The men therein go to sleep wearing beautiful sequinned pyjamas, and then wake up dressed like Aladdin clutching a stolen loaf of bread. It’s tragic, it’s disheartening, and perhaps worst of all – nobody knows the cause.

Granted, this is all according to our late Uncle Saul. He also says Hitler’s still living deep inside a hollowed-out elephant.

Weird.

Saul wasn’t the only one who worried so for all the poor gypsies – Madonna does too. That’s why she just let them  have her shoes.

If we could save the gypsies, you know that we would. We’d put them all up in a grandiose mansion full of hot dogs and diet drinks, and then sleep well every night for the rest of our lives knowing we made a difference. And then, most likely, we’d show up one day to check on them only to find they’d moved all our expensive chandeliers down to their riverside encampment and all the pants we left for them were used only to practice their pick-pocket skills.

Gypsies are so stupid and ungrateful.

The point is – you can’t save them. You can’t save prostitutes or orphans either.

Now Madonna could really care less about prostitutes or orphans. Gypsies on the other hand – well she’s in love with them all. In fact we heard they are who she left Guy Ritchie for. We don’t have that documented anywhere. Perhaps this deep affection she carries for the dirtiest of the thief-world is why she’s currently trying to save them all with a pair of her shoes.

No – she really is. According to Access Hollywood:

“The Queen of Pop has offered one of her favorite pairs of Christian Dior shoes to a charity supporting Gypsy child education. Organizers said Tuesday the skyscraper gold heels, which are autographed by Madonna, will be sold at the Ovidiu Rom annual ball later this month.”

Gypsy problem solved.

The shoes will sell for a decent price unless it’s discovered Madge got them at a JC Penney back to school sale. The money will be used to infuse the unfortunate beggars with proper grammar and mathematical skills, and then they’ll be more efficient in figuring out the square root of whatever money they just pinched from your wallet.

Sure – you’re still down the money, but at least now you’ll know it can at least be stacked in some sort of numerical order. And that just sounds better, doesn’t it?

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If there’s one thing that Madonna isn’t, it’s a retard. Old, gap-toothed, embarrassing, yes – but not retarded.

But tell that to Guy Ritchie. He was married to Madonna for several years, so if he says that Madonna is retarded then, yes, Madonna must be retarded. And since Guy Ritchie said that Madonna is retarded in this month’s Esquire, it must be true.

But it’s OK – Guy also says that he still loves Madonna. Aww, it’s just like Romeo & Juliet, isn’t it? A wildly offensive version of Romeo & Juliet where Juliet is about 150 years old and keeps thrusting her manky old genitals in people’s faces when they’re trying to eat.

It seems a little pointless to go over the Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce again, because it happened a long time ago and both parties have moved on so effortlessly. In fact, they’ve both pretty much reverted to exactly what they were doing before they even got married – Guy Ritchie is back making disappointing-looking films and Madonna is busy having it away with men so young that it wouldn’t surprise you if she one day stopped them on the street and wiped their faces clean with a spitty tissue.

But just because their divorce is in the past, it doesn’t mean that we’ve heard the end of it. Guy Ritchie has a new disappointing-looking film coming out soon, you see, and he needs to promote it. But how? What could he possibly talk about? The film itself? No, because he wants people to discover how disappointing it is for themselves. His previous films? No, because there’s a very real chance that an interviewer would lean in and slap his face the moment he said the word ‘Revolver‘. What does that leave? Oh, right, his marriage to Madonna.

So, a full year after anyone stopped caring, what insights into Madonna’s life could Guy Ritchie offer to Esquire? Let’s see:

“She’s a manifester, if there ever was one. First-rate manifester. Madonna makes things happen. Put Madonna up against any twenty-three-year-old, she’ll outwork them, outdance them, outperform them. The woman is broad. And, of course, here you go: I still love her… But she’s retarded, too.”

