I had a Charlie Chaplin moment yesterday.

It's not that I was standing there in a ragged coat wearing a bowler hat and carrying a cane. But there was a pair of baggy trousers involved.

I have a new pair of lightweight trousers, which are good in this warm weather.

They have pockets which are wide and not very deep. I was leaning over to get something when a pound coin popped out of the pocket and fell on the floor.

Naturally, I leaned forward and picked it up.

As I did so, another coin fell out of the pocket and onto the floor.

I leaned down to get this one, and as I did another coin fell.

I repeated this about three times, each time one popped out as I put the previous one away.

It was a brilliant piece of slapstick. Unfortunately, I was the only one there to appreciate it.

Today I have to send a video tape to someone called Katelynn. At least, I assumed that was what her name was, because she said it was, on the phone. I looked on a website to check her address and discovered that she spells her name Caitlin.

What? How could you pronounce that Katelynn? It's pronounced Caitlin, obviously, or if you must use the English version, Kathleen.

Wait a minute, I can see how people might get this wrong ... it's actually spelt Caitlín. There, that makes it clear.

Well, in theory a blog should be updated regularly, like several times a day perhaps. But clearly I've not been doing that.

So, if you love life as it happens but get tired of clicking day after day and finding I've not updated, here's your chance. I've added all the members of my old journal notify list to a new list, which will allow me to tell them when I've added an entry.

I'm not going to notify every entry, because some are really dull and others are just a case of fiddling with existing entries. But mostly if you're on the list, you'll find out first.

If you're not on the list and you want to join, just send me an e-mail by clicking on the 'notify' button at the end of the column on the right.

As you can see, I've been stealing buttons. These are stolen and/or adapted from the fine site called Steal These Buttons. But you're not allowed to steal any, because I got there first...

'ThirstyPixel: utilising high-quality products.'

More from adactio: the New Media Company Generator.

I actually think 'ThirstyPixel' could work ...

I notice that Brighton-based blogger Jeremy of Adactio was also writing about Punch and Judy today.

However, on reading his entry I realised that I had completely forgotten one aspect of the May Fayre in Covent Garden - there was an exhibition of Morris Dancing. Horrible. I must have just blanked that out, the way you do when you don't want something unpleasant to spoil a beautiful memory.

Last week, we had a visit from Susanne's brother, who is a puppetteer based in Berlin. He was very interested in the British puppet tradition, especially about Punch and Judy.

Well, it pretty much is Punch and Judy, isn't it? There's really not much else.

I tried to explain to him why Mr Punch is such a hero, despite the fact that he's (a) a bully, (b) a child beater / child killer, (c) a wife beater, and (d) a cop killer.

This is the sort of combination that regularly gets hip hop artists banned from the British stage / airwaves. Yet the same people who protest in fury about popular music lyrics would explode with anger if anyone attempted to ban Punch and Judy for the exact same offences.

The odd thing about Punch and Judy is how traditional it is. The characters, costumes and storyline have not changed in years. In fact, in the nineteenth century there was much more variation than there is today.

On Sunday 11 May, we went to the May Fayre in Covent Garden, which is considered the birthplace of Mr Punch because that was where Samuel Pepys remarked on seeing a puppet show which sounds like an early version. The British one, however, originated from an earlier Italian model.

The May Fayre is held every year and features a gathering of Punch and Judy players, all of whom have their little theatres set up and each of them does a show in turn.

I was surprised to find that the shows really are almost identical. Even the booths have almost the same red and white stripes and yellow frames. Mr Punch always has a bright red hat, red humped jacket, and bright red hooked nose.

And the story - each time it's the same thing. Punch's wife / girlfriend Judy leaves him in charge of their baby. Sometimes he tries to teach the baby to walk, sometimes he throws him downstairs - once he even threw the baby out the window. Either way, it's a horrific piece of baby-related misbehaviour.

And the children roar with laughter.

Then Judy comes back.

"What has he done with the baby, boys and girls?"

"He threw it out the window!" twenty or thirty young voices scream, in unison - some pointing, helpfully, with their fingers.

Judy then attacks Punch with a stick, but after a couple of blows, he gets the stick back and knocks her out with it.

Then the beadle arrives to find out what has happened to Judy. Sometimes this is a policeman, and on one occasion Saddam Hussein turned up, but don't ask me what that had to do with the story.

The policeman quickly goes the same way as Judy did. Then there is Joey the Clown, who leaves Punch to take care of a frying pan and a string of sausages. When Joey leaves, a big green crocodile arrives and eats the sausages.

