The Magic of Cliff is That After So Many Years of Slop He is Still Here. Has Sarah Palin Endorsed Him?

Cliff Richard has a new single in the charts, Thank You For a Lifetime, 50 years after his first hit single. I heard it on YouTube. Groo. I almost threw up. More of the same old slop. But I mustn't be too harsh. He brought happiness to many, and Rosemary was one of them. "Are you ashamed of me?" she asked, going a bit pink. "I quite liked Summer Holiday. It was rather jolly and wholesome and I was a deeply conventional girl. All that other stuff like Bill Haley seemed rather alarming. What a wet I was."

Fielding was never quite so wet. But he rather liked Cliff's Living Doll, because it pleasingly reduced the woman to an object, and he did admire Move It. "Remember that?" he asks. "Come on pretty baby lets a move it and a groove it?" But did Cliff really know what he was singing about? Fielding didn't. He had to ask in class what it all meant. He thought "grooving it" meant wearing sunglasses, and Little Richard's Good Golly Miss Molly, who "sure liked to ball" just liked dancing all night. And of course we hadn't a clue about "I want to rock you till my back ain't got no bone," or "Squeeze my lemon baby". Even Fielding and I, who had gone hardcore, didn't quite want to investigate Little Richard's use of the phrase "back alley". And from then on, things just got ruder and ruder. It was just sex, sex, sex - screaming, writhing, grooving and drugging.

Terrifying. I didn't really dare join in properly, being a fairly prudish grammar school girl and a late developer, so it's no wonder Cliff chickened out and turned to pap, and Rosemary and millions like her followed him. They perhaps felt safer with soppy summer holidays, clean living, tennis, Jesus and Christmas slop. But Fielding and I bravely went for Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Buddy Holly, Elvis and the like. Because, and I don't want to show off but I have to say it - we had better taste. To us, Cliff was crap. He was King of Bland. Never mind the namby-pamby lyrics and tunes, he never quite got the rhythm right. He never really rocked. Now here he comes again.

That is the magic of Cliff, that after so many decades of drek, he is still here. I can't understand it. Is it a backlash, because the world is sick of sex? Is it the religious right needing a sing-song? Has Sarah Palin endorsed him? Is the world still full of Rosemarys? Is this Cliff's swansong? Is that too much to hope for?

I was trying to get to grips with the European carbon permit scheme, carbon offsetting and trading the other day. First I read about it myself, then I read it again, each sentence separately, twice over. Then I had a little scream and a tea break and then, luckily, Rosemary came round. So I read about it out loud to her, a sentence at a time, nice and slowly, two or three times over each sentence, but we still couldn't get the hang of it.

"Is it about the clean-air act?" asked Rosemary. "Don't write that," she shouted. "You'll make me sound stupid." But she isn't stupid. I swear it. She's fearfully clever. So we slogged away at it, eventually we thought we'd just about got it, until we came to the bit on the "over-allocation of permits" to large companies under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. Here we hit a giant stumbling block. Because if some huge companies have been mistakenly given nearly a million more credits than they need, why don't they just give them back?

That seems to be the general rule. In our experience, if some goon overpays you, you must still pay them back. I accidentally robbed a French bank once when I was 19. I popped in to change some Turkish currency which I happened to have, wasn't quite sure of the exchange rate, and came out with loads of money. Marvelous. Naturally, I whizzed off and spent it. But waiting for me at my hotel was a cross note from the bank manager. Would I please return the money at once. They had overpaid me. I couldn't. I had no money left. And it was their fault. But I had to pay. If I couldn't, then my father must. He would be blacklisted and banned from France unless he did. So he coughed up.

If social services overpays your benefit, they will claw it back from your plastic cup of pennies even as you sit eating dry crusts in the gutter. The state is frightfully strict about over payments. Three years ago my mother died. I told the pension persons straight away like a good girl. I sent them the death certificate, I begged them to stop paying, but they went on, overpaying and overpaying for months, into her post office account. I left it in there, so that they might keep it, but they refused. I must take it, then I must pay them back. You are not allowed to profit from another clot's mistake.

Unless you're in the bizarre world of carbon emissions, then it's Alice in Wonderland. An overpayment isn't a mistake, it's a free gift. You don't give it back, you can hoard it or sell it on and profit hugely. The end of the world is just another business opportunity. "Managing emissions is one of the fastest-growing segments in financial services in the City ... with a market ... which could grow to €1 trillion within a decade." Carbon "could become the world's biggest market overall." And we thought carbon emissions were meant to be a problem.

· This week Michele saw two installments of Casualty: "Tess lasted two days stuck on that spike. Absolutely thrilling. It excelled itself." She also saw Tess of the D'Urbervilles on BBC1: "More beautiful, but nearly as brutish." She also had a lovely birthday, thank you: "Sixty-six last week. One year closer to the grave, but one year younger than Cliff."