Top Gear Bloody Personalised Greed

Stories of financial greed seem to be filling the news.

Marvin Gaye's family have won a £5m copyright case against Pharrell Williams over the song Blurred Lines, which is meant to sound like Gaye's '77 song, Got to Give it Up. Now copyright infringement is a serious issue; however, I do believe that in assessing damages, plaintiffs should demonstrate financial loss and damages should be set accordingly. I'm almost certain in this case that sales or royalty fees from Gaye's Got to Give it Up did not suffer one iota as a result and this is a case of opportunism on the part of Gaye's family, who by all accounts are not a nice bunch of people anyway. Perhaps copyright should be vested solely during the lifetime of original creator and not that of noncontributary hangers-on.

Paul Gascoigne maintains media phone hackers destroyed his life, probably with an eye on a big payout. Seems he was already making an excellent fist of destroying his life before anyone hacked his phone. 

As for the case of Ecotricity boss Vince Dale's wife of 20 years ago claiming £1.9m of the money he made since their divorce, that simply beggars belief.

Over the last few days I've been inundated with emails giving me suggestions for presents for Mother's Day. The fact mother is dead, and has been for some time, seems lost on the marketing people of these organisations. They know the most intimate details about me, my age, my buying preferences - but not that my mum is dead. Now it's no skin off my nose now, but imagine the way someone whose mother has only just died would feel on receiving these unsolicited emails.

It's my 60th next weekend and, against all expectation, Hay has bought me a personalised registration for the Merc 300SL - K300 PVB (the car is already a K reg). The thing is I'm getting a hankering for either a 500SL, an old Porsche 944 S2 or a Merc SLK 320 V6, which are cheap as chips at present (£5~7k for a good model) and guaranteed to become serious classics down the line. So too is the old 3.0 Honda NSX, but at £30k odd, they are already beyond my meagre means and far more than I would ever pay for a car, despite being a true supercar (0~60 in 4.8 seconds and 276 BHP) that could blow the socks off most modern cars. I set my limit on cars at about £6k max, and preferably half that.

Talking of cars, unlike the majority of the UK's population, I'm pretty ambivalent about Jeremy Clarkson. He makes a fortune from portraying himself as a buffoon and is fairly funny in print, so long as you don't take him too seriously. Most people react to him like they do to Marmite (or ladies' thongs), bringing out strongly polarised reactions. I personally don't watch Top Gear - it's very obviously just a carefully scripted circus with as much spontaneity as a Nuremburg Rally. If he is sacked (and again, I'm ambivalent - but anyone with a name like Oisin Tymon deserves a punch for that fact alone, let alone not having dinner ready), I'd quite like to see the return of Quentin Willson, one of the original Top Gear presenters.He certainly knows a thing or two about second hand and classic cars.

Continuing the theme of self harm (I refer to the bonfire incident of a few weeks ago), I nearly sliced my thumb off yesterday. Couldn't find any plasters and had to make do with Sellotape till Dr Hayley got home.

Looks a bit messy, but it did the job.

Took delivery yesterday of my eBay angle grinder bargain - only £25. Didn't realise it would be so huge - it's the size of a large baby. That could do some really serious damage in the wrong hands, like mine.