I had a unfortunate episode last night.

Herself and I were waiting for a programme to start but had to wait about fifteen minutes. As is normal at these times I switched to the channel concerned and turned the volume down. This was a ghastly mistake as I realised I had accidentally tuned into the Eurovision thing.

Now any sensible person would have kept the volume muted but like a moth drawn to the flame I felt a weird compulsion to turn up the sound a bit. Another mistake.

I had apparently arrived in the middle of a voting session where the results were being read out by two women [or I assume they were women. One never knows these days]. These two horrors were employing the technique that seems to be compulsory these days whenever a score has to be given – they announce “and the winner is” and then we have to wait for a couple of minutes for the next word. This abomination is ubiquitous these days and I’m just waiting for it to hit our courts as it inevitably will – the jury will announce ” we find the accused…. [two minutes silence]… guilty!” or whatever.

Anyways they finally [finally] got through the entire list and I realised to my horror we were to be treated to a snatch of each winning “song”. This was living proof that things can indeed get worse. The “songs” [which were awful] took a back seat to a display of lasers, pyrotechnics and choreography designed by a deranged chimpanzee on steroids. I swear I have had happier nightmares.

One thing struck me about the victorious troops – one of them was Australia. Yes, Australia is in the final of a European song contest. I honestly didn’t know Australia was in Europe and can only assume that they drifted around the planet after a particularly bad storm.

There is of course another explanation. Some poor secretary was banging out the invitations to compete when she [or he?] fell foul of that modern phenomenon which has frustrated us all – predictive text. The letter was written, addressed and posted and too late the error was discovered –

Predictive text had inserted Australia instead of Austria.