They think they've come up with a universal flu jab. Hopefully, the million or so people who die of flu every year won't have to now. Unless the usual suspects start their nonsense, like they did with the MMR jab.

Let's have a quick peek into the future. Flu jabs for all, no quarter for obscurantists, and plentiful supplies of the vaccine across the world, without any of that corporate nonsense about patents. You know it makes sense. All we have to do is make it happen.

Less momentously but for some of us just as cheeringly, youth hostels are to be given alchohol licences. Kevin Rushby in the Guardian gets weirdly upset about this, apparently in the belief that walkers are uninterested in drinking. Some people really are a bit slow on the uptake, aren't they? Will alcohol ruin the hostel experience? he asks. No Kevin, it won't. You might, but it won't. Oh well, you may give us the hump, but at least you won't be giving us the flu.

Do you remember the Eighties? Crap beer, dispensed with stony faced reluctance in smoke-filled museums of grime, between the hours of three-thirty and a quarter to four. Compare this with our modern wonderland, and tell me life isn't getting better.