Pandora

AMBER VALLETTA, the Tulsa-born mannequin (pictured), crochets backstage before she hits the runway. Elizabeth Hurley, whose holiday plans (Pandora, 3 August) are more mixed up than a handbag with a monkey in it, reportedly chills out between takes by using a needle to embroider on canvas. Does this make needlepoint on point? Looks as if it's only a matter of time before we see an international celebrity knitting circle where supermodels, film stars and glossy posse fashionistas spend their time gossiping and stitching each other up...

JOB SKILLS? That has a pretty broad definition at Express Newspapers, where a memo's gone up on a company noticeboard urging employees to refrain from downloading hardcore on company time. The Daily Star only runs softcore porn.

"PANDORA'S LIFE of Don Johnson" continues. The newly married thesp and funster is reportedly backing Zebra, a Silicon Valley electric vehicle manufacturer. Johnson's character in Nash Bridges still tools around in a big ole gas-guzzling Barracuda muscle car. Mystic Mudd, the resident runner of Pandora's psychic cool-line, sees four-wheeled battery-powered product placement in the dapper Don's on-screen future...

VIAGRA'S MANUFACTURER Pfizer offered a year's supply of the love drug to the first two players to score a hole in one at the Chequers Golf Classic in Malaysia. We'll skip the gags, moving on to disclose that Pfizer lost its cojones, pulled out and provided a cash replacement instead. But money can't buy you love, as the heart-transplant pioneer...

...CHRISTIAAN BARNARD, now 76, discovered when his young wife Karin filed for divorce the other day. She'd discovered some of Pfizer's little blue pills in the doctor's spongebag, and concluded he'd been playing away. Certainly, she alleges in court papers filed in Cape Town, he hadn't been playing at home for a while. So Mrs B seeks to annul the couple's pre- nuptial agreement. She says she signed it after going to Dr Barnard's lawyer, who she thought would protect her interests. Excuse me? Hmmmmmmm. You'll be astounded to learn that Mrs B used to be a model. Which completes today's celebrity knit purl whirl, and in a dervish dance of diversity segues into...

CHELSEA'S HOLIDAY JOB. Ms Clinton has been a workie on a Montana cattle ranch "weighing bulls and sorting breeding pairs".

TREVOR PHILLIPS is wooing the Fun City vote in London's mayoral race. He's just told visitors at the Great British Beer Festival that he favours 24-hour licensing.

SAMANTHA WEINBERG threw a party for her new book at her mama's minimalist hotel, The Hempel, this week. A Fish Caught in Time is Weinberg's 227pp tale of the 5ft, luminescent-eyed, steel-blue-scaled coelacanth, a rather rare four-limbed fish native to Indian oceanic waters. Weinberg, in a languid cerise summer number, chatted with a dressed-down Charles Spencer, and her silver-haired agent Gillon Aitken. Chantal Eyre, the jeweller, caught eyes and turned heads in a floaty frock. Weinberg pledged to donate monies to a coelacanth fund in the Comoros Islands - from which she was once expelled, according to Victoria Bonham-Carter, the book's editor.

After the party the author and her husband Mark Fletcher, who makes wildlife documentaries, took her family and a group that included Pat Booth, to supper at Geales. The Kensington old-school chippie features paper napkins, ketchup and "mumsy" staff.

u

OH, AND here's today's other fish story: What did the coelacanth say when it hit the concrete wall? "Damn!"

Contact Pandora by e-mail: pandora@ independent.co.uk