John Gibson: It's a sin chilling out over bins

Talk about sin bin. You wouldn't put it past Edinburgh City Council. Their Gosport (Hants) counterparts squandered £17,350 last year sending 93 representatives to Madrid to see how Spanish binmen deal with rubbish collection.

A Tory councillor led the delegates. As you'd expect. No surprise that the councillors capped their jollies with a long weekend in Majorca on the way home, expenses paid, while they were at it.

You wouldn't catch Edinburgh's garbage gurus doing that. Or perhaps you would.

Bear with me

Billed as TV's "action man", Bear Grylls - a virtual superman - apparently has a book out and if he was half the man at all he'd have asked Harry Hill to pen the foreword.

No chance! No way can I bear Grylls, ever since Harry in his show exposed his heroics.

Indefensible

The nation's supposed to be skint, yet the Coalition is palming a billion to booming India and in the same breath sacking 150 "surplus to requirements" pilots training with the RAF.

The Ministry of Offence is hell-bent on leaving Britain with its pants down.

Afterwords . .

. . . Jeffrey Archer advising: ''If you still want to write that book, get on with it. You've all heard that tired old cliche, there's a book in every one of us, and in some cases only one. Four of the most successful books ever published were written by authors who never wrote again: Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell), To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee), Invisible Man ( Ralph Ellison) and MASH (Richard Hooker).''