Don’t feel bad for Madonna just because Guy Ritchie called her retarded, though – almost exactly a year ago Madonna called Guy an ‘emotional retard’ during a concert, so this is his comeback. We can’t wait to hear Madonna’s rebuttal, which is due at some point in October 2010 and likely to be formed around the phrase “No, you’re retarded.” At which point, obviously, Guy Ritchie will take the bull by the horns and repeat the entire phrase back to Madonna in a slightly sarcastic way sometime around October 2011.

In fact, this weird little backwards and forwards could rumble each year until Madonna and Guy Ritchie are old and grey. Well, until Madonna is old and grey. It’ll go on until next year, that’s what we’re trying to say.

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Madonna is said to be considering getting married to her 22-year-old partner, Jesus Luz. Yes, you heard us.

In a series of rather comical coincidences – that you could not make up unless you were hell-bent on being labelled a heathen – the queen of the baby-snatchers is rumoured to wish to marry her child boyfriend.

Not that we’re judging, mind you. This is ruddy Madonna we’re talking about. Let’s face it, short of long-division, there’s nothing that she cannot do. Except wear trousers. And not grind her hip bones into a fine powder, as she dry humps her dancers in every video.

Madonna currently has five children; her two biological ones Lourdes and Rocco, and her two adopted kids Mercy and David. Then there’s the fifth. Jesus. Whom no one seems to realise must be some other child she adopted. We’ve read somewhere he’s supposed to be her boyfriend, but that’s just silliness if ever we heard it. Jesus is clearly still a child, and he actually appears to be shaving off peach fuzz each morning, in lieu of something rugged-looking that more closely resembles facial hair.

Well, whoever Jesus is, he and his non-mother are about to break a taboo or twenty, according to rumours. News has resurfaced this week claiming that Madonna wants to marry Jesus, with whom she enjoys her first relationship – of sorts – since she divorced an adult male by the name of Guy Ritchie.

One can assume that wedding rumours have come to light, once more, as Madonna is no longer shy about being seen in public with a man less than half her age. Where they used to arrive and leave certain events separately, they are now always arm-in-arm. That’s no real surprise though – as it’s only polite for a nice young man to escort an elderly woman up and down pesky steps in such a manner. We kid, we kid.

The two are now all about being out in the open. Madonna even put Jesus in her new music video for Celebration. The title track of her greatest hits album. The video for which features another of her children, daughter Lourdes.

From the Daily Mail:

Madonna is preparing to marry her toyboy lover Jesus Luz, according to reports. The 51-year-old singer is lining up to defy critics of her nine-month relationship with the young Brazilian model and make him the next Mr Madonna before the end of the year.  The extraordinary claim came from a biographer of Madonna’s, Randy Taraborrelli. She reportedly said of Luz: ‘He’s so sweet. He checks in with me all the time. I probably should do the same, but you know me. I think he gets it now that I’m a little – shall we say –self-involved.’

This was a guest post by Amy Grindhouse, who is all kinds of aces.

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There is a book coming out called The Michael Jackson Tapes, and it looks set to send a few jaws hurtling towards the floor, then shattering, whilst eyes pop out on stalks, then go back in again. Kind of like in cartoons. Because, in the book, the crazy melty-clownface, during an interview with a learned Oxford University rabbi, thought he’d explain his admiration for Adolf Hitler, list a few women he could probably have done it with had he felt like it, and, at one point, he thought it would be wise to give a pair of child murderers a great big hug.

Oh dear, Michael. Oh dear.

It was all going so well, with the new single coming out, then the film of the build up to his big comeback tour. But now, it looks like a big turd is about to be smudged on the Jackson memories.

Talking to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Jackson declared:

“Hitler was a genius orator. To make that many people turn and change and hate, he had to be a showman.”

