Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

She may be 87 years old, but MySpace shows that you are never too old to make new friends. At the time of writing, Doris Lessing has 151 friends. Must confess to having never read a Doris Lessing book. Heard a radio interview once, though, in which she came across as sensible and feisty. She was asked about female emancipation, particularly the role of the "Women's Lib" movement, and her reply was perfectly un-PC.

"The Women's Lib movement did nothing apart from shout slogans," said Lessing, who went on to say that women have much more reason to be grateful to the inventors of the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and the pill, than to the "sisters". Bringing about change, she said, is "hard bloody work" and requires more slogging than sloganeering.

Now that's she's won the Nobel Prize for Literature, she can expect to make many more friends on MySpace. Now that she's got an extra $1.6 million in the bank, she might even hear from Mr. Valentine Ibru, the Executive Director Foreign & Domestic Operations of Oceanic Bank Nigeria Plc., who wrote to us recently with the good news that "Sometime ago in our bank, your name and your contract/inheritance money was brought to our bank from Nigerian Apex Bank, Central Bank Of Nigeria (C.B.N) and after some period, this money was taken back to the Federal Government treasury. For the period of time this money was in our bank, it generated an interest of US$ 6,550,000 (Six Million, Five Hundred & Fifty Thousand United States Dollars Only), which we are about to pay to you." Sounds as if we won the Nobel Prize? But what did we write? That's the thing about getting old, isn't it? Memory fades. Shows that cash is still king, though.