WOW! What about those by-elections, then? Exciting or what?

There wasn't a wink of sleep to be had in our street, I can tell you, what with the opinion polls and the live broadcasts and the constantly breaking news. A nation holds its breath, eh?

As a matter of fact, we have recently joined the 60% of people who officially don't care. The type of people who watch all those experts on Prime Time and say "Jesus, would you look at the state of that table?"

When is Mr Sheen going to appear on Prime Time, is what we want to know. All that money spent . . . not . . . getting experts to give their expensive opinions, and then they don't give the place a good dust.

Particularly the wooden table under the big screen where Martin McGuinness appears. That wooden table is gone very streaky. There are big finger smudges on it, and it doesn't look the best. God be good to Martin McGuinness, isn't he having a bad enough time as it is? Prime Time should use its expert budget to hire a cleaner.

We have other questions too. How long is it going to take for some scientist chappie to come up with the revelation that parliamentary politics has become sort of like astrology . . . a harmless pastime for people who have too much time on their hands? A pathetic attempt to convince themselves that they are in control of their own destinies.

Yet we have polls and predictions and analyses up the ying yang, like parliamentary politics mattered. And the predictions are wrong so often that these super-rational guys should ring up Mystic Meg and apologise. I suspect that Fine Gael is on the phone to Mystic Meg already. They could certainly do a lot worse. All that energy poured into crap opinion polls. Shouldn't these people be out solving world hunger or something?

When we can eventually afford to solve world hunger, obviously.

That's actually what's worrying me about experts. All experts. They are not being correctly deployed. There we have the Kildare and Meath by-elections, a storm in an egg cup. Yet the statisticians were all over them like a rash. Like they were the Normandy Landings or something. Like anyone normal gives a curse about the by-elections. Like we're talking about them all the time, instead of watching the Discovery Channel and finding out really interesting things, such as the fact that the average aeroplane taxis 250,000 miles in its lifetime.

Concern is growing about experts . . . and not just that guy who was under the volcano in Supervolcano: The Truth About Yellowstone. What about Supervolcano: The Truth About Yellowstone by the way? It was the first case of tsunami-envy we've seen so far. Expect more in our culture soon.

Presumably Thai television hasn't had the time to make its own disaster film just yet, but they can't have things all their own way.

Supervolcano: The Truth About Yellowstone was the result of television people all over Britain and America wanting a natural disaster with white people in it. They just couldn't wait for global warming to kick in, because that could take a couple of years. They had to hurry up and make the drama themselves.

They had to have a volcano expert in it, obviously. And they had to have a fictional mortality rate even higher than the one the tsunami left behind. I wouldn't mind, but Supervolcano: The Truth About Yellowstone was so bloody boring.

Experts spend their lives just following us around suburbia. Hanging out.

Hovering. Or Hoovering. Writing in their notebooks. But that isn't the most annoying thing about experts. The most annoying thing about experts is that they are always late. They seem to be following common sense at a safe distance.

Or take this news about wooden floors.

Front page news it was, in some of the papers. Wooden floors are very noisy. Is that news or what? Humans have had wooden floors in their dwellings for thousands of years and now noise abatement experts are horrifying us all with the shocking news that wooden floors tend to be noisy.

In the rest of Europe, where they were not lucky enough to have our worldfamous thatched cottages, they've had wooden floors in their apartments for a couple of centuries, actually. They know that wooden floors are noisy. That's why the Europeans are so fussy about their socks. It's simple when you think about it.

Naturally, I am bitter about wooden floors, because they offer no shelter to the householder with sluttish tendencies. You want to come back to my place and watch those little tumbleweeds of dust blow up and down my wooden floor. Nah? Well, me neither. You want to try and sneak in to the house at three o'clock in the morning, through a wooden hall? Oh sorry, I thought you were an expert.