MY grateful thanks to Dan Atkinson for editing the Diary with such flair, wit and facial hair last week. Handed the ceremonial quill with which every word of this column is written, he ran off with it like a relay sprinter on a daily bowl of Nandrolone.

In fact he was so good there is already a petition underway demanding he is installed as the permanent writer.

The Diary is all for free speech but this sort of dissent should be suppressed, with violence if necessary.

To see more of Dan, get down to the Basement Bar of City Screen every Sunday night. There, he will make you laugh in person.

THE things we get sent. During the past few weeks, the Diary's postbag has become weirder.

Odd-shaped parcels are arriving almost daily. In these security-sensitive times, anything bigger than a padded Jiffy has to be isolated, prodded with long sticks and subjected to a thorough examination by a team of sniffer ants before it is opened.

Two such packages disgorged very strange items recently. First we unwrapped a hamster cage, complete with wheel.

Of a hamster there was no sign, but some of the bars had been bent back. And there was a message: "I'm outta here!"

The cage came with a tag suggesting we visit the website you-are-not-going-to-believe-this.com for an explanation. We did. We are still none the wiser.

Next we tore through some wrapping paper only to discover a wooden box, its lid secured by a combination padlock. "Unlock the secret to locking in moisture", it said, as if we cared.

You had to ring a number to get the number that would open the padlock. We did, only to get the lock, and found it contained some contact lens solution.

Whoop-di-do.

It strikes the Diary that if all the money wasted on dumb PR campaigns was pooled, we could pay off the African national debt and still have change for the pictures.

A HEADLINE in the Evening Press caught our eye: "Parking in streets may be banned," under which was this quote from the Lord Mayor: "The time is coming also when it will not be permissible to park cars in streets."

This report was in the Evening Press in September 1945, and the Lord Mayor was HC de Burgh (father of Chris?). How ironic that half a century later, the city council is trying to implement Mr de Burgh's policy by pricing motorists off their own streets.

JUST before this Diarist took a necessary constitutional, Heworth reader Mary Morrod pointed out an interesting combination of articles in the paper.

On page 12 of our February 11 edition, a reader's letter was headlined: "Geese blight park".

But in the Way We Were column on page five, was this: "50 years ago: Speculation had been caused some weeks before by the appearance over the eastern outskirts of York of a number of wild geese...

"Columnist Mr Nobody was asking if anybody else had heard them, because he was curious to know where they were roosting, as swans and ducks were common on the rivers and becks of York at the time, but geese were a rarity."

We presume goose poo was too.

Updated: 10:29 Monday, February 23, 2004