Bad nan cometh

THEY **** you up, your nan and granda/They may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the cakes they had/And add some extra, just for you.”

OK so that's not quite what Philip Larkin wrote in his famous poem This Be The Verse. But my version fits better with the gist of a new report which (sort of) makes the same points he did, only with the blame shifted back a generation.

A research team from Glasgow University has found that grandparents who lavish sweets, cakes, biscuits and more on their grandchildren are harming the children's health, with long-term consequences. This isn't a specifically Scottish problem either, though I'm sure I'm not the only exasperated Scottish dad who has to frisk his mum for illicit sweeties and contraband shortbread before she's allowed over the threshold to visit the grandkids. Heard of Korea's Demilitarized Zone? Meet my Debiscuitized Zone.

So far, so normal. Haven't grandparents the world over always acted like this? Of course. But it matters more these days because increasingly grandparents are taking up the burden of childcare. Nearly half of all British children are now regularly cared for by grandparents, spending on average of 10 hours a week in the company of the crisp-munching, sweetie-gobbling, biscuit-troughing old reprobates. Sure, we love them to bits – but maybe it's time they started coming with a health warning.

Azzurri fury

ONE thing we can't blame on our grandparents – or the weather or Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin's “troll factories” – is Italy's failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

Call me prejudiced, but I've never been a fan of the Azzurri, as the Italian national football team is known. I bear the country itself no ill will (nice place to visit, enjoy a pistachio gelato as much as the next person, loved Cinema Paradiso etc) but the negativity and theatrics of its footballers annoys me.

I'm not the only one, either: a 2010 survey by academics at Sheffield University found that Italy were the team football fans rated the most likely to cheat. And let's not forget the dubious, last-minute goal Italy scored against Scotland to deny us a place in the 2008 European Championships – so dubious that then-Scotland manager Alex McLeish suspected dark forces at play, as he revealed in a BBC documentary broadcast last year.

All of which means I had an ungracious smirk on my face the morning after Italy lost a play-off game to Sweden and found themselves, for the first time since 1958, without a berth in the finals. The tournament takes place in Russia next year, but Buffon, Gabbiadini, Immobile and the rest of their international teammates will be on the beach at Ayr – or wherever you park your sun lounger when you earn £100,000 a week and find yourself with a month off in a World Cup year.

Doesn't quite ad up

SO who's winning the war of the icky Christmas adverts – John Lewis with its icky Moz The Monster effort, or Marks and Spencer with its icky Paddington Bear story? Frankly, who cares. Though they are both giving us plenty of unexpected entertainment.

First came the belief – widely held by many viewers – that a cuss word was spoken by the burglar whose attempt to steal the Brown family's Christmas presents is unwittingly foiled by Paddington in M&S's 90-second advert. Thankfully the Advertising Standards Authority soon stepped in to reveal that the burglar does not say “F*** you, little bear”, as many people thought, but, “Thank you, little bear”. Easy mistake to make, especially if you've hit the Bailey's a month early, or you have one of those useless flat-screen tellies that make everyone sound like they're mumbling. Or swearing.

Now ace political cartoonist, top children's illustrator and all-round dude Chris Riddell has stepped into the Christmas advert fray with a sarcastic tweet aimed at John Lewis. Specifically he's pointing up the similarities between the storyline of the Moz the Monster ad (it's about a monster that lives under a little boy's bed) and his 1986 book Mr Underbed, which is about a – yup, you guessed it. Mind you, Riddell would be the first to admit that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: he makes no secret of his admiration for Mervyn Peake, the 1940s illustrator and author of fantasy classic Titus Groan, and Peake's influence on Riddell's own drawing style is obvious for anyone with eyes to see.

She-ro worship

FINALLY, some good news about American “she-ro” Juli Briskman, who you may remember from last week's diary. If not, here's a recap: the 50-year-old marketing analyst lost her job with a US government contractor after she was photographed exercising her first amendment rights in the general direction of Donald Trump's motorcade as it sped past her while she was out riding her bike. More specifically, she gave him the finger. Several times. And again at the lights when she caught up.

Now a fundraising campaign has been organised to help her through her period of unforeseen joblessness. “Juli Briskman is an inspiration to us all,” runs the blurb on website Go Fund Me, which at the time of writing had raised $97,567 in a mere eight days.

Briskman will need more than double that amount if she wants to become a member of Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, of course. But the very reasonable $2000 a night guest rates mean she could move in for a month and, should “the Dotard” (as Kim Jong-un calls Trump) drop in for a round of golf, she can exercise her first amendment rights once again – to his face this time.

Trump himself, meanwhile, has also run into trouble for exercising his first amendment rights: he described Kim Jong-un as “short and fat”, has previously dubbed him “Rocket Man” and called North Korea a “cruel dictatorship”, heinous crimes for which he has been “sentenced to death by the Korean people”, at least according to the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper.