YOU can always trust me to put my foot in it – that steaming pile of dog dirt that is. Even worse when it gets from my shoe to the car and stinks it out for days.

Most of my neighbours are brilliant at clearing up after their dogs, walking home virtuously clutching their little bags of poo, but there are always some antisocial morons. A colleague from Barnard Castle reckons it’s so bad there that the Demesnes ought to be renamed the Demessnes.

Now a new ad campaign will encourage them to clean up, but it still doesn’t solve the problem that’s baffled me for years. Having done the yukky bit of actually picking the stuff up and bagging it, why do some people then hang the bags of dog dirt from branches and bushes?

The worst place to see it is on the old railway walk from Stanley Crook to Waterhouses. Maybe it has some mystical purpose.

Future archaeologists will be baffled. SWEET, isn’t it, to think of David Beckham spending his evenings playing with Lego. It calms him down, he says, and it’s a good thing to do with his sons.

His latest, he said in an interview at the weekend, was a model of Tower Bridge, complete with traffic, that cost £209 and had 4,287 pieces and 172 pages of instructions – which would make most of us give up before we began.

He must be amazingly patient and determined to wade through that lot, even with the help of his boys. Better than all of them in separate rooms on separate computer games too.

What’s the betting that complicated Lego sets now soar in popularity.

The perfect consolation prize: if you’re never going to be a world class footballer, at least you can still sort those little bricks out and build it like Beckham.

PRINCE Charles pulled his wellies on and went to see what was happening in the Somerset floods.

People were delighted to see him.

To get him through the water, they gave him a splendid bench – decorated with greenery – plonked on the back of a trailer, which made him look like the runner-up in a carnival float.

But he’s given £50,000 to help people cope with the floods. And at least he was there, to see for himself – unlike most of the politicians still warm and dry in Westminster.

THE average mother apparently gets just 17 minutes a day to herself. That much? They spend it reading, watching TV or browsing the internet.

For mothers of toddlers just two minutes to go to the loo in peace would seem like a real treat. Funny how your idea of luxury changes once you have children.