Baltimore backlash

When shadow home secretary Chris Grayling claimed that Britain’s inner cities now resembled the drug and gun-drenched streets of Baltimore - as portrayed in US TV series The Wire - he garnered the column inches he so obviously craved.

But he also drew a brilliant rebuke from Baltimore’s mayor, Sheila Dixon who was none too impressed with her city’s name being dragged through the mud.

‘To present a television show as the real Baltimore is to perpetuate a fiction that dishonours our city,’ she wrote on her mayoral blog. ‘It is as pointless as boasting that Baltimore has a per capita homicide rate a fraction of that in the popular UK television show Midsomer Murders.’

But despite being reported seriously by several UK broadsheets - and even by the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper depicted in The Wire as a once-great organ brought low by shoddy journalism - the mayor’s comments turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by a British political blogger. As The Wire character Omar Little might say: ‘Play or get played. It’s that simple.’

Timber-framed housing expert Paula Sunshine, from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, is extending her 16th century house withperhaps the most renewable and sustainable building material of all.

When human hair is mixed with lime, it apparently makes the perfect plaster - as long as the hair’s previous owner looked after it.

‘I always go to female hair salons because women usually have their hair washed before a cut, which means it is very clean,’ Ms Sunshine said. Closed Circuit is considering making a donation…

Forget interest rates and inflation, London mayor Boris Johnson has come up with a new measure of economic health. At a meeting with leaders of London’s boroughs last week, the blonde bombshell urged the politicians to talk up the strengths of the capital’s economy.

And this was not mere hyperbole; he had fresh evidence of the green shoots of recovery. Fewer restaurants have closed in London than Paris. That’s right folks, the economy may be having its worst year since the Second World War, but that doesn’t matter a jot because we are beating the French at their own gastronomic game.