A platitude that is sitting in my brain, please ignore.

Big companies research the market before launching a new product (doubly so before “relauching” an existing one). Then they try to hit their target, shaping the product to “what the users want”. Tiny companies, or people just doing it for the love, make what they want to see.

As few can articulate what they want until they see it chasing what people say (or your research says) they want is a path to average.

So, do what you want rather than what you think people might want and you have a chance of being above average. But you might fail.

Gwen Stefani (yes, I know, not my usual thing, a return of a longstanding agreement from the last time I dragged my other half to watch Belle & Sebastian or somesuch) is not averse to using the odd bit of popular culture - in the first half hour she’s played songs that piggy-back on Topol and Julie Andrews - so when she tells us she went to the zoo yesterday, I’m immediately thinking a hip-hop mash-up of Julie Felix is on the cards.

Turns out she really had gone to the zoo, held a baby monkey and fed the elephants. She tells the crowd this and is a bit nonplussed that we don’t cheer the zoo (and all the staff she’s invited to concert) loudly. What she doesn’t realise is a lot of us are trying to work out which zoo she’s been to. Dudley Zoo, for a start doesn’t have any elephants.

While she’s off for another costume change, leaving vocal duties to Bowie’s long-time bassist Gail-Ann Dorsey, I’m thinking Drayton Manor? No elephants there either.

While she’s fitting in an incongruous ballad, but refusing to sing anything from No Doubt, I’m thinking Wipsnade? She can’t think that’s in Birmingham.

While she’s rampaging through the audience, scaring the shit out of security (she got right up the back of the arena), running while singing the one that goes “You know we’re cool” that sounds like Belinda Carlile, I’m thinking Chester Zoo? Nah.

While the fibre glass goats (I’m not kiding) are put away and another lacklustre ballad stutters with breakdance interludes, and you start to wish for the return of The Go Go’s (actually I pretty much aways think that), I’m thinking - surely not London Zoo? No elephants I don’t think, and wouldn’t she have invited the keepers to the Wembley Arena gig.

While she encores with What You Waiting For and I remember why for all the GIRL, GIRL, GIRL fake hip-hop posturing and the sad demotion of ska in her affections she’s still a cut above most pop acts, I’m thinking Twycross.

Twycross. It has to be.

A new book by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’ on e-mail etiquette, Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home is already billed as the “genre’s Strunk and White,’, but proposes that we use exclamation marks willy nilly.

Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be.

Please. God. No!

On the overuse of exclamation points. - By Jacob Rubin - Slate Magazine

I’ve been worrying about what some fairy stories are teaching our young. In particular wildly inaccurate versions of the food chain, where they seem to suggest that any animal will consume a smaller one.

The old woman who swallowed a fly is a case in point, the fly seems to be an accident - I mean I don’t know why she swallowed a fly, but you’d think it unlikely that she did it on purpose.

The spider, well again an accident perhaps? I remember reading in some horrific fact revealing magazine that you swallow a number of insects and arachnids while you sleep. Then again, she apparently swallowed the spider to catch the fly - possible, but misguided to say the least. The spider will have to spend ages spinning an in-stomach web. It can’t be good for her.

A bird is a little more stupid. To “catch” the spider you might have poured a load of hot water down your neck, like you do when there’s one in your bath. Or simply caught it under a glass and thrown it out of the window.

The cat I understand a little - what better way to get rid of a bird than a cat? She might have thought ahead a little and swallowed a scarecrow, but you can’t get it right all of the time.

The dog is where the food chain stuff starts to get odd. Dogs just don’t eat cats on a regular basis, in fact I’ve no idea which animal has the dog as its main predator, but it has a lot more chance of being ‘the dustbin’, or ‘the can of dog food’ or even the chav baby than the cat.

Next she swallows a goat, no mean feet. But what makes anyone think that a dog will be disposed of by a goat - I know they eat anything, but… I’m worried for her mental health as well as the physical implications. The governments obesity drive is well founded if this glutton is anything to go by.

You may have wondered where Shergar has got to, and carry on wondering. The woman has swallowed a horse, but I doubt it was that one. No problems with this you might think, after all the French do it all the time. Okay, but why? In history, as far as I’m aware there have been no recorded incidents of horses disposing of goats.

The woman’s dead, of course, and that has to be a good thing - removing her from the gene pool.

And the less said about that woman with the pig the better.