It’s a bit like the old dilemna about whether a tree that falls in a forest with noone around to hear it, still makes a noise when it lands - but if Britney Spears wasn’t constantly surrounded by cameras and journalists would her life still be in the mess that it seems to be at the moment?

I think it’s hard to argue that it would.

Unlike some people, like Pete Doherty, who would appear to have brought his problems with him into public life, Britney’s have all landed fairly recently.

There was a fair bit of news coverage prior to Christmas concerning the amount of excess packaging in which nearly everything we buy is enclosed.

Everything from bags of crisps to toys seem to be housed in boxes and packets which are far too big for the contents.  I’ve always wondered why crisp bags are normally about twice the size that they needed to be, but thought (perhaps naively) that it was for some scientific reason.

However, like most other things now I think it more likely that manufacturers feel the need to have larger packaging to make their product look better - a larger item therefore better value for money.

I was all prepared to have a right old rant about something and now I can’t really be bothered expending all that energy on something that won’t make any difference anyway!

So instead I’ll just lay down the simple facts.

On Wednesday I was in the car most of the day and was listening to Radio 1 - not normally a bad thing, but their coverage of a news story really got my back up.  Every hour they would lead with a small snippet of a story which sounded as if it was pretty bad, but then later on they played a longer version which essentially took away the bad element and made it all understandable and effectively made their story null and void.

I’ve had an idea for a film, or maybe a TV drama - I think it’s gonna be a cracker.  This is the basic premise :

Imagine you are a guy, in a bit of a humdrum job doing the same old same old day in, day out - perhaps a civil servant working in an office, or a prison officer or something.

Away from work you want to lead a different life so you spend your cash a bit too liberally and end up in a little bit of debt.  You don’t want to curb your spending to pay off the debt, so the level of debt spirals out of control.  The depression this brings on, leads to more spending and so it goes on.

I’ve been watching this story develop over the past week or so, and my viewpoint on it has changed slightly, but not very much.

I don’t want to say too much on it, but the stance that this woman has done nothing wrong and was jailed for something silly only stands up when compared to the laws and ways of life in this country.