In the very same interview – conducted about eight years ago, with view to being aired/publicised – Jackson also talked about women, claiming that Cindy Crawford had flirted pretty heavily with him, he would possibly have considered going out with Liz Taylor, but didn’t want the whole world to look at them with arched eyebrows, calling them an “odd couple”. And he seemed convinced that Madonna was totally in love with him, but unfortunately, she wasn’t to Jacko’s tastes:

“She is not sexy at all”

He would, he insisted, have rather dated Princess Diana, but he never had the guts to ask her out.

In another strange segment of proceedings – featured in the Daily Mail Online – the King of Pop referred to the Jamie Bulger killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, seemingly convinced that the pair of them just needed a good cuddle.

“I bet if you trace their life you can find they didn’t have parents around, didn’t have any love, nobody there to hold them, look in their eyes and say I love you. They deserve that, even though they’re going to get life. I want to say I love you and hold them.”

As posthumous interviews go, this one looks set to further split the consensus regarding the King of Pop, who, really, in hindsight, should have probably turned down any interview opportunities that came his way. It never seemed to go particularly swimmingly.

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Some people just don’t quite know how to correctly behave when they’re famous. Yes, we’re talking about you, Sarah Michelle Gellar! And you, Freddie Prinze Jr! Don’t try to hide away from our steely gaze. You both once had the world at your feet. For Christ’s sake, you could have been the next Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. But look at you, so totally normal, it’s disgusting. You’ve even given your child a standard everyday name – Charlotte Grace. Charlotte Grace? What the hell is wrong with you people?

As literally everyone else on the planet knows, if you’re going to live in the limelight, every single aspect of your life must be thrilling and unusual. Your diet, your choice of deity to worship, your outfits, and especially your children. They should be given freaky made-up names that sound stupid, like Suri, Maddox, or Brooklyn. Names guaranteed to see them cornered in the playground, and eventually home schooled.

They should have hairstyles almost as soon as they exit the womb, and their baby outfits should consist of hilarious designer trainers, and jeans! Celebrity babies MUST wear jeans. After all, these kiddies are not delicate souls ready to be nurtured and loved, they’re extensions of your personality, who will eventually blow most of your money on crystal meth, because they could never live up to your phenomenal successes. Might we suggest changing the Charlotte bit to Willem? It’s a small gesture, but funnier. More Hollywood.

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time Michelle Gellar has failed to play the Hollywood card correctly, having previously responded to a simple question about religion by claiming to believe that there might be some kind of God, but going on to point out that she doesn’t affiliate herself with any of the organised religions. Oh, for the love of GOD, woman! What kind of weedy, flannel-like response is that? It’s one of the first rules of celebrity that you choose something outrageous, pluck it from thin air if you must, and then just go with it. Macho men like Cruise and Travolta have been doing this very well for years. And Madonna found, to her enormous benefit, that wearing a thin red cotton bracelet made her somehow more alluring and impressive. These are the people to watch and learn from, Gellar and Prinz Jnr. The kind of people who would only acknowledge someone called Charlotte Grace had she just finished wiping down their car for a few bucks.

The baby, by the way, was born on Saturday. Poor little blighter.

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Madonna is at her happiest when she’s deliberately upsetting people – which probably explains Body of Evidence, actually.

But this time Madonna has outdone herself. This time, Madonna has managed to upset an entire swathe of eastern Europe. And it’s hard to upset eastern Europeans because, seriously, have you seen what those people eat?

Anyway, how did Madonna manage to so wildly offend the sensibilities of our European cousins? Simple, really – she went to Romania and said that she quite likes gypsies. Which is fair enough – pretending to finger yourself down the road from the Pope is OK. But gypsies? Ugh.

The best kind of fight is a fight that makes everyone look stupid and, God bless Madonna, that’s her favourite kind of fight as well. At least we assume it is, because she always seems to be in one of them.

Like when Madonna literally crucified herself during her last tour, for instance. Sure, it may have made religious leaders from around the world look stuffy and pompous but, like our dear old nan used to say, if you ever want to look like a gigantic tit then be a middle-aged millionaire in a leotard strapped to a giant glittery cross singing a piss-weak ballad about suffering to people who’ve paid £150 for a concert ticket.

