My update hit a nerve with every friend from my age group and I was inundated with platitudes.
Cameron has looked medically exhausted since about February, Clegg has become so utterly submerged in self-loathing that he now spends his days reading horrible tweets about himself out loud and Miliband has already lost the strength of mind to realise that carving vaguely worded platitudes into a limestone slab is the very stupidest thing that any human being has ever suggested.
The duke's statements about business, which to our tin ears sound like simplistic platitudes of the first water, are in fact fantastically complex and prescient exercises of soft power without which our economy simply could not function.
By virtue of its platitudes, this prevailing air of pan-feminism stifles debate and removes the agency it purports to provide us.
It opened with numbing platitudes about "legislating for all the people" and ended with pious hopes about ridding the world of terror.
These are standard platitudes that can be applied to Ireland in the international media these days.
Beyond the platitudes, Merkel is open to reforms to the internal market, to competitiveness, to the bureaucracy and even to some of the institutions.
Louis Walsh might have looked like a spare wheel at times – like a bewildered old man sitting on the end of the judging table, trying to mask his utter lack of comprehension at all the sounds and colours whizzing before his eyes by repeating the same three platitudes over and over again – but he's always been The X Factor's secret weapon.
And when, in the late afternoon sun, the glittering gold trophy was presented to the US captain Ben Crenshaw, it would have been hard indeed not to detect amid the pomp, platitudes and smiles as he wittered on in his Texas twang about the spirit of the Ryder Cup, and Mark James paid his deadpan Yorkie tributes, that golf truly had been the winner.
Some Labor folk have expressed concern that their colleagues have been going a bit "off the rails" – like Joel Fitzgibbon, who when confronted with evidence that Gillard would probably find it difficult to win an election campaign against a flesh-eating bacterium, openly mocked the platitudes that MPs are instructed to trot out at such times.
As for Andy, he's really the diametric opposite of Chauncey Gardiner, the dimwitted Peter Sellers character in Being There, whose platitudes about gardening and the weather are hung upon by those seeking insights into the economy.
