17 to 2 is a good bet. Decent odds. Not so ridiculously high that there’s no chance of a payout, but not so low that its not even worth the stake. So you wanna take a punt? Do ya? Are you feeling lucky; Punk? Well, if its a fiver each way on a nag running at Ascot it makes not much difference either way. If it was the odds on Spurs winning the league I’d want at least 150 to 1 before digging out my wallet.

But its not. Its the odds on living versus dying if you take a daily hit of aspirin every day of your post-50 life. So doctors are playing the lottery every time they give such advice. As well as turning us into a nation of drug addicts. Which I don’t object to if those drugs are purely recreational, but this is really chancey. For every 17 people who will live longer due to the addition of aspririn, 2 will die younger from a stroke or internal bleeding that it can cause. And the best bit is, of course, you don’t know who. Can’t predict the winners and losers, just like any gamble.

I’ll take my weekly doses of Tai Chi instead, I think. It may be violent at times but you need to live to 120 just to learn it all.

Baroness Warsi has resigned from the government in protest because David Cameron won’t unambiguously critisize Israel’s actions in Gaza. Good for her. She was useless anyway. She got the job in the first place because she was a rare and exotic beast. Not only a staunch Conservative from a working class background, who is fluent in Northern, but a woman (allegedly) and a Muslim to boot. Not ‘to boot’ in a bullying, Eton, nasty kind of way; it means ‘as well’. So Sayeeda crossed lots of minorities off the government quota list of ‘people not like us who really should be represented’. Women, Muslims, working class scum. Fantastic, she ticks all the boxes, let’s get her on board. We’ll have her on board and then everyone else can be an upper class male twit. Fantastic. That’ll shock the Daily Mirror.

The interesting thing really though is that, whatever side of the argument you favour, here is a politician who resigned on a matter of personal principle. Not because of expenses scandals (she survived hers), not because of involvement with child abusers or corruption, but because of something she believed.

A politician with a deep value system and principles. It’ll never catch on.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx