Tales Of The City: I name this month... after my mum

Now that the Hussein dynasty is no more, one looks around for a new, dictator to anathematise. It's been a bit quiet of late in dictator-land. Kim Jong Il has been spending his time watching old movies; Fidel Castro has been trying to convince the Cubans that he's not at death's door; and General Musharaff has been trying to deliver Pakistan into the arms of the fundamentalists by banning Western studies from universities. But there's been nothing picturesque about any of their behaviour patterns lately, nothing along the lines of Emperor Bokassa's or Idi Amin's memorable extravagances in the past.

So, a big welcome for Saparmurad Niyazov, "Leader for Life" of Turkmenistan, the former Soviet republic, who has been going flat out for the title of The World's Most Eccentric Premier.

First, he renamed the months of the year after himself and his family (January is now Turkmenbashy, or Father of all Turkmen, as he likes to be known; April's new name is that of his late mum); then he decreed that the streets of the capital should have numbers rather than names (except those already named after him or his mum). He had a golden statue of himself erected in the centre of Ashgabat (the capital), which revolves so that the sun is always behind it, blinding the onlooker. His latest triumph is to commission a gigantic shoe, 19ft long, 55lb in weight, with 30ft shoelaces, to symbolise the "giant steps" his country has made since independence.

Such vainglory! Such innocence! President Niyazov has obviously never contemplated the other, less elevated symbols connected to epic footwear - Gulliver's great brogues that threatened to crush the fleeing Lilliputians; the giant squelching shoe in Monty Python. Nor has he spotted the fact that a big shoe doesn't put people in mind of a giant stride - only an enormous foot, probably made of clay.

Why the Mr Sneeze idea could prove infectious

The pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline is being investigated by the Government's "medical healthcare products" agency to see whether they are guilty of promoting drugs to children. They haven't been advertising methadone in The Beano, not yet anyway, but they have been publishing a variant of one of the Mr Men books - Mr Sneeze and His Allergies - with information at the end about its anti-allergy products. The book isn't by the late Roger Hargreaves, the originator of the Mr Men franchise, although his name appears on the cover - it has been commissioned by the drug company from Roger's son, Adam, who presumably has made a packet out of the deal since Glaxoetc are printing 50,000 copies of the book this year alone.

I have no huge concern about this slightly sneaky bit of drug marketing - it's not as though Mr Sneeze is a paragon of childish heroism, or is ever shown in the book's pages visiting an iffy backstreet pharmacist, or slipping date-rape drugs to his lady friend, Little Miss Sunshine. I doubt if many children will hoard their pocket money in the hope of acquiring 100 tabs of Piriteze to stop them sneezing. But I worry about the way fiction in the future will find its borders invaded by the suave forces of commerce. I don't mean companies sponsoring stories that feature their products, in the Fay Weldon/Bulgari sense, but companies taking existing books and adding recommended treatments in the closing pages.

You know the kind of thing:

Alice in Wonderland followed by a page of anti-hallucinogenic downers, for girls who've foolishly taken little white pills marked "Eat me"...

Little Rabbit Foo Foo, whose hero spends the story whacking fieldmice and snakes and goblins, would end with a full-colour advert for Calpol.

Swallows and Amazons would lead into a series of commercials for Kwells, Tums, Sea Legs and Imodium.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe would carry a carefully worded encouragement to join the Roman Catholic Church at the earliest opportunity.

Lord of the Rings would feature a hologrammed commercial for the little-known specific, St Hrothgar's Stinking Bindweed, available only from Morkendale the Neurotic in the far-off Valley of the Knungs...

Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson's care-home saga, would benefit from a small, polythene-wrapped sample of Junior Prozac, tucked, for easy access, inside the back cover.

Junkie would be forced to carry, in its closing pages, some crucial information about teenagers and drugs, eg, where to score some Horse at 3am in south London; how to blag a few unused prescription sheets from King's College Hospital; how to find a vein, etc.

And Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix would end in six pages of bereavement counselling and a free handipak of Kleenex tissues.

It came from outer space

Good God, it's the 25th anniversary of Space Invaders. How thrilling it once seemed, to manipulate a badly drawn army tank along the bottom of a screen while firing at a falling cascade of badly designed spacemen or spaceships, which looked like cars with limbs. The bad guys fell relentlessly, vertically through the sky, and you blazed away up at them in a simple straight line - it was a game that could have been invented on the back of a matchbox.

How could we have thought at the time that it was the coolest thing we'd ever seen, streets better than Pac-Man, with its chomping mouth, or that ping-pong game you played with little paddles, sending a square ball bonking against the walls of the screen "court"? Did we really shake our heads and say: "Computer games - can they ever get better than this?" The last time I looked in the children's TV room, they were playing Enter the Matrix, in which, as I understand it, the winner ends up actually on screen, in the thick of the action, and gets to snog Trinity...