SOME people take Marmite on holiday with them. You can only go so far with that risky foreign cuisine. Lots take tea bags and toilet rolls. The Queen takes a pillow and Malvern water. A few take their slippers.

Sun, sea, sex and…slippers?

Doesn’t sound riotous, but home comforts can be, well, comforting in a strange place.

Some people, according to a survey last week, even take the hamster.

It’s the only time they get, apparently, to pay it a bit of attention.

Lucky hamster. I hope they take its slippers.

We don’t take Marmite or tea bags or a hamster. We take light bulbs.

Lots of them. So many cottages – and even posh hotels – seem to delight in keeping guests in the dark.

Maybe they have something to hide.

It’s a shame when you’ve remembered to pack all those holiday books and actually have time to read them, that your holiday home is akin to a gloomy cave.

The first thing I do when arriving at any holiday cottage is go round replacing all the light bulbs –except in Shetland at midsummer when it never really got dark and at 11pm it was still easy to read with no other light at all. A rare treat.

So if you run a hotel, a B & B or rent out holiday cottages, please have a thought and shed a little extra light on the proceedings.

Maybe even the hamster would appreciate it.

A HOSPITAL in France has opened a bar for its terminally ill patients where they and their visitors can enjoy a glass or two.

We beat the French to it.

Just days before she died in an Oxford hospice last year my sister was able to enjoy a sip of a last gin and tonic – maintaining standards and style to the end. It mattered.

IT must have been heart-breaking for the parents of murder victim Colin McGinty to overhear a judge at their son’s murderers’ parole hearing, say that the victim personal statement they had made, actually made no difference at all.

Dreadful for them in their anguish – but surely better for the law.

The figure of justice is usually seen carrying scales to weight out right or wrong, a double-edged sword, to show the way that justice works and is often blindfolded – so that justice cannot be influenced by anything other than the law and the facts of the case.

Even judges are human and it is easy to be moved by other people’s emotions.

But, as with the harrowing statements made by the relatives of the Hillsborough victims, they don’t alter the basic facts of the matter.

If nobody mourns a victim, is their death all right then? That’s the logic.

Victim statements were always a bad idea, a bid to blurring the hard edges of the law. Let’s stop pretending and do away with them.

SUPERBOOMERS are rewriting the rules of retirement, according to a new report this week. The new generation of over 50s are starting new careers, new romances, new lives and are, says one expert, “seizing the chance to rev up rather than slow down.”

I’m exhausted just thinking about it, but looking at Lulu – 66 in November – strutting her stuff in tartan trews at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony, it’s easy to believe.