No. I'm sorry, but no. I've had my human rights infringed earlier this week and now you're trying to take what little bloody astronomical knowledge I have away from me!

I spend the best years of my life being told there are this many planets, and here they all are in a nice and wholly unrealistic line on a poster, and this one at the end is tiny and called Pluto, and suddenly BANG! It's gone!

Well not literally - what a story that would be - but it might as well blow up because clearly it means nothing to astronomers of the twenty-first century.

You can't just unwrite seventy-odd years of history like that. Alright fine, technically it's small enough that other non-planets are bigger, but being a planet is as much a spiritual thing as a physical one. It's a planet because, way back when, someone bloody well said so. That's why it's a planet, not because it meets the height restriction or any of that pap. It has that planetary je ne sais quoi.

The only small crumb of consolation I can find in today's decision is that Pluto will henceforth be referred to as a 'dwarf planet'.

This conjures up the most fantastic image of dwarven aliens - each replete with axe, westcountry accent and fiery temper - one day landing on Earth and enslaving the entire population. "Refer to our planet with politically incorrect terminology, will ye!", they will snarl, as they drink their outlandish alien cider and whistle "Hi Ho" through their grey, lipless mouth sockets.

Moving on: it's Reading Festival tomorrow til Sunday, and I've had my impossibly-tight wristband snapped around my defenceless right wrist. Come Saturday night it will probably be a toss-up between the continued existence of my hand and my ability to enter the festival, such will be the lack of circulation.

We drove down to the festival site to pick up the passes and the place was absolutely heaving. The Reading Evening Post's six foot cuddly lion (why?) was taking the brunt of the onslaught, faced as he was by jubilant hippies queueing to embrace his costume.

I also noticed that, in the comedy t-shirt stakes, I'll be playing with the big boys at this festival. Happilly we had a new batch arrive this week so I've got fresh, unspent ammunition to unleash on them all.

I'll be at the festival from very early until remarkably late each day so expect things from me on Dayorama to go a little quiet. Then I'm in Canada so my absence may continue! We shall see.