Mr Punch - for whom the phrase 'never explain, never apologise' was presumably invented - ends up knocking Joey out as well. And sometimes, the crocodile too. Sometimes Death comes along to give him a shake up, and in earlier years he would have been hanged in the end. But then he escapes, to cheat Death and the Hangman, saying in his weird squeaky voice:

"That's the way to do it!"

As Susanne's brother pointed out, this would never be allowed in Germany. Parents would never allow their children to be exposed to such shocking violence, and anti-social behaviour.

However, I have to say that none of the children I saw appeared to be being corrupted or depraved by what they were seeing. On the contrary, they seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously. As were their parents. It's difficult to say why we enjoy seeing such a rogue and scoundrel breaking every moral rule and getting away with it, but we do, and it's enormous fun.

On the other hand, it is a bit sad to see that the traditional Punch and Judy style is so set in stone, fixed like a sepia photograph. Even though one of the puppeteers was as young as 11 years old, there was very little attempt to update the format or innovate it. The children are not likely to complain about changes - but their parents might.

Partly this is a result of the strange attitude in British society to children. Punch and Judy is seen as something for children, not for adults, and therefore of low social value. It's not seen as any kind of art form - the performers have to pass the hat round at the end of the show - and so there is no incentive to change or innovate. It's like comic books, which in Europe are seen as an important form of artistic impression. Whereas in Britain they're things that kids read, and therefore not important.

It's funny, that, isn't it?

Oh yes it is!

So I was reading the report by Andrew Orlowski in The Register that says that Google is going to move blogs to their own section of the search engine - which means most of the results you get for a search will no longer be blogs, as they are now.

And I noticed this remark:

"Recent research by Pew put the number of blog readers as opposed to writers, as "statistically insignificant"."

So there you go. You, out there. You're statistically insignificant.

In case you want to find out just how insignificant you are, you can read the original research here.

What it actually says is that just 4% of US internet users read blogs, as opposed to about one third who read online versions of major news media. "The overall number of blog users is so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs."

Clearly, Andrew Orlowski knows even less about statistics than I do. As I understand it, the research was based on 1600 people, of whom 999 were internet users. So the number of those who read blogs would be around 40 - which is too small a sample from which to draw meaningful conclusions about.

That's quite a different thing from saying that the overall number of readers is statistically insignificant. Four percent (and with a 3% margin of error the actual amount could be anything from 1% to 7%) is still quite a lot of people. If, say, half the US population uses the internet at some time or other, that would mean there are about five million blog readers in the US alone.

Almost none of them read this, of course, but don't let that make you feel insignificant.

Personally, I'm surprised that there are that many blog readers around. I always thought that the only people who read blogs are other bloggers. Sometimes, late at night, I even suspect that all the UK blogs (apart from this one) are actually just written and read by Mo Morgan.

However, just to show that it can cut both ways, this article goes way too far in the other direction:

'According to Jupiter Research and other analysts there are more than 500,000 people who maintain a weblog today. If each one was so miserable to have only one hundred readers (I for nothing I have more than 1000 different blog readers each day, so that gives you some reference) that would make already for 50 million readers.'

Well, no. Very few weblogs have 1000 different readers - most have much fewer - I would guess around 10-30 unique readers for the vast majority of blogs. And most people who read blogs read more than one - so the blog reading community, world wide, is probably not a lot more than the five million mentioned above.

Or five million and one, if you include Mo Morgan.

Never let it be said that I don't keep you updated with all the latest important news from Europe:

Authorities warn about mosquito plague - Four cows already dead in South Tyrol.

Not all the most interesting information is on the web.

(Only most of it)

I was reading a book - A Brief History of Heaven by Alister E McGrath - when I found the following information:

'A ... question that has greatly vexed Christian theologians concerns the age of those resurrected. If someone dies at the age of 60, will they appears in the streets of the New Jerusalem as an old person? And if someone dies at the age of 10, will they appear as a child?'

'The issue caused the spilling of much theological ink, especially during the Middle Ages. By the end of the thirteenth century, an emerging consensus can be discerned. As each person reaches their peak of perfection around the age of 30, they will be resurrected as they would have appeared at that time - even if they never lived to reach that age.'

Apparently, not only will everyone who gets to heaven be 30 years of age, but all blemishes will be taken away. Probably everyone will look like Brad Pitt as well. I'm looking forward to that myself.

Yo-yo banned over worries it's dangerous. A BBC report on dangerous toys. Eight children have been injured by these, it says.

I'm not sure if there exists a children's toy which is not dangerous if used in some way or other. But if the government says action to be taken, then clearly it should be taken immediately.

All our local shops, which used to sell these toys for £2.50, have taken immediate action.

They've reduced the price to £1.50.