Artist Andy Warhol said that "in the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes" and this week I have been enjoying my fifteen minutes. Awarded an MBE in the Queens Birthday Honours List 2009, I have spent the last few days trying to answer as many of the phone calls, media requests and emails that I can - if I haven't replied to yours personally, please accept my thanks for your kind wishes and thoughts. Not that all the wishes have been quite so charitable.

Some have suggested that I am "buying into the establishment", others that I "haven't done enough to deserve it" with one cheeky person asking "who I'd slept with to get such an honour"! Whatever your thoughts on the matter, I am happy to hear them, particularly if they're good - I am only human after all. [NB. Please don't reply to this email though, the responses go back to an auto-account for email admin purposes only].

This news was swiftly followed by the delivery of some sobering statistics from Google Analytics showing the 25% of my website's traffic for the past few weeks has been coming from a website associated with extreme right-wing politics - the ones who have managed to get two of their members elected to the EU parliament. Since I find this particularly galling, I promptly decided not to write about them anymore. One of the downsides of a democracy is that you occasionally get people in power who you absolutely detest. Why give them the "oxygen of publicity" I reasoned? Perhaps we should be lobbing the rotten tomatoes rather than eating them, as the latest food research shows!