Death (and tapas) in the afternoon

Sunday lunchtime and a special treat for you. The papers reported last week that Catalonia has outlawed bull-fighting, which I think is a crying shame. It must leave the bulls with a curious dilemma, too, a combination of relief that they won't be butchered for sport, coupled with existential angst about their life's role now that they will no longer perform on a Saturday afternoon for an audience. It must be similar to being an actor in Last of the Summer Wine.

I've never been to a bull fight, but wrote about it here a couple of months back and would love to see it one day. I went to a bull ring out of season a few years ago and while unable to see the sport was able to sample a by-product in the form of some delicious bull's blood black pudding.

Anyway, if bull-fighting is to be replaced by something more acceptable to vegans, this gives me an ideal opportunity to reproduce (slightly cut down to save space) a marvellous monologue by Michael Flanders on the cruel sport that is the Andorran festival of olive-stuffing. Read on and enjoy...

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FLANDERS: I bought this hat last year when I was on the Franco-Spanish border, in the tiny principality of Andorra. It's worn like this - with the peak at the back - and it is in fact the proud distinguishing mark of the Andorran olivador, or olive-stuffer.

How many of you, as you toy with a dry martini at the bar, have thought of the romance that lies behind the simple stuffed olive, or have witnessed, as I have, the almost unbearable drama of a corrida d'olivas, or festival of olive stuffing.

In Andorra, every boy hopes that he, too, will grow up to be one of the truly great oliveros. Let me now try to recreate for you something of the atmosphere of a corrida d'olivas.

By three o' clock in the afternoon, the stands in the great Plaza d'Olivas are packed and excitement mounts as the band announces the entry into the arena of the olivador. He is closely followed by his assistants, the picador, with his pick of sharpened wood, and the matador, with his small round mat.

They bow to the Presidente Municipale, who gives the signal for the trumpet to sound, and the first olive to be wheeled in. A gasp goes up; for this is no ordinary olive. This is the giant, pendulous oliva brava, specially bred for the ring in the rugged foothills of Andalucia.

A corrida d'olivas is divided into three parts, or tercios - the first, a tercio of quites, or passes. Here, the olivador, keeping the rest of his body entirely motionless, passes the olive from hand to hand, trying to soften up its tough outer skin, in a bewildering series of Veronicas, Naturales, Media Veronicas, Veronicas Reverso.

The trumpet sounds a second time, this time the tercio de banderillos, and now it is the turn of the picador. Planting his feet firmly together in the sand, he holds his pick at arm's length and prods into the olive, trying to determine whether the stone runs true up and down, or whether it is set at an angle, favouring one side, the dreaded oliva revoltosa.

The trumpet sounds a third and last time, for the tercio del muerte. The olivador bows again to the Presidente, saying to him, "I dedicate to you this olive". He then places it on his knee; he takes the pica, raises it high above his head. All is hushed. And then, in one sudden movement, he brings it jabbing down into the heart of the olive. And a great cry goes up of "Olé!" - he has made an 'ole.

But before the gutted olive can fall to the sand it is caught by the matador on his mat, dragged out of the arena, and handed to the estufadores, who are of two types: the estufadores pimentos, and the estufadores anchovas.

No olive is ever allowed a second time into the arena. And woe betide the olivador whose olive is revoltosa. For then, at the moment of pica, the pick, glancing off the angled stone, will jab hard - ungh! - into his own knee.

A cruel sport. Some may think it so. But this is surely more than a sport, this is more than just a vital art form. What we have experienced is total catharsis, in the acting out of that primeval drama of man pitted against the olive.

And as the sun sets over the now empty Plaza d'Olivas, nothing is left but a few footprints in the hot sand, with here and there a tell-tale smear of olive oil. And one is reminded of those immortal words of Garcia Lorca "all lust and life must pass away, to make a cocktail canape."

And this hat - this hat was introduced by perhaps the greatest olivero of them all, Flaminguez. Who, at the very moment of pica, would give a deft twist to the wrist, which sent the sharp olive stone flying high into the air. And this peak is to stop it going down the back of the neck.

