UF ORDER OF OMEGA

And the lamb's tails - they're your classic little promise spring is on its way. Traditionally.The really frustrating thing is that without the seasonal switch-off and the start of the period of abeyance, it's impossible to get the garden ready for next year. And I can't get a thing done in my garden, because autumn just won't come.It all looks great. The dahlias are awesome, even though their frost-tender tubers haven't been lifted for years The roses are in a second bloom far finer than the first. The magnolias are in heavy bud, and the willow has shot out its first little lamb's tails. The only trouble is that is all a bit mental.My Bishop of Llandalfs should be slime, turned into sad little mounds by light but decisive frosts.

Roses, it's true, ought to be flowering, but only in the manner of plucky survivors, with a few defiant blooms fighting a rearguard action against winter As for the magnolias, they shouldn't be out until February. One in five Brazilians born in the north-east is moving to avoid drought. But not if nobody gets to see them.Everything in the garden's much too lovelyAustralian farmers are blowing their brains out as dry weather turns their land into dust. Perhaps it's the papers that should take up the Spanish challenge and stop printing "concerned" pictures of skeletons in metallic swimsuits whenever the opportunity arises Bony frames make clothes look good.

But Beatrice's could have been fine if her parents, together or apart, could have put her first.* The size zero scandal continues apace and has even eclipsed itself, with the development of a new tiny size, the "00". What is to be done? How can the world of fashion rid itself of its body dysmorphia? The banning of teensy models in Madrid has made little impact Endless articles in the media have achieved even less. David's life is never going to be perfect and nor is Charlotte's. The damage is horrific, for the messed-up adults involved as well as the poor, traduced, fought-over children. Even the alleged domestic violence, I'm afraid, sounds like a reprehensibly hysterical consequence of deep incompatibility, rather than an indication of systematic one-sided abuse.The most upsetting thing about the awful legal imbroglio that the former Beatle and his estranged wife have got themselves into is that it is played out up and down the country every year by about 28,000 other warring parents.

These supposedly terrible accusations sound to me to be fairly commonplace symptoms of a marriage that wasn't working (and even fairly commonplace symptoms of one that's perfectly all right, really). Her parents say - with some justification as they don't appear to be in good shape themselves - they cannot cope with such care. Charlotte, like very many other severely disabled children, and unlike David, is likely to continue to be looked after for by the state.Yet if the strange vicissitudes of modern parenting looked to have been aired quite comprehensively enough for one week, there was another shocker in store. Enter Beatrice, a child with parents just as wealthy as Madonna - and in perfect health as well. What could go wrong here then? Whoops, absolutely bloody everything.Not long ago, Paul McCartney was tapping messages on to his newly estranged wife's website, explaining that she was a good mother, no gold-digger, and that the two of them would be sharing their parental responsibilities in a happy and amicable fashion.Now it's Heather Mills who is being called a fantasist, as she describes such supposed abuses as her husband being sick, being drunk, being huffy about breast-feeding, and smoking joints (which we all knew anyway). For some while, she has been cared for completely by medical staff - the very people her now-separated parents took to court over the hospital's wish to withhold resuscitation, because of the baby's poor quality of life. Charlotte, who turns three today, can theoretically leave hospital now, even though she needs to be attached to an oxygen tank, fed via nose tube, and relies on a panoply of powerful drugs to keep her alive. This story of a child snatched from the tender ministrations of a hard-pressed African state was merely made more piquant by the grim news that right-to-life baby Charlotte Wyatt hardly ever saw her mother any more.

It's been a vintage week for armchair gossips, with personal revelations that one would normally have to twitch the curtains feverishly to happen upon simply falling into the laps of a nation agog. Merry pontification about Madonna, who adopted a Malawian non-orphan, centred on whether David was being rescued from poverty for selfless enough reasons and, as usual, everyone agreed that since the world's thirst for details about the child would be insatiable, he'd never get a minute's peace Tut, tut. I just want to say that if a man wrote a novel in which the hero made the heroine fit for marriage by burning, blinding, maiming and mutilating her, there'd be hell to pay More from Howard Jacobson. There is no acceptable attitude in the novel: this is its justification and its glory. Which is why I do not complain that Jane Eyre achieves her fulfilment at the cost of an acceptable attitude to men In literature, there is no such thing. And there is no such thing as an acceptable attitude to women.Reader, I am not looking for a fight.