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How to accept you’re a Radio 2 listener now

ARE all your favourite tunes now being played on Radio 2, proving you’re no longer a cool kid and are in fact quite old?

Try these coping strategies:

* Convince yourself that the youth would all be listening to Radio 2 if they knew how good bands like The Verve were, instead of their so-called music which is just noise.

* Switch your car radio to Radio 4 just before you park every night. After five minutes of Today turning back to Radio 2 will make you feel like a teenager at a grandparent’s birthday party.

* Move your hips from side-to-side in a pathetic mockery of dancing when Snap! is played while you’re doing the gardening.

* When hearing Steve Wright play Cigarettes and Alcohol after you’ve given up both makes you feel horribly middle-aged, remind yourself that at least you’re not an aged punk convinced you’ve remained true to your anti-establishment values.

* Nostalgic for the 1990s? A quick listen to Cerys Matthews will remind you that many of the bands, for example Catatonia, were crap.

* Challenge yourself with Ken Bruce’s PopMaster quiz and enjoy a glow of pride on knowing the answers while failing to admit that this empty accumulation of useless knowledge is in itself a sign of age.

* Realise that growing older has its benefits, such as being wiser, more tolerant of different viewpoints and never having to endure the atonal instrumental breakdown at a Spiritualized gig again.

* If all else fails, accept you really are a Radio 2 listener facing irrelevance, retirement and death, but at least Sara Cox understands you.

Make plastic bags a quid and give us the money, say turtles

TURTLES have told the government to stop messing around, raise the plastic bag charge to £1 and send the cash straight to them. 

Sea turtles, one of the chief victims of plastic waste in the oceans, believe that increasing the charge by 1,900 per cent will not only act as a deterrent but provide them with a much-needed income stream.

Leatherback turtle Stephen Malley said: “You know how hard mating already is when you’re 90 per cent shell?

“Now try doing it with a Lidl bag round your neck that you’ve dragged across half the Atlantic. Yeah. Exactly.

“Make the charge really sting and we’ll have the cash, because even though banknotes are plastic you don’t get many of them turning up in the sea, let me tell you.

“Never you mind what we’re going to spend it on. That’s turtle business. We’ve got plans. That’s all I’m saying.”

Malley added: “Don’t start getting sentimental and giving it to pandas. Black-and-white dicks.”

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