Take him, Jonny

This is my first post in a couple of weeks, which is disgracefully slack (many apologies to anyone who visits daily - and I see there are a couple - and leaves disappointed), but it has been a busy summer.

So back to blogging with a bang, then, or maybe just a quiet pfft depending on whether you are using a silencer. I've been mildly intrigued by all these confidential American military reports that have appeared on WikiLeaks. It seems to have created a bit of an outrage, with the top brass saying that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks owner with the Warhole hair, has the blood of Afghans on his hands for revealing the names of informers and conspirators.

Not as much Afghan blood on his hands as the misfiring US troops, Assange's defenders may reply, but the White House has a point that there is a certain lack of morality and concern for consequences behind the publication of the leaked documents.

Robert Gibbs, President Obama's press secretary, pleaded with Assange today to stop, but that is hardly likely given that Gibbs, an owlish bumbling fellow, is as much of a threat as a goldfish. So why doesn't the White House just, you know, have Assange whacked?

These leaked documents reveal that there is a special ops assassination squad going round bumping off the Taleban rather than arresting them for trial, which is cool (sorry, I mean disgraceful). Why not put a couple of them on Assange detail?

Surely they know how: pull up in a car alongside him, invite him to go for a ride out to New Jersey or some godforsaken place and then take care of him. Make it look like an accident, of course. Astounding how many people accidentally garotte themselves with cheesewire when buying shoes.

Honestly, if you can't bump off people that are being irritating, what is the point of having a CIA? What is the point, indeed, of being President?

A suitable name

Mark Reckless, MP for Rochester and Strood, missed a vote on the Budget last week because he was completely blotto and incapable of stumbling through the correct lobby, it has emerged. Well what did we expect given his name?

Meanwhile, Bob Sensible and Kate Dull, MPs for somewhere else, just stayed in their offices watching Yes Minister DVDs and drinking Vimto until they were summoned for the vote.

Buzzed off

This story explains why it is bad to watch porn on your computer and have a crafty wank.

Not because it is evil or against the word of God or a bit dirty, but because you might die while doing it and coroners do not respect your privacy.

Which of us really wants the fact that we died while pleasuring ourselves to be announced to the press - and reported in the Daily Mail?

Split personality

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has not had a good week. First, he got slammed when a list of schools that were to be saved from the axing of the rebuilding programme included 25 that were actually due to be scrapped, as if that were a) actually his fault rather than an incompetent quango or b) going to make any difference to the quality of children's education.

Then, he got called "a miserable pipqueak" by a red-faced Labour backbencher (although personally I'd take that as an immense badge of pride). And now, he has had his English "corrected" by Hansard.

According to Paul Waugh's Evening Standard blog, Gove in his apology to the Commons ended by saying that he would like "to unreservedly apologise". But Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debate, changed it to "to apologise unreservedly".

Frankly, the sort of people who get het up about split infinitives really need to get out more (or should that be to more get out?) And I'm speaking as someone who believes that good grammar really does matter and should always be corrected. Unlike most pedants, I do not shudder when Captain Kirk promises to boldly go where no man has gone before, nor do I view it as a way in which we English are intellectually superior. There are plenty more solecisms in American English that prove that (such as "winningest").

The argument that it is wrong to an infinitive split is just silly, one of those inventions of the Victorians that pays no attention to how language works. They claimed it was because you don't get a split infinitive in Latin, but Latin does not use a "to" particle as part of the infinitive as, say, German does with "zu".

A split infinitive is common in ancient Greek, old French and other languages and was used in Middle English but died out for a spell until the 18th century. Shakespeare only splits an infinitive once (but we should never use him for grammatical perfection). Wodehouse often splits them and that is good enough for me.

It became so popular in the 18th and 19th century that grammarians clamped down on it quite hard. Perhaps that is why there is such a strong anti-splitting camp, because generations of pupils had it whacked into them not to separate "to" from the rest of the verb.

Either way, I'm not sure that Gove should take any mocking from Paul Waugh, who in his piece uses the phrase "bat and eyelid".