And now she’s done it again. And this time it’s a doozy, because Madonna actually managed to offend the very people who’d paid to see her. So what did Madonna do to make her entire audience boo her? Did she crap on a Romanian flag? Did she sing Papa Don’t Preach while doing an offensive impersonation of a vampire? Did she besmirch the reputation of beloved Romanian gymnast Corina Ungureanu? No. No, the truth is far more shocking. In fact it will chill you to your very core. BBC News reports:

Madonna paused during her two-hour show to say: “It has been brought to my attention, that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe – it made me feel very sad.” “We don’t believe in discrimination, we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.” The star then received more boos when she mentioned prejudice against homosexuals and others.

It’s incredible, isn’t it? And – even though it actually causes us physical pain – despite her hectoring, schoolmarmish tone, we have to admit that that Madonna doesn’t completely come off as the worst party in this argument. Because really, if Romanians have such a problem with Romanies, they should probably think about moving to a country with a name that doesn’t directly translate to Land Of The Romanies, shouldn’t they? Although if that’s what they decide to do, they should probably steer clear of Gypsyville. And Pikeyton, for that matter.

We’re not saying it was wrong of the Romanians to boo Madonna, though – just that they were booing her for the wrong thing. If they wanted to boo her for, say, being a little old lady who looks like Iggy Pop’s grandfather in a nightmarishly revealing leotard with one of history’s worst British accents and a genuinely preposterous religious belief then, hey, we’d be 100% behind them all the way.

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9 – Kelly Clarkson (sort of) rips off Beyonce, refuses to shut up about it – Amy Grindhouse

8 - If you’ve been watching David on Big Brother and thinking “But where do I know him from?”, here’s your answer. You’ll thank us for this – Watchwithmothers

7 - Do you have a dog? Are you painfully lonely? Do you like the idea of making people run away from you in terror? Then do WE have the invention for YOU! – Geekologie

6 – A list of the top four pies ever. Contentious - Interestment

5 - Steel drums make everything sound happy. Look, here’s a steel band playing Joy Division songs. And they’re ACE – Mychemicaltoilet

4 - Here’s a feature called Ask The Sluts which, experience has taught us, is never a good idea. Ever – Domesticsluttery

3 – But Madonna! Your ARMS! – Bestweekever

2 - You know the world’s 100 most offensive jokes? Here are the punchlines to them – Coed

1 – A man flipping off zoo animals. The most joyous thing you’ll see all day, and another winner from Black20…

Good news if you’re the kind of person who still likes Madonna! Somebody’s now selling a 4″ x 6″ square of her skin stretched over a small wooden frame. We’ve heard there are several moles vaguely formed in the shape of the big dipper, and if you follow the image, navigationally speaking, you’ll eventually wind up in the Americas.

We’ve also heard it originally came detached in the teeth of a rabid goat seven hours into a Kabbalah desert-tent ceremony.

That, or bunches of faxed love notes and boring telephone messages she delivered years ago are going up for auction.

Years ago Madonna had people who loved her – and we mean really loved her. Most of them we assume were bankers and the deaf. We’d give you a list of exactly who loved her but none of them have ever wanted their names publicly released for fear they’d be excommunicated from one church or another.

Not Jim Albright though – he wasn’t ashamed of his feelings for her. You see, until her he was best known for being born on a river bank from the swollen bum of a hippo. Can you imagine living with that? Luckily the tabloids were far more interested in the fact that Madonna was feeding from his jugular every couple hours than they were about him taking his first breath from beneath a giant pile of brown.

Or something like that, anyway. The point being – Albright dated Madonna exclusively at some point in the early nineties. As a result he has several faxed love notes from her and two cassette tapes chock full of smutty messages. The faxed notes read like a Mad Lib, and the love messages had the general theme of one day adopting all of Africa together.

Once again our mind may have hazed the truth lines. We’ll let NBC News relate everything:

“Madonna faxed love letters to her then-boyfriend Jim Albright and left naughty messages on his answering machine in the early 1990s. The messages are on two micro-cassette tapes estimated to sell for up to $40,000.”

So if you want to hear Madonna tell somebody else a long time ago about how those boob-cones really chaffe, and how making love to black religious statues is actually a whole lot of work, then by all means throw in a bid. Might we suggest you start with at least three digits.

For the rest of us though, we’ll just have to content ourselves with buying her one stranded desert-island movie from countless bargain bins. We saw it once for under a dollar.

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When Madonna adopts a child, it’s hard. There’s the spoon-feeding. There’s the bathing. There’s the constant threat of incontinence.

Yup, that Madonna sure does take a lot of looking after. But little Mercy James is bound to cope. Because, just as we’ve been expecting all week, the Malawi Supreme Court has finally approved Madonna’s request to formally adopt Mercy James and take her home.

Madonna has fought so hard for this – it’s everything she’s always wanted. Until next week when she decides that she also wants a diamond-studded unicorn, and throws another pissy fit when someone tells her no, obviously.

Of all her admirable attributes, Madonna’s tenacity is right up there with her slightly nauseating unwillingness to dress remotely like a woman her own age, her swiftness to attach herself to religions which are plainly rooted in bullshit and and her ability to push a Snickers bar through the gap in her teeth sideways. When Madonna sees something she wants, she just goes ahead and gets it. Admittedly a few years later she tends to divorce it because it’s not the express ticket to A-list movie stardom she anticipated and also because it looks a bit like a potato, but that’s by the by.

The point is, Madonna’s tenacity has just ensured that she’s won the greatest prize of her life – a small orphan from Malawi who she may or may not plan to keep in a giant bell jar to use as her primary source of delicious stem cells.

That’s right – after her humiliating defeat earlier this year, Madonna’s adoption of Malawian orphan Mercy James has finally been given the official go-ahead by the country’s supreme court. AP reports:

Madonna can adopt a second child from Malawi, the southern African country’s highest court ruled, overturning a lower court decision it said was out of touch with the times. Chief Justice Lovemore Munlo, reading the three-judge panel’s ruling, also said the singer’s commitment to helping disadvantaged children should have been taken into account when deciding on Madonna’s request to adopt 3-year-old Chifundo “Mercy” James.

This news isn’t exactly a surprise – the adoption was widely predicted earlier this week – but it’ll be no less thrilling for Madonna, not least because the court has essentially set a precedent allowing Madonna to rock up to the country in a dirty great JCB and scoop up as many little orphans for herself as she can as often as she likes.

Because don’t forget that Madonna has done a lot for Malawi recently. She’s founded a charity to feed the country’s orphans and provide them with medical supplies – plus she’s built the Raising Malawi Kabbalah School to educate them in the mystic ways of the Kabbalah, ensuring that generations of Malawian orphans can grow up to be at least as clever as Ashton Kutcher. It might not be much, but it’s a start.

It just goes to show that money can’t buy you love. But it can buy you a crapload of bricks to build a school to indirectly guilt a government into giving you a kid who you can then go on to shower with the nearest approximation of love available to you at any given moment of time. Which is a completely different thing. It is.

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It’s time to congratulate Madonna. And not because she only got up to pee 17 times last night – although that is her personal best this year.

Instead Madonna appears to have defied international adoption law and all number of child trafficking protesters by winning her appeal to adopt little Mercy James, the orphan that she couldn’t have a few months ago.

It’s unknown how Madonna convinced the judges to allow the adoption since, when asked, their voices were muffled by the sumptuous collar of their new fur coat and drowned out by the roar of their gleaming speedboat respectively.

If there’s one universal truth about Madonna, it’s that criticising her only strengthens her resolve. That’s why, before we get to the actual meat of this story, we’d just like to publicly berate the following people for strengthening Madonna’s resolve:

* The person who told Madonna to stop dressing like a teenage girl.

* The person who told Madonna to stop talking in that ridiculous faux-Mary Poppins accent.

* The person who told Madonna to stop making bad music.

* The person who suggested to Madonna that a wealthy middle-aged woman like herself should maybe consider tucking in her vagina from time to time.

Right, now that’s out of the way, it’s on with the news. Remember Mercy James? Of course you do – she’s the little orphan from Malawi who can’t win. Earlier this year Madonna did everything in her power to adopt Mercy James, an act that would condemn her to spending the rest of her life in a nightmarish whirlwind of soulless, out-of-touch celebrity obnoxiousness and having to occasionally visit Guy Ritchie.

However, stung by the backlash from her previous adoption, the Malawian Supreme Court then refused to grant Madonna’s adoption application on the basis that she hadn’t permanently lived in Malawi for 18 months, thereby condemning Mercy James to a lifetime of poverty and, probably, an early death from something like Malaria. That poor girl. Malaria on one hand and Guy Ritchie on the other. We don’t know which one we’d chose, in fairness.

So what did Madonna do? Did she simply give up on Mercy James? No chance – she gave up on Mercy James, then fell off a horse, then changed her mind and decided to appeal the court’s ruling. And if reports are to be believed, she’s only gone and done it. The Daily Mail reports:

Three Malawian appeal court judges will reverse the original verdict, blocking the singer’s bid in March, her lawyer said. Alan Chinula passed on the news, after persuading two of the three appeal judges to alter their decisions… The official ruling will be announced next Sunday at Malawi’s Supreme Court of Appeal.

So congratulations Madonna. You finally got what you wanted. You’ve proved us all wrong with your steely resolve, and for that you should be commended.

Now, for crying out loud, nobody tell Madonna that she can’t make a sequel to Body Of Evidence.

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At one point in time, Madonna was a feminine woman who graced the charts without having to flex her arse at us.

Even perverts liked her – they got to see ropey porn featuring cars and candle wax. Now she’s bulked up so much that if you sticky-taped a drawing of a willy over her lady tunnel, she’d legally be classified as a bloke.

Over the years, she has moved on to other career paths. These include picking up an African child as her new plaything and divorcing Guy Richie. Someone captured their time together in a painting which we’d sum up as rubbish. Arty people seem to agree too – nobody bought it.

Now, it’s not like no-one stuck up their hand and offered £5.63, a Twix and their hat. A few bids were apparently recorded, but nobody wanted to piss away £15,000 on a painting of Madonna and Guy Richie.

Of course, we all know that everyone is being financially shafted and hardly anyone can afford to piss away money on total tat. Believe it or not, we aren’t expert art dealers and our invitation to appear on Cash In The Attic and Bargain Hunt haven’t arrived yet. But we know the following:

* The painting was done by Scottish artist Peter Howson who is meant to be quite good. Sadly 93.7% of the public don’t know who he is. If the auction house had lied and said Banksy painted it, some moron would have shelled out £100,000.

* We’ve never seen Guy Richie naked before, only his face. But it appears that he is the human equivalent of The Thing from The Fantastic Four in the portrait. Give him a fake tan to make him look orange and you’ve completed the look.

* Madonna and Guy Richie secretly created the monster from the Cloverfield movie. They both appear to be as tall as the building in the background and don’t really mind unleashing a beast to destroy New York.

*Sadly, the artist Peter Howson has done nothing to make Madonna look vaguely attractive. Surely his brief for the painting can’t have been “make her look as manly as possible, pregnant and strongly resembling something that farmers would use as an alternative as a scarecrow”.

* Just a little bit of work is needed on Madonna’s left tit. Her nipple looks a cherry stone and if you turn your head to the left to gaze at its ugliness, it resembles Pac-Man. We know you’ve just tried it.

But don’t worry dear reader! If you thought you’ve missed out on the opportunity to own a genuine piece of overpriced shit, then you are wrong. According to BBC News:

“The painting is still for sale and we would be delighted to hear from anyone who is interested in this much talked about piece of Scottish art history.”

There are two options here. We all chip in a pound, buy the artwork and stage a mass public burning of it in a randomly picked city centre. Or, the auction house will have to go for a rubbish bid such as £5.63, a Twix and a hat with fluffy clouds pasted all over it.

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All Madonna wanted was to collect African orphans and secretly drink their spinal fluid to preserve her youth.

Or, you know, look after them and give them a lifestyle they could never even imagine. Or whatever. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now because it’s all off. Madonna has discovered that her appeal to adopt three-year-old Mercy James from Malawi has been shelved indefinitely.

‘Indefinitely’ is a deceptively woolly term, so let’s try to break it down for you – it’s roughly the period of time that Madonna falsely thinks she can still get away with dressing like someone 35 years younger than her.

Madonna, for her faults, has done a lot for Malawi in her time. She’s helped to raise global awareness of the poverty that affects the country, and when she built that academy there she only managed to trample across a few people’s property to do it. Plus, let’s not forget that Madonna also took the liberty of removing David Banda from Malawi – something all Malawians are hugely grateful for because, well, he’s grown up to be a right little spoilt bastard, hasn’t he?

And all Madonna wanted in return was to adopt little Mercy James. In Madonna’s mind it was a win-win situation – Malawi would have one less desperate mouth to feed and a free space in one of its overcrowded orphanages, and in return Madonna would be able to school Mercy James in the traditional ways of the west, such as learning how to have unconvincing candle sex with Willem Dafoe and not understanding the true value of money.

Of course, that plan was dealt a fatal blow last month when Madonna’s adoption bid was turned down by the Malawi courts – but now Madonna has just learnt that her plan to appeal has also been indefinitely shelved. ABC reports:

“There is a gripping temptation to throw caution to the wind and grant an adoption in the hope that there will be a difference in the life of even just one child,” Justice E.J. Chombo wrote in the lower court ruling. “But removing the very safeguard that is supposed to protect our children … could actually facilitate trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals.”

He’s got a point, obviously – granting an international adoption to Madonna before she’s spent two years living in Malawi would really put them on thin ice. Sure, first it’s just one child to Madonna, then the next thing you know there’s a whole bunch of other pop singers coming to Malawi to do exactly the same thing. Would you be able to live with yourself if you saw a picture of Gina G holding down six or seven Malawian babies under her foot while she sucked the spinal fluid out of them through a straw? Would you?

But, all credit to Madonna, she knows when she’s been beaten. So it’s with a heavy heart that she’ll leave Malawi, possibly for good. Just Madonna on her own. Just Madonna and her special wriggling luggage that sounds like muffled cries for help. She’ll be missed.

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So Madonna fell off that horse because a photographer – possibly working for Old Bags On Saddles magazine – spooked it.

And it’s true. It’s true because Madonna’s rep Liz Rosenberg said it was true, and everything she says is true, with the possible exception of most of the things she says. But apparently, according to the incident’s police report, the paparazzi played no part in Madonna’s little topple whatsoever.

It’s a shame, because we assumed that Madonna now hurts herself whenever there’s a photographer around. Oh well, we’ll just have to cancel her photoshoot at the rusty spike factory, we suppose.

The poor paparazzi. Whenever anything bad happens to a celebrity, they’re always the first to get blamed. Honestly, it’s like there’s something about people who spend their lives conspicuously intruding on people’s privacy in the desperate hope that they’ll start crying or get their knickers out that just rubs people up the wrong way. How strange.

And if you believe what you read, it’s not just human beings and Pierce Brosnan who dislike the paparazzi, it’s also horses.

Ever since Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse god from Norse mythology, was snapped drunkenly vandalising a park bench with Quick Draw McGraw, the dim but well-intentioned wild west cartoon sheriff horse, all horses have had it in for the paparazzi. This hatred manifested itself most recently on Saturday when a horse who was carrying Madonna around saw a photographer in the bushes and deliberately flung Madonna from its back, causing her enough distress and injury to be hospitalised.

