, Pugin wallpaper, river views – at the Palace of Westminster. "It works best if I'm authentic." But then she adds: "We do think about the theatre, of course. We always work out what our first question will be, and what the key questions are after that."

Her colleagues have been known to urge her to play things straight, but sometimes instinct gets the better of her all the same. When Matt Brittin, Google's boss in northern Europe, was recalled by the [public accounts] committee after being accused of misleading it over the company's tax affairs, one of Hodge's fellow members told her not to do anything over the top. "So I was completely calm right the way through. Only then, at the end, I was too tempted. I couldn't resist."

There are thousands like her, taken to Delhi from the tea plantations in the north-east Indian state by a trafficker, sold to an agent for as little as £45, sold on again to an employer for up to £650, then kept as slaves, raped, abused. It is a 21st-century slave trade. There are thought to be 100,000 girls as young as 12 under lock and key in Delhi alone: others are sold on to the Middle East and some are even thought to have reached the UK.

bridesmaid dresses online

Every tea plantation pays the same wages. Every leaf of every box of Assam tea sold by Tetley and Lipton and Twinings and the supermarket own brands – Asda, Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury's and the rest – is picked by workers who earn a basic 12p an hour.

Victoria Coren on Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber's problem is that he is a children's entertainer. That's a different job from "rock star". Justin Bieber is, at all times, wearing an implied fez covered in spangles. He might as well be called Mr Magic.

When he goes on stage two hours late (as he did to much parental rage in London last week), it's like being two hours late to shout: "Who's the birthday girl?" and pretend that a felt monkey is too shy to emerge from a suitcase.

It's no good being two hours late for a children's party. The window has closed. The kids have all drunk too much orange squash, run around screaming, had a wee on the floor, pushed a sausage into someone's eye, burst into tears and fallen asleep.

orange formal dresses for juniors