How I learnt to love the bomb

Now here is a book I am keen to read. Was there anything as cool yet shit-scary as the Cold War, with its perpetual threat of mutually assured destruction and spies defecting and counter-defecting all over the place?

I say that with the casualness of youth, of course, having not lived with the fear of the bomb. I was 13 when the Berlin Wall came down, but my mother alarmed me last Christmas by describing how scared they all felt in the late 1970s and that if Armageddon had come, her plan was to walk slowly towards the mushroom cloud with me under one arm and my brother under the other. She can be a little Hollywood sometimes.

The Secret State, by Peter Hennessy, originally published in 2002 but now with lots of new declassified information, has the subtitle "Preparing for the Worst", a very British way of describing half a million tons of TNT being dumped on Trafalgar Square

Studying British implacability is something that Hennesy, who once taught my wife for a masters in politics, does very well. He is well connected with the Civil Service, basing much of his research on anonymous private briefings, and is also superb at weeding out fascinating titbits from previously archives.

Such as this one, which I read in Sam Leith's review of the book in this week's Spectator: "In the Macmillan era, senior civil servants fretted about whether to join the AA so that if the PM was in his care when the four-minute warning was sounded, he could use one of their phone boxes to authorise nuclear retaliation."

And then there is the "Spot the Bomb" competition that the Home Office included in an in-house journal showing fallout plumes from two bombs and you had to guess where they landed.

Or the conversation between Khruschev and the British Ambassador to Moscow in the early 1960s, when the Soviet president asked Her Majesty's diplomat how many H-bombs it would take to wipe out the UK. The diplomat estimated six, to which Khruschev told him not to be pessimistic and that it would take many more, before reassuring him that more than enough had been put aside for the job.

Or the revelation of who had a place in the nuclear bunker in the event of Britain being attacked. Apparently, a surprising number of typists had been marked to survive the apocalypse, there only being so much that a wartime PM could be expected to do himself when sheltering underground.

Reverting to typo

The Times has been going through one of those staff-culling periods that newspapers conduct every once in a while. It's never nice when friends leave, especially if it is not voluntary, and there has been a slew of leaving parties in the past fortnight.

The latest emailed announcement of a departure was given the subject line "The end of an error", which made me chuckle and suggests that either the departee is leaving of his own volition or that the Times news subs department remains the best repository of black humour.

It doesn't quite match the email from a senior sub after he had recovered from surgery to treat intestinal cancer, in which he announced that his colon had been amended to a semi-colon. However, it did bring to mind a CV that the Times property section, a former employer of mine, received a few years ago during the last big cull.

It was from a freelance sub who had been let go by the news department and was looking for new work. His cover letter said that he had worked for the department in "a particularly exiting period for the paper".

The property chief sub assumed that the error was not a grim joke and turned down the application.

Bang and blame

An unfortunate juxtaposition of news and sports headlines on the Express website, as noted by Fleet Street Blues.

Out of time

My sister-in-law, who probably has too much time on her hands, has just sent me this picture, which observes that today is the day to which Marty McFly travels forwards in time in Back to the Future 2, released in 1989.

Which is fine, except that Marty actually travels to 2015 in the film. Someone seems to have manipulated the image and then sent it around the world today. Strange.

Anyway, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. 2015 is only five years away: how close is modern society to the world that Marty McFly finds? Here are five things the film got right:

1. Watching multiple TV channels on the same screen
2. CCTV everywhere
3. Video billboards (although not yet in 3D or see-through)
4. Everyone having plastic surgery
5. A baseball team in Miami (this happened in 1997)

And here are five things that have not yet happened - but they've got five years to get there...

1. "Queen Diana", as mentioned on a news headline. (Guess they thought that this was a safe prediction - although QE2 may still be reigning over us in 2015).
2. Flying cars
3. Self-drying clothes that shrink to fit us perfectly and self-tie shoes
4. No obese Americans all over the place (or is that just Hollywood?)
5. Hoverboards. This is my biggest disappointment with the film's predictions.

To pay or not?

This is my 100th post on the Questing Vole, so thank you if you have read some of the preceding 99, especially if you left a comment. They are all appreciated.

