Excellent for the broadsheet, because I can offer a certain deep, intellectual edge: I adore Dickens (particularly when he set up shop on Regent Street with Mr Jones), only watch EastEnders in an ironic way, and love all classical music, particularly when it’s by Abba. Of course, flat chests and big beards have their place – they never held Tolstoy back, for example – but they’ve yet to prove an especially winning Page Three combination.Now, while I do not wish to diss the competition – John Walsh and Robert Fisk are both universally acknowledged to have lovely figures, after all – I do feel that my own chances are particularly excellent. However, while this was nice of us, I have to confess our motives were not entirely pure as we did not feel that Mr Jacobson, who is quite flat-chested and has a big beard, had an especially good chance. Of course, being the feminists and right-on egalitarians we are, we were all for it.

We even held his place in the queue while he went off to Ping-Pong around before writing lots of truly excellent words about Israel. What an utterly confusing week, for many reasons, chief among them The Independent’s launch as both a broadsheet and a tabloid. Actually, this is quite something, a total first in newspapers, and so it was with some excitement that Deborah Orr, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and myself queued up outside the Editor’s office to volunteer for any Page Three work. Yasmin and the other Deborah really, really wanted it, not so much, I think for the work itself, but for what it can lead to: dates with third-division footballers; the inevitable acquisition of a bed with a pink, buttoned Dralon headboard, necessary for setting off cuddly toy collections just so; being on first name terms with Peter Stringfellow, a man who, now I think of it, is looking increasingly less like a man and more like a Cheestring with a silly wig on.
At one point Howard Jacobson joined us, his argument being that to stop him would amount to outrageous gender discrimination, plus he’d always longed for a pink, buttoned Dralon headboard to set off his cuddly toys just so.

But if you really care about European economic efficiency and social integration, thank the new airlines, not the old ones
More from Hamish McRae. A very few may be allowed to go under, when the fiscal pain of propping them up becomes greater than the political pain of letting them go. Something called KLM will probably survive and something called Air France will certainly do so. There will be other consolidation of European airlines, with weaker ones being allowed to keep their brand names in exchange for loosing management control. Now the rather more durable way to do so is to get Ryanair to open up a route to your municipal airport.So where does this leave Air France and KLM? They will scramble on. The result is that places that would not naturally attract travellers can do so by encouraging airlines to open up cheap routes.

Economic activity follows, for visitors spend money, buy holiday homes, tell their friends. The way to boost a region’s economy used to be to try to attract foreign investment, with governments paying large subsidies to companies to create a few not-very-high wage jobs for a few years until production was shifted to China. Most people make up their minds where they want to go and then look for the best combination of price and convenience. But some people don’t care so much where they go and simply look for good deals.