There may be a hosepipe ban on at the moment, but nobody said anything about washing up bowls, buckets and and the odd half-left glass of stale beer. Beer has yeast in it, and if you pee into the glass and pour the resultant melange onto hostas, it can work wonders. As for the buckets and other receptacles, do I feel any guilt about this bit of naughtiness? Not in the slightest. First of all, by weeing in the garden I save at least two gallons of water a day; and second, had the fatties at the top of the water companies awarded some repairs to infrastructure and modern conservation methods (and fewer bonuses to themselves) we wouldn’t need hosepipe bans in the first place.

‘The Jubilee is for everyone, not just for monarchists’ suggested the Daily Telegraph somewhat inexplicably today. If you’re a raging republican (or just an old git like me fed up of celebrating a Britain that died years ago) it very obviously isn’t for you. It isn’t for Occupy, or the Socialist Workers’ Party, Islamists, Labour Left, drug addicts, Yardies, most of the Scots, or any of the other blemishes on our national life. The main people it’s ‘for’, if we’re honest about it, are marketing managers, and the Chinese.

Dealing with the latter first, I would estimate that the Jubilee has upped our tat-import bill by quite a considerable amount of money. About the only supermarket product line without a Union Jack on it right now is the tampon. To date I have seen the jolly Jack on Camembert packs,  Italian ice-cream, Spanish Cava, and….well we could be here all night. Mainly though, it seems to be on goods imported from the Chinese People’s Republic: garden lights, collapsible chairs, cushions, pen-knives, torches, pens, and all those other things that cost us once to import, and then once more to recycle a month later.

The marketing managers have excelled themselves in their contorted attempts to rationalise the use of Union flags on the most unlikely consumable branded products. Does Rover really crave a special Jubilee portion of chicken and tuna with balsamic vinegar in a tasty rice and crab sauce? We shall never know. But in Britain’s supermarkets lately – be it Morrisons or Sainsbury – you walk in, and immediately wonder if you’ve entered the Windsor Castle Souvenir shop immediately after the relief of Mafeking.

Only pharmacies appear to be a reasonable haven of bunting-free point of sale, which I find strange: as a former adman, the Jubilee seems to me a gift from Heaven for almost every OTC line. ‘Uniquely formulated headache remedy for National Anthem Fatigue Syndrome (NAFS)’, ‘Special Issue Nausea Control pill for every programme showing Prince Charles drivelling on about Mama’, ‘Non-habit forming tranquiliser for use after Prince Philip interview’ and so forth.

I sense I am going to get a rocket from the lovely True Belle for all this stuff, but the truth is that the Diamond Jubilee is for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, a fine woman who is the head of an ungrateful nation, and a family of variable quality. As for Maj herself, she represents everything admirable about how a sense of duty and commitment can be a uniting factor in an otherwise schizoid society….and, dare I say it, how a full-time working mother and pompous father often produce completely dysfunctional kids.

Finally, I am informed by an acute Slogger that Argentine ‘experts’ working for AIG are in residence in Athens to ‘advise’ the Greeks about the default thing. I cannot see the logic in this. “The team in Argentina has been through a number of eruptions, and has had to deal with situations of extreme uncertainty and capital flight that would be not unlike what AIG will be dealing with if Greece leaves the Euro”, said Clark Troy, a consultant.

I don’t know anything about Clark Troy, although having a name suggestive of both Superman and the Trojan Horse is an amazingly apt monniker to have in this context. But employing the employees of a bailed-out bank from a rogue-defaulting country to advise you on leaving a currency zone you are desperate not to leave….well, shall we just say that it gives out mixed (not to say impenetrable) signals.