This blog is, of course, free and will remain so, unlike my cricket blog on the Times website, which yesterday slipped behind the Great Murdoch Paywall.

The issue of whether The Times should charge its online readers has attracted a lot of comment, generally unfavourable ones from those who think that all content on the internet should be free to read.

Most of these pooh-poohers seem to accept paying for newspapers in hard form. The Times put up a paywall around its printed newspaper back in 1785 and it still seems to be a working model at £1 a day (those who point at falling sales over the past decade ignore that circulation is double what it was 30 years ago). They also accept paying to watch movies or sport on TV through satellite subscriptions at up to £50 a month.

Why, then, is the idea of paying £2 a week for an enormous amount of online content anathema? Well, the main reasons are that it was always free before and you will be able to continue reading news elsewhere without paying.

Except I don't buy this. For a start, free does not mean good. Look at Metro or the Evening Standard: free newspapers but also unreadable tosh, fine to flick through for five minutes on the Tube but not something I would think worth spending money on.

Yes, there are lots of really good free websites out there - many not run by corporations but by individual bloggers - but they are only good because people spend a lot of time working on them. Those people should be paid. The reason I don't blog as often as I should here is because often I am too busy writing for money, but the Vole is a one-man operation. If you have a large team of people producing a hundred stories a day, you need to pay them and they would deserve paying by what they produce.

Also, I also don't think people buy newspapers for news any more. They already know what the stories are from TV, radio and the web, but they read The Times for the context and illumination that my colleagues place on the news. People may still not think it worth paying to read these people online, but they need to acknowledge that they are not coming to find news.

The thing that opponents of online charging do not understand is that, unlike private bloggers who crave readers for their personal satisfaction (I certainly do), big media organisations do not care if a large proportion of the online audience stay away. They just want enough people to read - and to pay - to cover the cost of producing a first-rate service.

In very broad terms (ignoring reductions for subscriptions and giveaways), The Times only needs to attract about a million paying readers to its website each week to double its income. It gets about 20 million unique readers a month, so it can afford to let an awful lot of them go.

And while the advertising revenue may drop at first because of the 95% reduction in potential readers, the paper's management can offer in return a better analysis of who the readers that remain are. They can monitor what stories they read and advertising can be targeted accordingly. In the long term, advertisers will see the benefit of knowing more about their audience.

That is not to say that I agree fully with The Times's online charging model. It seems strange that there is not an option to pay monthly or quarterly or annually. The constant pay-and-sign-in model will irritate many and irritation, more than cost, is a good reason to avoid things on the internet.

I would also like people to be charged by their time on the site rather than a flat fee for access. I'm not sure that our web strategists understand that people often only read small sections of a big website. Many of my cricket blog readers will only read the cricket section of our site - not even branching out into the general sport site. Some people will just visit to read a particular columnist or to get news from one sector where we have good analysts.

These people may not think that £2 a week is good value. But they might be happy to be charged 10p (or even less) a click and by retaining more readers that way, the paper would make more money. Technologically it should be very simple (look at how iTunes works). I'm sure our wonks must have looked at it, but clearly they feel that they "whole product" approach is the way they want to go.

Good luck to them, but farewell to those who used to read The Times online and won't any longer. We appreciate your support over the years. If you want some free reading matter, can I suggest the Questing Vole...?

Stupid sport

I knew that the Americans were a nation of taste and good losers to boot. If only we could view yesterday's match with the same attitude.

Hat-tip to Marbury.

They're coming home, they're coming...

Look, on the bright side at least we have avoided having to play Argentina in the quarter-finals.

I watched yesterday's Germany game on a small portable TV with bad reception by the boundary edge of the Coldharbour cricket ground in Surrey. It was the annual Times over-40s v under-40s match and because of the football we decided to take an extra-long tea interval between 3 and 5.

Except that once Germany scored their fourth goal there was very little reason to carry on watching the football and so the cricket resumed with 20 minutes left in Bloemfontein. That's how desperate England were.

But just because our football team are crap, there is no reason to feel gloomy. Here are a few signs that all is right with the world:

• Andy Murray is still in Wimbledon (this will hold for at least another five hours as he is third on Centre Court today
• England have just beaten Australia 3-0 in a one-day cricket series. True it is a money-spinning exercise not pegged to an Ashes summer and hardly anyone cares about it, but a win is a win
• Our golfers are dominating America, which is always good in Ryder Cup year. Graeme McDowell won the US Open and other Brit winners on US soil this year include Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter, Rory McIlroy and Paul Casey
• Despite never seemingly winning a grand prix, the top two drivers in the Formula One table this season are British: Lewisham Ilton and Jenson Button
• We won five gold medals and six other coloured medals at the rowing World Cup the weekend before last
• Er... we must still be quite good at cycling and canoeing and diving and swimming and Paralympic sports and quoits and quidditch and backgammon and snooker and darts and conkers and Boggle.

So who cares if there is one sport that we are unremittingly cruddy at? We rule the world at everything that matters

Honk honk

There was a bit of hoo-hah last week from people complaining that the South African vuvuzela - which looks like an elongated toy trumpet and sounds like an elephant trying to clear his trunk - was spoiling their enjoyment of the World Cup. I thought the lack of goals would do that.

The vuvuzela, which South Africans claim is a traditional instrument despite it being a) plastic and b) has only been mass-marketed in South Africa since 2001, drowns out all other noise, a safety risk as well as just plain irritating.

But not being in South Africa, I hadn't realised how the droning sound - a B flat, I believe - gets under your skin until the Great Britain men's eight arrived to cheer on their team-mates at the Munich rowing World Cup today, all carrying their own vuvuzelas. I'd have thought if they wanted to honour a local tradition, a Wagner tuba would have been more appropriate and just as loud.

Seven of the crew have been sat a few rows behind me here in the grandstand making the most almighty racket on their three-euro honkers, which they picked up in a Munich supermarket yesterday. Apparently they tried to play them in the hotel bar while watching the football last night and got evicted.

One of the crew was missing, though. Greg Searle, the 1992 Olympic champion who is making a comeback this year at the age of 38, was not in the orchestra. Was he too mature for it?

No, I was told, Greg is the ringleader. And sure enough, he showed up later with two vuvuzelas in hand. But where does he stick the second one? I could make some suggestions...

The glamorous life of a sports writer

Here I am in the grandstand of the Olympic rowing lake outside Munich, a brutalist concrete structure that makes you think that if the rest of the 1972 Olympics venues were designed with such lack of beauty it is no wonder that people started shooting each other.

It is raining. It is cold. The cheese in the press box rolls is bland, the apple juice slightly salty. I am staying in a hotel in Dachau, just down the road from the concentration camp. To add to the general mood of misery, the local press spent the afternoon watching their national team lose in the football World Cup to Serbia. It is not a jolly place. I got up at 5.30am to come here today.

I'm not moaning, though. It's just that when people sometimes express envy that I get paid to write about sport, they don't realise that it is not all Pimm's, sunshine and girls in pretty frocks (although at Henley it pretty much is that). But I am very lucky to be doing what I do.

This is a busy time, hence the lack of posts this week (I'm really sorry to the few kind souls who visit this blog each day and leave disappointed, I will try to write more often so that you can be disappointed only by quality rather than quantity). I flew to Munich this morning, having spent the past four days commuting from London to Eastbourne daily for the women's tennis.

I get back Sunday night and it is straight off to Wimbledon on Monday for a week and a half then it is a few days at Henley Royal Regatta (where really no one can complain about their lot - they even have courtesy gin and tonic in the press tent!), a day doing a one-day international at Lord's, three days covering rowing in Lucerne and then up to St Andrews for the Open golf.

That takes us to the third week of July, but I'd rather be this busy than twiddling my thumbs. My diary for August just says "sleep". And "blog".

(Thanks to Rachel Quarrell, my colleague on the Telegraph and editor of Rowing Voice for the photo of our bleak workspace above)

Swearing for beginners

So as the amount of cars bearing fluttering white flags with a red cross tells us, another World Cup is about to start. That and the car drivers have very small cocks. The World Cup may have officially begun yesterday, but those were games just involving unimportant countries like France. The real tournament gets under way tonight when England play the USA.

