BLUE IS NOT THE COLOUR

Why would anyone want to eat a blue egg? I’m not too keen on an egg of any colour or persuasion but I’m definitely not going to eat one which has been deliberately infected with a virus and costs three time as much as a plain white one in Asda or Tesco.

These trendy eggs come from the Araucana chicken from Chile and the Dongxiang and Lushi ones from China, which have been deliberately infected by the retrovirus EAV-HP, which installs its own genetic data. The altered gene changes the chemistry of the eggshell so that it can take in biliverdin, a bile pigment, from the chicken's uterus.

And you still want to buy an infected egg in Man City attire?

DUN NAME DROPPING

My old chum, the brilliantly droll Alastair McKay (no relation), has been compiling his list of favourite films, placing the chillingly brilliant Don’t Look Now high on it. It’s based on a Daphne du Maurier short story and features Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as parents whose child drowns in a pond outside their house – a heartbreaking sequence – and they move to Venice where the rest of the gut-wrenching plot plays out.

It brought back my own memories of Christie and the time she stayed in my house in Glasgow for a week. I won’t go into the how and why because it remains private, as was her visit at the time, but there are a couple of events that brought back a chuckle.

We went out to the Horseshoe Bar in Drury Street one evening and, in the unlikely setting of a cinema superstar having a quiet drink, a guy wondered over and said: “Sorry to interrupt, but you know what hen? You look the double of Julie Christie” before wandering off.

The second time was when my car gave out at the end of the street where my pal Brian Barr (sadly missed) lived. Julie was his favourite film actress. I said to her, “He’s on the third floor, ring his bell and say, ‘Brian, do you think I could use your phone to call the AA?’.” I hid out of sight while she did it. I can still see the stunned look on his face. I probably had a similar one when I took a bath in her London flat when she was away and noticed that the doorstop was an Oscar.

Shortly after the making of Don’t Look Now, in a horrific real life play-out of the film tragedy, the 22-month-old son of the couple caretaking Julie’s place in Wales drowned in a two-foot deep pond.

JUST McCANN IT!

It’s more than 11 years now since Madeleine McCann disappeared in Portugal while her parents were dining in a nearby restaurant and still the fruitless search continues, with the Met police asking once again last week for even more money to continue the hunt. We’ve had the crowdfunder, the incessant appeals, the documentaries, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a stage play or an operetta in the pipeline.

The cost to the public purse now runs into millions as a result of the parents’ negligence money that wouldn’t be spent if, heaven forfend, it was your child that had gone missing. It’s time to say not a penny more.

EVENING HALL

This street in south Sheffield must be about the safest in the country, with a police station the sole building on it. It’s called Letsby Avenue. As far as I know there isn’t another nearby called Onyer Way.

TOTTI-ING IT UP

The Italian football legend Francesco Totti was 42 on Thursday, the day his autobiography, Un Capitano, was published. Totti’s entire career was spent at Roma, he was born in Rome and on the day of publication people queued overnight outside Roman bookstores to snap up copies. Totti recalls visiting an Italian prison after the 2006 World Cup victory and one of the cons going frantic to meet him and have a selfie taken with him. It was only later he discovered the story, that the prisoner had been due to be released just before the visit but was so keen to meet his hero that he asked the prison board if he could stay on for a week, threatening to “do something crazy” to be returned to jail if he was released.

Totti has a reputation for being a mite big headed with not much in the way of substance within. A few years ago he published a book, proceeds to charity, called Tutte le Barzellette su Totti (All the Totti Jokes). One of them centres on Scotland. Italy are about to play us and his teammates are so sick of Totti’s bragging about his ability that they tell him that he can just play against Scotland by himself. After the match he wanders in and they ask, “How did you get on Francesco?” He replies. “I drew 1-1.” The players are astonished. “That was amazing. How did you do it?” He responds: "Well, I would have won but I got sent off with 20 minutes to go.”

BECOMING IMMORTAL

We have recently lost two of the greatest pranksters of our time, Dick Tuck and Alan Abel, both of whom died aged 94, surely proving that fun is the best elixir of life we have. It was Tuck, in a concession speech in 1966 after he had been humiliated in a Californian Senate election, who came out with the line: “The people have spoken – the bastards.”

Tuck had a particularly hatred of Richard Nixon. In 1968 he hired a group of pregnant black women to parade outside a Tricky Dicky rally carrying placards bearing the candidate's campaign slogan, “Nixon’s the one”. Another time, when Nixon was speaking from a platform on the back of a train on a whistle stop tour, Tuck acquired a railwayman’s hat and waved the train off. I met him briefly on Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980. He was wearing a teeshirt saying, A Reliable Source.

Abel’s pranks were less political. While driving through Texas his car was stopped by a bull and cow copulating. So he founded the spoof Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (Sina), which campaigned to clothe all naked animals. He staged a demo outside the White House to try to persuade Jackie Kennedy to put underpants on her horse. Branches sprung up all over the country and one woman even sent him a cheque for $40,000 (which he returned).

When the white supremacist David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana Abel set up the Ku Klux Klan Orchestra to promote a “kinder, gentler” image and paid for musicians to record an out-of-tune version of the William Tell Overture, sending copies to radio stations claiming Duke had been the conductor. In 2006 he proposed what might now be deemed entirely sensible, a fat tax replacing income tax with every person paying $5 for each pound they weighed. He also formed Citizens Against Breastfeeding which opposed the “naughty nipple” and Females for Felons, which was to offer sex to prisoners. And in a mockumentary called Is There Sex After Death, a take-off of the sexual revolution, he posed such questions as, “Will the sex organs wear out from too frequent use?”

Arguably his greatest hoax was to trick the New York Times into running his obituary in 1980, using a host of accomplices posing as his nearest and dearest. He had allegedly died on location in Utah for a new film called Who’s Going to Bite Your Neck Dear When All of My Teeth Are Gone? The day after the obit he called a press conference. He said later: “Next time I go nobody will believe it and I’ll become immortal.” He went this month. Possibly.