As she was overwhelmed by members of the Tartan Army at a railway station, Ms Swinson got out her BlackBerry, logged on to her Twitter site and wrote: “Have I missed something? What’s the football festivity? Can’t move at Queen Street station for folk in Scotland tops.”

Seven minutes later, Graham Barrie posted: “The Tartan Army v the Dutch Army tonight at Hampden Jo. You really need to get out more ”

Jeff and Mr Eugenides both have good takes on this. I have to agree with them. For some, football is a matter of life and death. The Scotsman‘s David Maddox calls the match “do-or-die”. But in truth, it isn’t much more than a slightly tedious playground game.

The Scotland–Netherlands tie wasn’t exactly in my diary, though it is true that I was quite aware of it thanks to my football-loving friends. My own take on the match, as published on Twitter, would probably have got me into more trouble. I wasn’t merely ignorant; I was aware, but sarcastic and dismissive:

Advice to football fans: Scotland won’t win the World Cup, so I wouldn’t concern yourself with it.

I find it difficult to get excited about football at the best of times. My enthusiasm for Scotland internationals is marginally above zilch. In my defence, I was rather put off by the fact that last month I was taken by a friend to the pub to watch what I was told would be a football match but turned out to be a disaster film. Strange.

Really, you could argue that the people who don’t think about football are making the right decision. All that worrying over whether Scotland gets knocked out in this round or that does seem to be a waste of energy. And I can well imagine Jo Swinson has plenty of other things to occupy her time with.

This comes just a few months after Patrick Harvie was at the centre of another Twitter row manufactured by David Maddox. His crime was to discreetly tweet at the dinner table, something which I think many people do.

I don’t get this obsession with politicians having to be identikit robots who all have to be up-to-date on the price of milk, whatever music is in the charts and some tedious sporting exploit. I have written about this phenomenon before, and my views haven’t changed.

The fact is that there are 646 MPs and 129 MSPs. If you took 775 random people, you can be guaranteed to find people who couldn’t give two hoots about football and couldn’t tell you how much a loaf of bread costs. You would certainly find plenty of people who didn’t feel the need to contrive odd opinions about the Arctic Monkeys. Yet we expect all this from our politicians. Why?

On the one hand people criticise politicians for being almost like robots if they are perceived to toe the party line, talk in soundbites or reel off reams of irrelevant statistics. But then if they reveal a bit of their personality by representing part of the variety of society by not fitting a media-constructed template of what a “normal person” is expected to be, they are blasted for being “out of touch”.

I can more easily admire Jo Swinson for her personal choice not to worry about football than any politician who feels the need to pretend they are interested when they are so clearly not. Indeed, Jeff’s comparison with Gordon Brown’s uneasy comments about Paul Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland in Euro 96 reveals that this is one of those issues where you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

While you would expect parliamentarians to have a knowledge of certain things in order to do their job, there’s nothing wrong with them being human when it comes to their personal interests. In cases like this, it is those in the media who seem more out of touch.

But it is really weird. Sometimes you see stories in there that are literally four or five years old. And it is not as if they are particularly interesting stories either. Okay, so that story about the bloke who was forced to marry a goat (and the goat’s subsequent suffocation on a plastic bag) was quite funny.

But the other day a rather unenlightening (and distinctly not very newsy) article about how to write a CV was right up there in the top five “most emailed”. Why would you email that to someone? To “gently hint” that you think they might be bad at writing CVs?

Today, for seemingly no good reason, this three-year-old story about a link between milk and ovarian cancer is the second most emailed story at the moment.

I realise that it is quite banal to point out the often contradictory nature of scientific studies on the various health effects of food. Red wine makes your heart happy but your liver sad. We all know it, and we are bombarded with so much contradictory information that we really might as well not bother.

You remember that advert that showed a girl guzzling down five litres of cooking oil because that is just what eating crisps is like (if you eat your annual consumption of crisps all in one go)? Almost put me off eating crisps. The next day I visited the dentist. He told me to eat more crisps and less chocolate. Not that I eat much chocolate anyway. I eat about three packets of crisps per day, so it’s a wonder I don’t constantly pee cooking oil.

Anyway, to veer back from that self-indulgent tangent, the point I am trying to make is this. It is slightly funny that the story about milk maybe possibly perhaps causing ovarian cancer was gazumped by a story saying that milk could cut the risk of getting diabetes and heart disease.

