I’ve ploughed through all her work, and now I’ve started on Ian Rankin. There’s simply nothing more relaxing after a hard day’s work than trying to predict the plot or solve the case. The other day I tried an Anita Shreve with the unbelievably soggy title All She Ever Wanted It just didn’t deliver. I followed it up with another Shreve classic, The Pilot’s Wife.

These women are so feeble, so wet, and clearly never get drunk, swear or behave badly It does your head in I’m back with Rebus, a man after my own heart. And let’s be honest: his sex life is so poor it makes most female readers feel superior!Top shelf: Won’t ‘The Sun’ want a modesty wrapper as well?Sainsbury’s supermarket is to make sure that children don’t get offended by any cheeky magazines by wrapping them in special “modesty” covers. These will conceal bare breasts and buttocks on the covers of men’s magazines such as ‘Loaded’. Surely this will simply lead to a rise in sales, and soon ‘The Sun’ and the ‘Daily Sport’ will be demanding that they, too, qualify for modesty covers. It’s like those warnings before a television programme about violence and bad language. I’m sure all that happens is that more people simply tune in to find out what’s so offensive.Pet puppet: Paul Merton could wake up wooden ArchieI can’t wait for the return of Archie Andrews! I grew up listening to the antics of Archie the ventriloquist’s dummy. He was a cheeky schoolboy in an ill-fitting blazer who was a huge hit in the 1950s.

It never occurred to me how weird it was to have a wooden talking doll on the radio. In fact, I thought Archie was a real flesh-and-blood boy for many years, not a doll with a man’s hand up his bottom. When ventriloquist Peter Brough died, Archie was sold for £34,000 – and now he may be resurrected I hope Paul Merton rises to the challenge. He would be perfect.On the ropes: Could young blacks respect Ali after this?Muhammad Ali has sold the right to use his name for $50m.

There’s no doubt that he was once a great fighter, but his official biographer maintains that Ali supported racial segregation and, in the end, how much did he really do to fight for the black underclass in America? He was an icon, and a symbol that many young blacks respected. But selling his name means that he has well and truly sold out

More from Janet Street-Porter. I fear I am not a child of the Enlightenment. When you are guided purely by reason and evidence-based science, you have to jettison so many innocent pleasures that brighten these dark days, such as a belief in pixies, yetis, werewolves, spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, the Tardis, David Icke, the Liberal Democrats and my perennial hope that a woman rider will win the Grand National Oh, and God – He has to go too.