Incidentally, I can understand why David Cameron thinks it would be a good thing politically to fly the flag of St George over the office during this tournament, but isn't there the risk that it will make Downing Street look a bit like a council estate?

You may have read that Wayne Rooney, the troll who plays up front for England (a rather talented, semi-shaved troll, mind), has been told off for swearing and warned that if he does it tonight he will be sent for an early bath. To help referees to prepare properly, they have been given a list of 20 English obscenities to keep their ears open for.

Twenty? Crikey, I wonder what the other 15 are. Will they be really foul, or really tame. Will "you blighter" count? What about "bloody hell, ref"?

Still, if you see Joe Cole say "damn it all" after fluffing a chance and then one of the linesmen shouts "bingo", you'll know that they have completed the full set.

While Rooney must watch his tongue, there is no reason why he can't be creative about expressing how passionately he views the referee's decisions. These tips might help him stay out of trouble:

The Haddock method: Captain Haddock, the bluff seadog who accompanies Tintin, is the angriest cartoon character ever drawn, yet his abuse remains appropriate for children’s eyes, if not their vocabularies. “Billions of blue blistering barnacles” is one insult. “Ten thousand thundering typhoons” is another. And then there are the single-word curses, such as “ectoplasm”, “coelacanth” and “troglodyte”.

Follow Shakespeare: If it’s on the national curriculum it must be OK. So Rooney can call the referee “a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave”. And that is just from one quotation in King Lear.

It’s classier in Latin: “Pedicabo ego vos, et irrumabo” is the opening line to a love poem by Catullus. It is positively filthy – although one school translation just renders it as “nuts to you and go to hell” – but has the advantage that no one will understand it, apart from Frank Lampard, who has a GCSE in Latin.

New York Times bans tweeting

The New York Times remains a stout defender of proper English, even if its sports pages insists on using the ghastly American word "winningest" for the most successful teams (I'm not joking about that, as this story shows).

This week an edict was sent out to their writers from the NYT's "standards editor" banning the use of the verb and noun "tweet". Outside of an ornithological context, that is.

"Tweet", according to their style guru Phil Corbett, "has not yet achieved the status of standard English ... except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And 'tweet', referring to messages on Twitter, is all three".

He goes on to suggest "deft, English alternatives" such as "use Twitter or write on Twitter". One day, he concedes, "tweet" may become as common as "e-mail", but then again it may fade into oblivion. "It doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly," he writes.

I think Mr Corbett may be my favourite American. Now if only he can change their rule on "winningest"...

Erasing old contacts

There is a good joke in one of the early episodes of Friends when Phoebe finds her grandmother sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper and a thick book in front of her, in which she is drawing lines along a ruler. When asked what she is doing, grandmother replies: "Checking the obituary pages and updating the phone book."

That came to mind yesterday when I deleted Alec Bedser's home number from my address book. The former England fast bowler died a couple of months ago, so I guess I don't have any need for it any more. Sad that he has gone - Bedser had been a regular sight on the cricket dinner circuit and remained a good raconteur even in old age - but at the age of 91 he had had a good innings.

And then I flicked to the news and saw that Stuart Cable, the Stereophonics drummer, had been found dead at the age of 40 and another contact was scrubbed out. Journalists pick up contacts like cats attract fleas and having worked on most sections of the paper in my nine years at the Times, I have picked up an eclectic array of phone numbers and emails.

There are some odd groupings in my contacts book. Jane Asher, cake-maker and former squeeze of Paul McCartney, sits between the Arsenal press office and the official Ashes poet. Keith Chegwin, the 1980s children's TV presenter, is followed by a number for the Chennai Super Kings Indian cricket team.

I had spoken to Cable a few years ago for a rugby supplement I was editing. If you want to find a celebrity to talk about rugby, you can't go far wrong with trying anyone Welsh and Cable was happy to chat for half an hour about his love of the sport and his favourite players. He was charming, funny and very un-rock and roll.