Helpfully, the related stories are: Milk in tea ‘blocks health gains’, Drinking milk ‘no risk to heart’ and Milk linked to Parkinson’s risk. So now you know.

I now have to post “eight random facts/habits” about myself.

1. I find having a conversation a stressful chore but I quite like talking to a large group of people
2. Despite the fact that I love Formula 1, I have next to no interest in cars or driving
3. I have a fear of answering the phone
4. I have difficulty waking up. I also have difficulty falling asleep. This means that, if I have nothing to do, I end up waking up later and later every day. I have been known to go all the way around the clock.
5. I do not have any ambitions
6. I much prefer spending an evening in by myself rather than going out with a large group of friends
7. I recently discovered that I am probably intolerant to cow’s milk
8. I currently have a problem with my jaw which means that I can’t open my mouth wide. This makes eating difficult

I won’t tag anyone — unless someone wants to take it for themselves.

Proper blogging will return soon.

But how many normal people could actually answer a question like this? I certainly could never tell you who had won the Grand National. That’s not because I’m out of touch. It’s just because I’m not a gambler and I’m not interested in horse racing.

Annabel Goldie might have been pleased to get Nicol Stephen’s question right. But, combined with the fact that she knew who is top of the SPL (a question that I probably would have got, although I don’t follow football that closely), it just looks as though she was just sitting in front of the television all Saturday.

I also would have probably correctly guessed who was at number one — but I wouldn’t have been certain and it would only have been because I blogged about it a couple of weeks ago. Most weeks I haven’t got the slightest clue who is at number one.

And then there is the price of a pint of milk. I am somewhat surprised that Jack McConnell didn’t get this correct. It is the classic ‘reality check’ question, and I would have thought that he would at least make sure he had a vague idea of the answer.

But it’s not as if I would know. Anyone who doesn’t do the shopping for their household (like me for instance) — or just doesn’t drink milk — would be scratching their heads at this one. But does that make me, or Jack McConnell or any politician who gets this question wrong, somehow less real than avid milk guzzlers?

Because no matter what, only you can make the perfect cup of tea. Invariably, if somebody else makes me a cup of tea it tastes absolutely disgusting — and many people seem to say this. There is only one way to make decent tea, and that is my way.

People must assume that when I say that I take no milk and no sugar that I must want my tea to taste like compost. One person actually said this. She thought that because I took no milk or sugar that I must have wanted it really strong, so the tea bag was left in the mug for absolutely ages.

Yuk. No way. I keep the bag in my mug for a very short length of time — maybe five seconds. I just pour the water, swish the bag around a bit and take the bag straight out. A minimum of fuss and effort: this makes the perfect cup of tea for me.

I don’t mind milk in my tea, but it does seem a little bit pointless to me. It just ‘waters (milks) it down’ and makes it taste more like milk than tea. And it apparently takes away the lauded health benefits of drinking tea.

Some people have suggested that I put sugar in my tea. This is because I probably need to put on weight because I no longer fit any of my trousers, and I even bought smaller trousers and I don’t even properly fit them! A couple of years ago I was 10½ stone; nowadays I hover between 9 and 9½. I don’t know why really. I shovel food down my gullet like nobody’s business.

Nevertheless, some people have even made comments about how thin I look now. There is also the astonishing fact that I actually lost weight over Christmas. I explained this as being down to the fact that “junk food travels through faster”.

Sugar in my tea could fatten me up and allow me to reduce my clothing budget, so the theory goes. But I can hardly think of anything that tastes more disgusting than sugary tea. (Sugary coffee is not so bad, but I still much prefer my coffee completely untainted.) If I were to regularly put sugar in my tea, I would probably die of disgust before experiencing any fatty benefits.

Those ISO busybodies are not the only people suggesting a standard way to make tea. For instance, Scaryduck reckons:

Tea should be stewed for at least half an hour before serving, preferably in a mug last washed up in 1973 with full-fat milk and six sugars. Tea which breaks several international conventions against chemical weapons but we do not care. Anything else is a betrayal of British values.

And who could forget a few years back when the Royal Society of Chemistry suggested their own “perfect” cup of tea? (Link to PDF file.) Leader of the Tea Party, Tony Benn, approved:

He sniffed. He sipped. He pondered. “It’s very tasty, I must say,” he said. He sipped again. “Oh, it’s delicious.”

Update: Entirely coincidentally, this from Gordon McLean.

Frosties are even worse because the sugar coating seems to form a kind of protective shield which magnifies the effect, causing milk to go all over more of the place.

Gah.