SOMETHING for nothing! There - that got your attention, didn't it? So I suppose we shouldn't be too hard on Cherie Blair who, when offered a little something from a trendy Melbourne shop, managed to grab armfuls of goods worth over £2,000.

In an extraordinary freebie spree, she and her children grabbed 68 items that filled five large boxes. Dale Winton, eat your heart out.

The only restraint seems to have been shown by shocked Australians who described the Blairs' behaviour as "a bit undignified".

But now she's had to pay for it all. Shame. Would she have chosen so much if she'd known she would have had to cough up?

We all love freebies, something for nothing. For most of us that might mean free samples in the supermarket, Buy One Get One Free on a jar of coffee, or the set of steak knives my mother got from Surf about 40 years ago.

Journalists, of course, are always being bribed, but not usually very successfully. In the last week alone I have been offered a pink velour cushion embroidered with "Princess", a sachet of instant coffee and some cleaning spray for the loo. I occasionally get perfume and once, memorably, a flea collar.

I think I can still call my soul my own.

The irony is, of course, that the less people actually need freebies, the more they get given. The rich get richer and the poor get done for shoplifting. Cherie Blair is said to earn over £200,000 a year, so could probably have afforded a few T-shirts and pyjamas for her children. Even five boxes full.

Prince Charles, who's not short of a bob or two, enjoyed free cruises on the yacht owned by the late Greek millionaire John Latsis.

Film stars "borrow" designer dresses for big occasions. And think of all those magazine deals that pay for the posh weddings.

But, as so often, it is Hollywood which leads the way.

At the Oscars last month, the goodie bags were each worth nearly £20,000. Gulp. Each of the presenters and performers - none of them what you would call struggling for their next meal, like Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta Jones, Cameron Diaz and Dustin Hoffman, was given such delights as a stay in a posh hotel at £1,000; private dinner party and a set of steak knives worth £1,000 (and I bet they don't last as long as those from Surf); chocolate truffles, sports club membership, body lotion, organic satin sheets, cosmetics, sunglasses, jewel-encrusted compact, and so on and so on and so on.

In fact, they were given so much that the organisers asked that companies give gift certificates instead of the actual goods - otherwise the goodie bags would be too heavy to carry.

I never had that problem with my flea collar.

ARE we getting a little panicky about Sars?

My neighbours are recovering from flu. I'm getting over bronchitis (wheeze, cough, wheeze). There are many similar bugs already whizzing round the world doing a lot more damage than Sars, however new and frightening it might seem.

So far, despite the thousands that have caught it, fewer than 300 people have died. Too many, of course.

But in that time, how many pope all over the world have died from flu? Or pneumonia? Or all the other diseases that can spread so easily. There was a panic some time ago that TB was making a comeback, often brought into Britain from developing countries. Do we have masks and tests at Heathrow?

And we still ignore the biggest threat of all. In the month that those 300 people have died worldwide from Sars, the same number of people will have been killed on the roads in this country alone.

So why don't we concentrate our panic on that?

Perfect balance

WELL, they never asked me...

A study by the University of Teesside for the Economic and Social Research Council has shown that working from home is just as stressful as working in an office. Tosh.

They say for the it can affect your work/life balance and that work encroaches on evenings and weekends. So?

The last few weeks when the weather was brilliant, I abandoned the computer every day to potter in the garden or walk down the lanes. And in the evenings when it was cold and dark and there was nothing on TV, I got on with work.

It strikes me as the perfect work/life balance, in that I have total control over when and how I work.

I bet not even the researchers at the University of Teesside have that.

Red carpet, red card

IT was a seriously swish lunch. So swish, that on arrival, when I got out of my car, a nice young man rushed forward with an enormous umbrella to keep me dry.

(Where was he when I'd been pushing a loaded trolley across Tesco car park in the pouring rain an hour earlier?)

He held it attentively over me as we approached the hotel entrance, complete with special-occasion red carpet. The red carpet looked lovely and clean. My shoes were wet. So I walked alongside the carpet for fear of making it mucky.

There are people on this earth born to walk on red carpets - and people born to clean them.

You can tell where my roots lie.

PS: GPs say they want to charge £36 for a home visit. Sounds reasonable - cheaper than the washing machine man.

But will they have a full set of spares on the van?

Published: 30/04/2003