My wife and I spotted the latest edition of Private Eye magazine in our local newsagents this afternoon, and the cover made us laugh out loud. The newsagent laughed too, and said that he’d pointed it out to a customer earlier in the week, but unfortunately the customer turned out to be just such a professional! (point to the image)

Today is the centenary of the birth of composer Richard Rogers, and Mark Steyn has written an amusing column about him in the National Post (My funny valentine to Richard Rodgers). Here’s an excerpt that made me laugh out loud:

You’ll Never Walk Alone? In America, it’s a hymn, sung at weddings, funerals and graduations. In Britain, it’s the all-time biggest soccer anthem, its lyric wrought in iron above the gates at Liverpool Football Club and bellowed every Saturday afternoon on the terraces by thousands of baying fans in between knife fights and vomiting.

I have a theory that football fans were all orphaned at an early age, and that’s why they still behave like juvenile delinquents. It’s reassuring to know, however, that they can recognise a good tune when they hear one, because long after the football has finished (thank God!), the music may still be around.

More from The East End of London:

About 1850, the latest craze of the streets was photography, and Whitechapel and Commercial Road were full of shops where this as yet very imperfect art was available to the people, at a shilling or sixpence the portrait. A photographer who had practised in the Whitechapel Road told Mayhew his trade secrets. He explained with relish the many frauds that he and ‘Jim’, his partner, had invented…

When a photograph failed, or the light was too poor to take one, the customer would be sent away with a picture of somebody else; the only case of dissatisfaction at this treatment was an old woman who refused to believe that a bearded masculine face was hers — ‘it was a little too strong’.

‘The fact is,’ said the photographer, after telling many stories of his infinitely gullible public, ‘people don’t know their own faces. Half of ’em have never looked in a glass half a dozen times in their life, and directly they see a pair of eyes and a nose, they fancy they are their own.’