Israel: Nancy, Madonna and Jewish Princesses

So as Israel prepares for Syrian attack on the Golan Heights and more kidnappings in Gaza, I arrive in Tel Aviv after a 4 hour-plus in-flight altercation with a 3 year-old tot. El Al had foolishly seated me in the dollies' galley area adjacent to two loos: this was an irksome experience. Queues formed either for relief or replenishment, sometimes both. The brat delighted in stamping on my feet each time she passed and then attempted to open the exit door at 35,000ft. I was tempted to let her get on with it: strapped in I would have survived and she would have been sucked out into oblivion. True, the plane's safety integrity might have been imperilled, but thanks to Reader's Digest, one knows that pilots are capable of heroic ingenuity. What I won't do for infanticide ... Instead I gave the little bitch's father one of my specialised Medusa psyches until he was driven away with the fruit of his loins in his arms.

Seated in this hellish place gave me time to reflect on modern superstition, one being that you must drink copious amounts of water - 8 pints a day! Total nonsense. It is this that accounted for the endless stream of demands for bottled aqua minerale and the consequent need to piss. Why can't people just sit quiet and meditate as I would have given half the chance?

Tel Aviv: the Jerusalem Post tells me that London's warmer by 3 degrees C. But I'm not here for the weather. Frankly you do not come all this way to get skin cancer. My reasons for this trip must necessarily remain a secret. What I can report is that I booked into the Isrotel Tower Hotel and immediately flew to its open pool hundreds of feet up on the roof from which to gaze at the cityscape, via a glass lift. Not for the phobic it must be said. The sheen and glitz of the Isrotel is more aberration than not: for the most part Tel Aviv is ramshackle, dusty: Middle Eastern. The Med tries its best but gives up just past the line of the coast road: infrastructure is not what it could be. Yet it scarcely matters.

Later, as I get pissed on the Isrotel beach prior to night-time adventures, a friend tells me how Tel Aviv has turned into a gay mecca. I learn that Sven's ex-tart Nancy Of The Oil hosted a show here recently called I'm A Jewish Princess, Get Me Out of Here - in which spoilt rich women of Israel were set domestic tasks in hotels and hospitals - a turkey that ended up on cable. Madonna was here last year for some kabbalistic reason.

Have to go, will update soon if I can.