John Gibson: How to fly ourselves to the Moon

Couldn’t Santa have slipped his sack over the head of a balloon name of Dr Richard Murphy, fly him to, say, Dunoon, and from there to the Moon? He belongs up there and, methinks, he surely was the star conversationalist over his Christmas dinner.

Dr Murphy and his fellow researchers at the Imperial College, London, painstakingly worked it all out, recycling the Christmas wrapping papers in the UK into 21 million litres of biofuel.

Enough to power a double-decker bus for 11 million miles, the equivalent distance to the Moon and back 20 times. The man in the Moon awaits Murphy and his team, with a big fat turkey and all the trimmings.

Maybe I’ve got some of these figures wrong. Does anybody care? More important, are taxpayers funding these Imperial numpties?

Only way is up

What is it they say about humble beginnings?

I keep being reminded that Cary Grant started as a stilt-walker in a circus on Coney Island. I started as a lowest-of-the-low copy boy on North Bridge. You just never know how life will pan out.

Afterwords . .

. . . no messing with Meryl Streep, pictured below, at 62 and telling it like it is: “Once women pass child-bearing age, they can only be seen as grotesque on some level.”