THE minimum wage is to go up to £4.10 an hour. Which still means that the low paid would have to work for nearly two weeks to buy the very ordinary looking T shirt that Victoria Beckham wore to Brooklyn's birthday party.

We might need a minimum wage. What we need even more is a maximum wage.

Giving the lowest paid more money doesn't mean a thing when the gap between rich and poor is getting unbridgeable. Will an extra 40p an hour really get people closer to the Beckhams' spending power? Dream on.

It is the ridiculously paid people who send the economy out of kilter. Once upon a time people could live near their work. Now in London quite ordinary houses are selling for £1m. Only because a smallish section of the community has that sort of money, and it upsets it for everyone else.

Teachers and nurses can no longer afford to live near their work. Some of them can barely afford to live. The Government is coming up with all sorts of plans and schemes to persuade them to stay in their professions.

If there were a limit on what the highest paid could earn, things wouldn't have bubbled out of control. In some areas now, even doctors can't afford to buy houses. Which leaves the city slickers with their million pound bonuses in their million pound houses with no one within working distance to look after them but each other. And serves them jolly well right, you might say.

But we can't even dismiss it as a London problem, because a lot of those people will sell up their homes in the smoke and buy something in the country. They're not going to haggle over prices and so they go ever upward. Fine for those of us who already have our houses and can sit smugly and watch them grow in value. But what about those who haven't yet got the foot on the housing ladder? How many £4.10s to buy a house these days?

It's bad enough not to earn very much, but how much worse when you see so much spare dosh sloshing merrily about for a select few.

Still, there are some consolations about not having too much money. At least we're not daft enough to spend £300 on a T shirt that looks as though it came from BHS.

NEW easy-read maps from the Ordnance Survey have started up again all those tedious old stereotypes about women not being able to navigate. They also make the assumption that men drive while women are in the passenger seat with the map book. Look, in our car it's much simpler. I drive. He navigates. No problem. Often, I manage to do both, all by myself. Most women can.

What's more, when the map is not enough, women aren't too proud to stop and ask directions.

BIRTHDAY columns in national newspapers are usually filled with the great and good who have earned their place there - statesmen, actors, sportsmen.

Until last weekend, when they pompously announced "Brooklyn Beckham, 2". The world has gone mad.

ALAN and Louise Masterton tragically lost their daughter in an accident. Ever since - although they also have four sons - they have been desperate for another baby girl. Not to replace Nicole, they claim, but because their family needs "a female dimension".

Sensibly, no clinic in this country would treat them. However, treatment in an Italian clinic resulted in yet another male embryo. So they're giving it way and will continue their fight for a daughter.

Despite concern for their grief, you can only hope they never succeed. What daughter could live up to the challenge of living her own life as well as that of her unknown, dead sister? An appalling burden to wish on a child.

You could wonder, too, how the Mastertons' sons feel about it all. Failures, no doubt, for not being girls.

The Mastertons are giving the unwanted embryo away to a childless couple - a couple, presumably not as picky as they are.

But if they can give away a prospective child as easily as that, you could wonder if they are fit to be parents at all.

WHAT is this life if, full of care, we have no time to go home and make mad passionate love

We are turning into a nation of workaholics, says a new survey. Getting up, going to work, coming home, going to bed and immediately going to sleep. Well, there's exciting.

Men, especially, are killing themselves, neglecting their wives, neglecting their children. And getting increasingly ratty and bad tempered.

The wives in this survey were said to be quite happy about the long hours their husbands worked.

I'm not surprised, if as soon as they come through the door they start an argument, they're better off in work.

Maybe they could sleep there as well and just send their wages home....

BRIDGET Jones is the most unlikely modern heroine - self-indulgent, self-obsessed and so

irritating that any sane person just longs to slap her. Hard.

Now even Rene Zellweger, the American actress chosen to play her, has had enough. Even before the first film is released in a few weeks, she has said that she will not sign for a sequel.

Apparently, she didn't like London, the weather, the filming, the smoking, the eating.

Pity, with a list of moans that long, she sounds absolutely type-cast.

ESTHER Rantzen - who was so spectacularly unpleasant about her husband's first wife, especially after her death - has criticised Anne Robinson for being rude.

Now why do the words "pot" and "kettle" come to mind?