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I love you, Phillip. There, I've said it. By Eamonn Holmes

I’VE taken a long, hard at my behaviour recently, and I can reach only one conclusion: I love you, Phillip, and we should get married.

I know you must be thinking ‘Hang on, wasn’t Eamonn slagging me off like I was Jimmy Savile yesterday?’ But any psychologist will tell you it’s a textbook case of unrequited love being sublimated into irrational hate. 

Yes, my unhinged rants reeking of sour grapes by an egotistical D-list celebrity all make perfect sense now. And the fact is, I am truly, madly, deeply in love with you.

So why did I not tell you sooner? Perhaps I felt unworthy of a colossus of daytime TV like you. You have reshaped broadcasting forever, from your groundbreaking use of a puppet gopher to This Morning’s philanthropic offer to let the poor win their electricity bill by calling a premium-rate phone line.

Perhaps I was intimidated by your good looks. The mischievous sparkle in your eye or your immaculate silver hair which is the only hint that you are, actually, pretty f**king old. 

Perhaps I was jealous of your young lover when I saw you caught on cameraphone in a pub. How I wish it could have been me with you in that terminally awkward moment.

But that’s all in the past. Now I’ve discovered my true feelings we must be together. We can take things slowly at first, and let’s face it, you’re not exactly going to be snowed under with job offers for the foreseeable future. 

Obviously I’m not up to speed on the whole gayness thing, so I’ll need a bit of mentoring with that. I’ve tried listening to Judy Garland albums and that wasn’t too bad, so I’m ready to move on to bottom sex, buying a chihuahua and learning Polari. All I’ve got to do is text Ruth to let her know I’m a gay now and we can start our new life as Mr and Mr Holmes.

I even reckon I can wangle us a big showbiz wedding like Elton John. GB News say they’ll pay for a Victoria sponge and some sausage rolls if we exchange vows live on air. It’s a bit different to their usual stance on LGBT+ issues, but they’re prepared to bend the rules for anything that might get more than 30 viewers.

So call me as soon as you can, my love. When we’re together you’ll look back on this difficult chapter in your life and realise every cloud has a silver lining. Yes. That’s definitely what you’ll think.

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Scraping mould off bread: Your mum's waste-avoiding hacks that left you traumatised

THERE’S being thrifty, but your mum went to disgusting lengths to prevent waste. Here are some of her frugal ways that still give you the shudders.

Scraping mould off bread

Bread is a famously inexpensive staple in every culture, but gold bullion to your mum. Your weak disposition was to blame for your food poisoning, not the traces of green mould on your cheese sandwich. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, she’d say, but now even a slightly stale loaf makes you fearful, which doesn’t feel like a sign of strength.

Making leftover meals

You left your least-favourite foodstuffs on the side, only for them to become a burnt, congealed mess served up next day. Not too bad if it was bubble and squeak, f**king terrifying if it was a ‘stew’ made with gravy granules. Like Jaws, who knows what horrors lurked in the deep? The kicker was that this habit probably only saved 4p per meal.

Hand-me-down clothes

Being the baby of the family had its perks, but not being forced to go to school in your sister’s hole-filled Matalan polo shirts and out-of-fashion clownish shoes. Naturally you were mocked, class contempt forever burned into your subconscious like a brand. Yes, your brother’s cheapo C&A trainers have a lot to answer for. It was character-building, claimed your parents, who just wanted to save money for a big Sony.

Owning a compost heap

Nowadays visits to garden centres trigger hideous Nam-style flashbacks of collecting your football from a pile of stinking organic matter smelling suspiciously like a drain. Your mum’s twisted creation was a rotting housing estate for maggots, supposedly to recycle discarded vegetable peel for gardening, which acted more as a reminder of nature’s nightmarish life cycle of death and decay, something you dwell on miserably in your 30s. 

Trimming sprouted potatoes

Like a facehugger bursting forth from a Xenomorph egg, the sight of a stem growing from an old potato did not bode well. Your mum keeping those straggly cut-offs in a box looked as if she was harvesting a new alien colony, while you were expected to eat the ‘perfectly fine’ original offender. The potatoes by now had very high toxin levels, but back in the day that was just being a fussy eater.

Having you finish your plate 

Eating every last morsel as if you were on death row haunts you to this day. For the crime of wanting a bowl of trifle without finishing your soggy green beans you were forced to funnel every drip of lumpy turkey Bisto down your gullet. And in a cycle of cruelty you do it to your own children, with the added incentive of telling them if they don’t eat those ten remaining peas global warming is their fault.

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