I haven’t been around much lately, but with good reason. I have been completing my application for permission to leave this pleasant land* for greener pastures and surprisingly, considering that the government is supposedly desperate to bring down the net migration figure, it’s ridiculously complicated.

Surely a  multiple choice form with pictures of the ‘Desperate Scousewives’ cast in the margins might be more appealing to a demographic we can probably do without?

“She became a drug user and started begging following the death of her father and the News of the World exposed this.

I really regret it because I’d got to know her very well and I really quite liked her. The fact she was begging outside Chalk Farm station came from a police officer, who had been surprised when he asked her to move on.

I went too far on that story. Someone crying out for help, not crying out for a News of the World reporter.

I then took her back to her flat and took a load of pictures of her topless.

Then she went on TV and described me as her boyfriend.

When I heard a few years later that she’d killed herself I thought ‘Yeah that’s one I really regret.’ But there’s not many.

Sometimes I wouldn’t have bought the News of the World even though I worked for it, but the British public carried on.”

Former journalist Peter McMullen on his information gathering techniques. In this case, he was speaking to the Leveson enquiry about Denholm Elliott’s daughter Jennifer, who became a drug user and was forced to beg after the death of her father in 1992.

With this in mind, I decided to overlook the form’s polite request for a few words on my ‘Reasons For Leaving’ and instead sellotaped the transcripts of two of this week’s most popular news stories onto my form. I think they articulate my disappointment and anger effectively, and I can pop off for a coffee with the time I’ve gained.

You can use them for your form, if you want.

*Not really. It’s a device to shoehorn these two hideous examples of humanity into one user-friendly, bite-size post. Like you didn’t know.