The unacceptable face of the net Human beings have always celebrated physical beauty, but - as magazines, the internet and other media beckon us into a more visually defined world - its perceived role has become wildly disproportionate to other qualities. Most of us are psychologically vulnerable to what others think of our looks, and with airbrushing and cosmetic surgery, the bar of perfection has been raised to become ever more unattainable. Even world-renowned beauties are pilloried for veiny hands or a bit of extra weight. Women commonly suffer from a kind of physical self-loathing which is gradually spreading to men as well. The cult of appearance is slowly devouring everything before it. Imagine if achievement had been measured throughout history in modern-day terms. On Dr Johnson, author of the first English dictionary: "So he's okay with words, but have you seen the scrofula scars, and that awful wig?" Or Florence Nightingale: "It's great that she helps people, but frankly the centre-parting ages her." It is inherently destructive, and one day, perhaps, will be seen as a temporary insanity of the early 21st century. But is there any point in criminalising it? A law needs to have a reasonable prospect of being enforced across the board, and of it being desirable to do so. As things stand, our courts are overstretched, our prisons full to bursting, and even the perpetrators of violent crimes are frequently let off without custodial sentences. It would be a form of craziness to clog up the judicial system with endless debates about "appearance-based insults." As a society, we cannot run to law to solve everything we do not like. You can despise something without wanting to criminalise it, and if enough people agree with you, a social code is created that can have an extremely powerful inhibiting effect. The advent of the internet, by easily facilitating both random insult and anonymity, has briefly broken down social codes against unwarranted nastiness, but there are already signs that, with time and ingenuity, trolls will find themselves as disliked and shunned online as in real life. And then, perhaps - even for one of our most celebrated swimmers - it will be safe to go back in the water. At the mercy of the economic psycho The mayhem in the eurozone has begun to seem like the economic equivalent of one of those horror films in which the inhabitants of a house are maimed or slaughtered one by one. First Greece, collapsing, in need of bail-outs, potentially on its way out of the euro; now Spain, locked in market panic, haemorrhaging money from its banks. Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, has accused national governments of a "lack of action." But what to do? The experts don't know. I certainly don't know. Even outside the eurozone, things don't look good: Britain is stuck in recession, and even China is apparently stalling. In the meantime, every economic decision is taken with the vague feeling that one might be walking into some terrible trap. If banks are crumbling, is it a good idea to put money into bricks and mortar? But then you read that London house prices might slump by half, once bankers have no more spare cash with which to pump them up. Should one pour pounds into gold; purchase a Scottish croft; stock up on soap and pasta in preparation for an emergent barter economy? With the benefit of hindsight, people will no doubt look back and marvel at our appalling decisions, but - if you're reading this from the future - we really haven't a clue. And if it is actually an economic horror film, the maniac has only just started swinging his axe. I'm getting back into the groove The CD is on its way out, we hear, thanks to "digital downloads and streaming." I had already intuited this when I went panicking into HMV recently, after my daughter told me, with intimidating specificity, that she was expecting to play musical statues to Abba's Mamma Mia at her third birthday party that afternoon. The CD section was alarmingly shrunken, like an army on the run. The Abba was found nonetheless, and played on a child's tinny CD player shaped like a Lego brick. The adults" CD player has gone to make way for my husband's iPod, which I have not yet mastered. The task of mastering the iPod falls under the minor bureaucracy of life neatly described in a line from Leonard Cohen's new CD: "the present's not that pleasant / Just a lot of things to do." I enjoy this line, because I hear Leonard sing it in our car, in which we still have a CD player. Yet none of it is half as pleasing as easing out that giant disc, black as liquorice, with its faint odour of burnt rubber, to hear that anticipatory crackle as the needle descends in the groove before your favourite song. Forget the future of music: I think I'll go back to vinyl.