Tasteless (if you're lucky), the consistency of shaving soap, and the colour of yogurt that has seen better days, a lava flow of mayonnaise has swept all before it. Though preferable to salad cream with its diesel aftertaste, I don't know
why mayonnaise has supplanted butter as bread's best friend.

The last straw was the hasty purchase of a supermarket ham sandwich to discover that instead of sinus-clearing English mustard it had been lathered in mayonnaise.

The good Earl of Sandwich would not have been amused.

I certainly hope so. When he stepped up to the Dispatch-Box in 1997 to deliver his first Budget, there was a sense of the new.

This continued for the next few years even though Brown stuck to the Tory spending plans. To liven up proceedings bets were taken, for example, on how many times he would use the word "prudence" in his speech. She packed her bags a long time ago as we Budget-watchers came to learn that next to nothing Brown said could be taken at face value. Old proposals would be dressed up as new ones, fast and loose was played with statistics, and worst of all stealth taxes inhabited the small print.

You will have seen from Thursday's Daily Express how mean in fact was the Chancellor's sham income tax and corporation tax giveaways.

Experience teaches me that it could be days perhaps weeks until accountants and economists have sufficiently analysed the Budget's small print before we can be certain that all the ...

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Blanchflower's attempt to lower the cost of borrowing, which will be applauded by mortgage payers, was revealed in the minutes of the meeting published this week.

Blanchflower has caused controversy because he is based in the US and has to commute to the MPC's monthly votes. But while he exhibits such dove-ish tendencies homebuyers and other borrowers will wish his well.

It was while researching Blanchflower on his website that I came across his 2004 paper with its eyebrow-raising title.

Its findings were underwhelming. Using data based on a study of 16,000 Americans the good professor concluded that "sexual activity enters strongly positive in happiness equations"; "higher income does not buy more sex or more sexual partners"; and "married people have more sex" than anyone else.

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