Good advice from Jill Insley.

I won’t bore you with my views about the complete uselessness and incompetence of HM Revenue and Customs, which failed to learn any lessons from two previous data losses in September and October. Instead, I would like to point out to prospective parents who may, quite understandably, feel nervous about signing up for child benefit following this debacle, that there is a very simple way around the issue of providing HMRC with your current account details.

It will only work with savings accounts run by institutions (such as the Skipton building society, which told me about this) that are not clearing banks. You can elect to have your child benefit paid straight into a savings account. This means that, instead of having to supply your own current account number and sort code to the HMRC and anyone it cares to share that information with, you provide the number and sort code of the bank account used by your savings institution, plus the reference number of your own savings account. Much harder to crack for your average fraudster.

Here’s a thought: since HM Government is currently short of two CDs, why don’t we all send a couple of blank disks to Gordon Brown, 10 Downing Street, Whitehall, London SW1? By Recorded Delivery, naturally. We wouldn’t want them to get lost in the post, now would we?

… in 1963.

Er, that’s what it says here…

Blonde women really do make men lose their heads, according to scientists.

Tests showed that men performed worse after they were shown pictures of fair-haired women, most likely because they believed they were dealing with someone less intelligent.

Researchers concluded that rather than simply being distracted by the golden hair, the men were subconsciously copying the stereotype of the “blonde bimbo”.

Academics at the University of Paris X-Nanterre examined men’s ability to complete general knowledge tests after exposure to women with different hair colours.

Throughout both trials, those participants exposed to blondes recorded the lowest scores.

“This proves that people confronted with stereotypes generally behave in line with them,” said Thierry Meyer, joint author of the study and professor of social psychology at the university.

“In this case blondes have the potential to make people act in a dumber way, because they mimic the unconscious stereotype of the dumb blonde.”

Now that’s what I call research. I’ve always wondered what went on at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. And is there a University of Paris IX-Nanterre?