THIS week is the official end of what the Met Office has been pleased to describe as ‘the summer’ although the rest of us would probably describe it as ‘some days when it was a bit warmer than the winter’.’ Anyway.

The best thing about this is that it means there’s just one more week for our MPs who are still larging it on their annual summer leave to cram in as many experiences as they can of Real Life before they disappear into the state-subsidised Westminster bubble.

Here’s my suggestion as to how they should spend the next seven days...

1. Call an out of hours GP service at 1am. See how long it takes for a) anyone to call back and b) if they do, a real doctor to visit

2. Spend 24 hours in A&E

3. Travel second class on a rush hour train from London

4. Research the options open to you if your child is attending a failing or coasting secondary school and you can’t afford private. Clue: Very little

5. Write down the date you last earned £26,000 a year. It’s the average national salary. Then work out how your family would survive on it

6. Spend a day working in a call centre. Then imagine doing that, day in, day out when, actually, you have a degree in physics plus £36,000 of student debt

7. Compare the cost of green energy to the cheapest online. Then go figure

8. Spend an evening sitting up with a mentally ill teenager. Attempt to try and get some meaningful help for them

9. Spend a week not eating in a state-subsidised canteen or drinking state-subsidised alcohol

10. Join an on-call carer for an average day. Then ask yourself honestly if you believe that the average £6.79 an hour paid for this is a fair wage for what they do

11. Accompany a young working couple for a morning while they try and get a mortgage 12. Go down the local pub and ask how many of the drinkers are genuinely worried about the Palestine situation/Women only train carriages/Bringing back fox-hunting. Brace yourself for a shock

13. Join a group of young disabled kids on the day the local council tells them their youth club is going to close forever due to budget cuts

14. Tour your local prison and count just how many inmates were in care, are illiterate or have a mental health problem

15. Visit a young mum with cancer whose miracle drug has been denied to her because ‘it’s not cost-effective’ Then go back into your job and just try and make a difference, eh?

Bob Gee just doesn't get it

MEMO to Royal Bournemouth Hospital’s lead governor Bob Gee, who reckons the Basil Fozard re-hiring scandal (Fozard was allowed to retire with a £1.9 million pension pot and then re-hired on a bigger salary) would be ‘Difficult for the public to understand’: no one’s fooled. Your problem, Bob, is that the public understands EXACTLY what’s going on here. And they are absolutely disgusted with you and your indolent colleagues for allowing it.

SamCam? a wuss but she's no fool

BECAUSE she wore a wetsuit for her dip in the sea this week, Samantha Cameron’s been branded a wuss.

She is - I go sea swimming in just a cozzy right up until November. But the reason I suspect SamCam wears a wetsuit is because there is no other garment on this earth that makes you look so much taller and slimmer. Wuss she may be. But that woman’s no fool.

Study is just silly 

FROM the people that probably brought you the amazing news that the ‘Pope is a Catholic’, Georgia State University reveals that men who help out with the kids have a better sex life. Would that be because their wives are not weeping with fatigue and infuriation over never having the time to get dressed, look nice and not collapse under the weight of it all perhaps? I think it would!

He'll never learn 

JUST when you think men can’t get any more stupid, you read about the bloke who injected his bits with a ‘Viagra-style’ drug. With grim results. Stop laughing at the back. The reason I know this bloke is stupid isn’t because of the above, though. It’s because, after the kind of medical interventions you can’t describe in a family newspaper, the Muppet’s Muppet declared he’d be willing to give it another go but: “I’ll try a third of the dosage next time.”

Karen Danczuk just doubled her chances of a date

SELFIE queen Karen Danczuk has reportedly revealed she’s bisexual, just weeks from splitting from MP husband, Simon. I’m sure she is, because Karen is nothing if not the opportunist. Announcing this has instantly doubled her chances for a date!

Note: This piece by Faith is an opinion piece and not a news report. You can contact Faith by tweeting @HerFaithness