Ah, you know you're already past it when your student starts pipping you to the post.

Rachel Allen, at just 37 and with barely a handful of cookbooks and a couple of TV series under her belt, becomes the Grande Dame of celebrity cooking, as she is about to be outshone by former pupil Catherine Fulvio who has just got her own TV show.

It's seems to be almost part of the Ballymaloe curriculum now -- train with us and we'll teach you how to chop onions and present a show.

Catherine, who runs Ballyknocken House in Wicklow has been compared to Nigella Lawson, the sexy siren of British telly cooking. Catherine's Italian Kitchen starts on RTE this week

and it seems we're not yet tired of the genre of gorgeous women slobbering

all over their organic

ingredients.

The point is, are we better cooks because of it?

There's a growing trend of not just cooking your own, but growing your own, in this recession so there's no doubt we need all the advice we can get.

But are we heading into the kitchen afterwards to copy our favourite TV chef, or simply snuggling on the sofa with a glass of wine and a takeaway while we watch them do all the hard work?

Now that all the property shows have come to an abrupt end, it's back to the foodies for comfort.

Another Eurovision song from Waters? Oh God help us now...

John Waters is clearly buoyed by his success at gaining, er... five points for us in the Eurovision in 2007 and coming paddy last (well, Dustin didn't even get to the final, in fairness).

He has now plunged the entire nation into crisis by suggesting that he's penning another dire dirge for this year's entry.

As if the country wasn't already in a state of chassis.

Seriously, John, we are actually looking for Europe to, you know, dig us out a bit at the moment.

We want them to like us, to take us seriously, to believe that we are knuckling down and trying to dig ourselves out of the economic mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Laughing at us isn't a great start to that problem.

Some of them over there -- the older ones -- probably still remember us as the country that kept on winning the Eurovision contest.

So just why are you doing it?

Oh, I get it now -- is it by losing again, they will feel sorry for us?

Good on you. Keep it up. You don't fancy singing it yourself, do you?

Sorry to say, kids, the Junior Cert must stay

The initial unconfined joy at the news that the Junior Cert might be scrapped to save a few bob for the Department of Education, was short-lived in our house as our own 'JC' realised it was probably more a cheeky headline rather

than reality. All that boring study will have to continue.

It was a daft suggestion anyway, as surely our kids will need as much exam preparation as they can get, especially if they're going to spend ten years in college waiting for those jobs to come around again.

- Sinead Ryan