I can't say that I knew Cable from a half-hour conversation any more than I knew Bedser, but he was kind enough to give me his mobile phone number and email and that formed a small connection that is now broken. Updating your contacts book can be quite cathartic, a good way of looking back on your career and remembering conversations long forgotten.

I've just gone through the book and found four more names that can be crossed out: Ben Pimlott, the historian, Bernard Levin, the satirist, George Melly, the jazz singer, and Ian Richardson, the actor. Other names had to be Googled before verifying that they can stay in the book a bit longer, such as Dannie Abse, Dennis Healey, Seamus Heaney and Lord St John of Fawsley.

Of them, it was the erasing of Melly that brought the biggest smile of recollection. When I last spoke to him he told me that he enjoyed watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he was a lecherous old man who liked perving over Sarah Michell Geller. You can get away with saying that if you are old.

So the Vole's contacts book is now a little slimmer than it was before, but it has been an interesting trot down memory lane. The only contact I can't bring myself to delete yet is that of my grandfather, who died more than four years ago. It seems that if I was to remove his phone number from the database, he would cease to exist. Does that seem rather pathetic?

Playing up

It's really kind of Nicola Smith, of the Trades Union Congress, to put in the hard work identifying where the coalition Government is cutting public services. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't know that they were doing such a good job, although I suspect she thinks this is all evil.

Apparently, £5 million is being cut from England's Play Strategy. I agree that this is outrageous. The strategy to build adventure playgrounds costs £235 million. Why can the Government only find 2 per cent in savings?

Mr Eugenides takes a more blunt view of the programme (apologies for the asterisks but I'm typing this at work):

"Here's a 'play strategy': a pavement and a piece of f***ing chalk. My memories of 1980 are hazy, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one who managed to play hide and seek in the street without some c*** from Renfrewshire Council explaining the rules to me; and I refuse to believe that the class of '10 are such panty-wetting inadequates that they need a f***ing budget to learn kick-the-can."

Or here's another bit of money being saved, the Government has said it will wait until the spending review in the autumn before deciding whether to let everyone with a longstanding health condition have a free prescription. Note that they aren't necessarily scrapping the previous Government's plan (a plan they spent 13 years doing nothing about, by the way). They are waiting to see whether there is any money to pay for it and will then decide whether it is worth it. Seems sensible to me.

This is a scheme that would cost getting on for half a billion quid a year. Apparently 15 million people, a quarter of the population, have some form of long-term illness, including asthma and depression. Some of them need help in paying for their prescription and, of course, they should be entitled to it from the public purse. Others don't.

I have had asthma for almost 30 years. It is mild and reasonably controlled. If I bought a prescription as often as I should do, it would cost me about £30 a year to get enough inhalers. I think I can afford that. It is a reasonable use of my money to stop me wheezing and I certainly don't expect other taxpayers to pay.

The reason I don't spend even that is because my wife is also asthmatic and I use her (paid-for) medication. This amuses our GP, who treats us like grown-ups, but irritates the surgery's resident asthma nurse.

Nursey won't issue me with a prescription unless I come in for an "asthma check", a pointless waste of time (no one knows how I am breathing - or how to control it when I'm wheezy - better than I do myself) and just an excuse for box-ticking. So I refuse and just wait until I next see the GP for some other reason and ask him at the end to print out an extra ventolin ticket, which he is always happy to do.

It is a very small war of defiance against state involvement in our lives but a crucial one. Reduce the needless asthma check-ups, I say, and spend that money on free asthma prescriptions for those who need them. No taxation without respiration.

Last of the whining summer

Is there any connection between the formation of our coalition Government and the news that Last of the Summer Wine is being axed after 37 years?

Maybe there is only room for one story about a likeable but dull character called Clegg being dominated by a slightly snobby military type and his Yorkshire-speaking sidekick.

The burning question now is how the BBC will bring the series to an end. Here are some ideas based on how other TV series concluded:

* They have been dead all along but, unable to accept it, have been forced to drink beer and reminisce in a sort of Yorkshire purgatory. Norah Batty is Gene Hunt the ferryman. The series ends with them all going to the pub, much like the previous 30 series.