This definitely happened. Madonna was injured because a paparazzo leapt from the bushes, perhaps dressed as something that horses dislike such as a tub of glue or the Cliff Richard-performed theme tune to the early 1990s BBC horse-based drama Trainer, and spooked the horse she was riding.

Except, according to the police report into Madonna’s fall, the paparazzi didn’t play a part in the accident whatsoever. E! Online reports:

“She was a victim of a fall from a horse. We have no mention of the paparazzi,” Officer Chris Brenner tells E! News. “We got a call that the subject fell off the horse and treated it as an aided case…. Above complainant was a victim of fall from horse. Unknown injury. Bridgehampton Fire Department/ambulance responded and transported to Southampton Hospital,” said Brenner, quoting the police report.

So if the paparazzi didn’t make Madonna fall off her horse, what did? It’s just like a whodunnit, isn’t it, or at least it would be if it wasn’t for the very heavy suspicion that Madonna did it because she’s rubbish at riding horses.

Or maybe Madonna fell off the horse on purpose. After all, if we were Madonna we’d fling ourselves off horses as often as we could, purely because then movie acting would be automatically promoted to the thing we were second-most hopeless at. Smart move, Madonna. Smart move.

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Madonna is the material girl – specifically the materials of elastoplast, tubigrip and whatever colostomy bags are made from.

Alright, not the last one. But the first two are almost a certainty, because Madonna has only gone and fallen off another poxy horse again. Apparently Madonna was hospitalised this weekend after toppling off a horse in the Hamptons, and she’s blaming the paparazzi.

But anyone worried that Madonna falling off two horses in four years puts a dent in her ‘queen of reinvention’ tag should relax – this time Madonna fell off a horse in a silly hat. Possibly. It’s completely different.

There are some things that Madonna should never do. Like acting, for example. Or wearing leotards that barely cover her middle-aged genitals. Or, as it turns out, riding horses. Putting Madonna on top of a horse is a recipe for disaster – historically, any time Madonna has ever got on a horse she’s either mistaken it for Gwyneth Paltrow and spent four hours doing pilates and discussing brown rice with it, or she’s been flung from it and ended up in hospital.

That’s what happened in 2005 when Madonna busted up her ribs falling from a horse, and it’s what happened this weekend after Madonna – yup – fell off a horse. But just because Madonna doesn’t seem to do much else apart from end up in hospital after stacking it off horses all the time, it doesn’t mean that she’s a rubbish horse-rider. In actual fact, as AP reports, it’s all the work of the filthy paparazzi:

A representative for the superstar said Madonna suffered “minor injuries” after she fell while horseback riding in the Hamptons, a playground for the rich and famous on the eastern end of Long Island, N.Y. “The accident occurred when the horse Madonna was riding was startled by paparazzi who jumped out of the bushes to photograph the singer, who was visiting friends,” Liz Rosenberg said in a statement Saturday evening.

See? Those dastardly paparazzi should know better than to startle horses by jumping out of bushes. Horses have traditionally been easily spooked by the paparazzi, ever since a photographer once took a photo of Mr Ed getting out of a taxi without any knickers on and then caught Black Beauty cheating on Red Rum with Champion The Wonder Horse at 3am outside a pikey nightclub in Dagenham.

While we hope that Madonna quickly recovers from whatever injuries she sustained in the accident, the fact alone that she’s fallen off two horses in four years has got us worried. Just recently Madonna tried adopting a second baby from Malawi a couple of years after she already adopted one. Now she’s fallen off a horse a couple of years after already falling off one. It’s almost like Madonna has hit the oldest point that she’s ever going to reach, and now she’s ageing backwards, reliving all the landmark moments of her life in reverse.

That’s not a bad thing, of course. True, it means before long Madonna will start getting naked in public all the time again, but let’s focus on the positive here – in about 25 years Madonna will start dressing her age again. Hooray!

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