SO WHAT'S wrong with shyness? Scientists have created a new pill to help beat shyness. Shrinking violets might blush prettily in joy and relief but the rest of us should be wary.

Most of us are shy some of the time. And a jolly good thing too. A bit of bashfulness keeps us quiet, keeps us in the background, saves us pushing ourselves forward and making total and utter idiots of ourselves. Well, some of the time.

Though extreme shyness might be painful for the people who suffer from it, the opposite is a pain for the rest of us.

Shy people don't sit next to you on the bus and start telling you all their most intimate illnesses in loud and gory detail. They don't greet you in loud voices across crowded restaurants. They don't strip off their clothes at the slightest hint of sun or the first bars of The Stripper. They don't take over entire pubs with their loud bonhomie and trap you in the corner to tell you crude and awful jokes in loud voices. And they don't go on chat shows and tell the world about their very peculiar sexual practices.

The world, in fact, could do with a few more shy people.

Most people get over their shyness most of the time. It's called Growing Up. Others get over their shyness a bit too thoroughly and bounce through life inflicting themselves on other people and dominating every pub, party, conversation and occasion they're part of. People who are never shy are a total pain.

Time the scientists re-thought their research. What we need really is a pill that promotes bashfulness and blushing and actually makes some show-offs shy.

Then the rest of us could get some peace.

OF COURSE I watched the new Richard and Judy show and very reassuring it was too. Despite moving to Channel 4, Judy looks as mumsy and distracted and bossy as ever, and Richard just as hopeless. The guests and quizzes are hardly important - what matters is the strange kind of magic between those two.

If Judy were as glitzy as she'd like to be and Richard were as smooth as he surely thinks he is, then the whole thing would be a disaster. As it is, they should knock spots off the cardboard cut-outs in Neighbours.

SO Britain is the most congested country in Europe, according to a new government report. But some bits are a lot worse than others. On Saturday evening - a relatively quiet time - it took me nearly 40 minutes to do the three miles between Richmond, Surrey and Hammersmith - about the same time it takes me to do the 40 miles between Richmond, Yorkshire and Newcastle.

If there's a North South divide, then we're the right side of it.

While in London, I paid my first visit to the Tate Modern. Brilliant building - the old Bankside Power Station breathtakingly adapted into an enormous gallery. But the exhibits... Maybe it's me, but I somehow missed the artistic message in the upside down grand piano hanging from the ceiling, the bad photographs, the totally grey canvas. And as for the gents' urinal displayed in a glass case...

No wonder many visitors were sitting with their backs to the exhibits and gazing instead across the river at the dome of St Paul's Cathedral - a brilliant view of it in the afternoon sunshine.

On the other hand, when Sir Christopher Wren first designed St Paul's it was considered too outrageously modern and grotesque for public taste.

So who knows - maybe in four hundred years' time, someone will be paying millions for that gents' urinal. On the other hand.

MICHAEL Barrymore has now blamed his ex-wife Cheryl for all his problems, claiming that she took control of every aspect of his life.

Maybe. But perhaps she had to take control because he clearly couldn't.

I mean - just look what's happened to him since he's been on his own.

GOSH, how we laughed at Mary Whitehouse when she counted all the "bloody's" in Till Death Us Do Part, how we mocked her when she criticised films she hadn't even watched and how we ridiculed her preoccupation with too much sex and violence on television. What a silly interfering women we thought she was. Thirty years later, seeing what's offered as entertainment on television, seeing how life in general has coarsened, is it too late to say in the week of her death that, actually, you know, she might have had a point?

PS. On Practise to Deceive, the short story competition. Gremlins who can't count got into yesterday's piece - the competition actually had well over 200 entries from all over the country.

PPS. On the shopping page last week I forgot to mention the WI Markets (My sister, a cake-baking stalwart, will shoot me). They are, of course, a splendid source of home-made goodies (as my freezer will testify). Tomorrow, the ladies of Leyburn WI are having a special Christmas Display in the Community Centre, Leyburn 10am-11.30am, where they will be showing a selection of Christmas goodies and taking orders for delivery on December 13 and 20.