2005-07-31 - 7:20 p.m.

You know you�re having a quiet Sunday when you find yourself flicking through the TV stations of an afternoon and suddenly somehow find yourself involved actively following the plot of Weekend at Bernie�s II. The original Weekend At Bernie�s is famous for being possibly the only film in history where a lucky actor gets to play a corpse for the entire hour and half, though critics of Hugh Grant may argue that there have been comparable performances since.

If there�s one film that didn�t really lend itself to the idea of a sequel, it was this one, but Hollywood was not to be denied. In II, a Voodoo Queen resurrects Bernie, but as luck would have it, Bernie can only move when he hears music, which is funny the first time, but not so much for the tenth or eighteenth. Hopefully someone has already enlisted a practitioner of the dark arts to ensure that Weekend At Bernie�s III never becomes more than the stuff of a madman�s dreams.

And is it me, or is Andrew MaCarthy a real fat knacker in that? Not that I can talk, of course�but I�m with Neil Armstrong, who said that he believed that every human had a finite number of heartbeats, and he didn�t intend to waste any of his running around doing exercise.

I got that quote from my splendid book of Sporting, Gaming and Idling Miscellany, which also has a quote from Henry Ford saying �exercise is bunk�. Am I wrong, or did he also say �history is bunk�? Did being a great mind in those days just involve going around saying everything is bunk? �Knees are bunk!� �Spreading lime chutney all over someone�s naked body and licking off every sweet, glistening morsel is bunk!� Hardly the cut and thrust of great philosophical debate, is it?

A friend of mine has just had the gross but none-more-modern misfortune of having her diary found at work, a fate that, having gone through it myself, is something I would not wish on anyone.

The day before I began Pablo, it happened to me, too, and I have to say that being hauled up by your nethers to explain to your boss why you�ve been bandying around insulting descriptions of your workplace and all who populate it is the most bowel-shrivellingly painful thing in the world. For me, the phrase �upper-middle class wankers� will always now haunt me. But good luck to you, R. As my old gran used to say, don�t let the bastards get you down.

Actually, she never said that � she�d never use so few expletives.