* A ceasefire in Yorkshire is declared (they didn't like to talk about the war much) and Clegg is able to return to his native North Korea. As his helicopter takes off, he looks down and sees the word "tara" written in wheelie bins. A heartbreaking side story has Foggy devastated by the massacre of a colliery band he had been teaching.

* After spending many years in a pub, Clegg decides to emigrate to the other side of the country (Lancashire) and become a radio psychiatrist.

* The trio are ordered to slide down a really steep hill in a bath. Clegg admits that he is scared and just before they go Compo reveals that he has a cunning plan to get out of it, but we never find out what the plan was. As they go over the top of the hill, the action slows and then fades to a field of poppies.

* Holmfirth gets its first Latino antiques shop owner and Seymour is able to retire. His last act is to forgive Wally for telling the press about the secret military bathtub. Compo and Norah Batty finally get it together on the eve of the parish council elections.

Peter Sallis is 89. Thought you might want to know that.

Diplomatic trick of the day

Marbury has spotted an interesting snippet in the latest Prospect magazine:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is afraid of dogs. As Russian president, Vladimir Putin tried to exploit this by having Koni, his black Labrador, sit in on their meetings.

It's true. Merkel was bitten by a dog as a child and has been very uneasy around them ever since. Not only would Putin bring his Labrador to meetings with the German Chancellor, but he also presented her with a puppy in 2006. Classy.

I can't help thinking that Tony Blair might have missed a trick by not making David Blunkett (with his lovely, slobbery friend Lucy) Foreign Secretary.

Koni, who is descended from a dog once owned by Brezhnev, has been at her master's side regularly since 2000. The only Russian employee allowed to bark orders at Putin, he once said of her: "I try to consult with my dog, who gives me good advice."

He also once told George W Bush that his dog is "bigger, tougher, stronger, faster and meaner" than Bush's terrier, Barney. Surprised that Bush didn't get Cheney to take out Koni with a twelve-bore.

Laws is not an ass, nor a fraud

The Telegraph's battle against perceived expenses abuses by MPs is not only getting boring but it is proving damaging. It would be wrong if the latest witch-hunt, against David Laws, robbed the coalition Government and the country of one of the most capable politicians.

The charge is that Laws, the newly appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury and one of those rare politicians who is respected by all sides of Parliament, defrauded the taxpayer by claiming up to £950 a month in rent to live in a property that is owned by a man who happens to be his lover.

Laws, who says that he had not told family and friends that he is gay, has thus been outed by a petty newspaper for the sin of paying taxpayers' money to his partner.

But what is wrong with that as long as he paid a fair market rate? In fact, Laws probably paid a lot less. I was paying £1,000 a month seven years ago for a one-bed flat in Greenwich, a lot farther from Parliament than Kennington. Laws around that time was paying his partner £750. You can find flats in Kennington for less than £950 a month, but why should MPs have to live in the scuzziest properties?

The fact is that MPs who do not have a London constituency were last year entitled to claim up to £2,000 a month in rent or mortgage relief. Laws, by claiming less than half that, has saved us all money. Shouldn't we be praising him? Sounds like the ideal quality in a man responsible for reducing the national deficit.

Whatchoo campaignin' about...

Sad news (well, in a "meh" sort of way) from the US where Gary Coleman, midget TV star, has died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 42. Thus continues the curse of the child stars in Diff'rent Strokes, the 1980s sitcom in which Coleman had Americans in stitches by repeatedly asking people what they were talking about.

Dana Plato, who played Kimberley in the series, did softcore porn, armed robbery and then committed suicide in 1999, Todd "Willis" Bridges was arrested in 1994 for ramming someone with his car and became a druggie and Coleman had to sue his parents to get the money he earned from the show and had various well-publicised run-ins with the law.

What I found most interesting about Coleman - apart from discovering there was an episode in which a paedophile tried to groom Willis and Arnold (now those really were different strokes) - is that he had run for Governor of California back in 2003 and came eighth... out of 135 candidates.

Yes, 135 names were on the ballot paper for one election. Well, only 107 because 28 names were written in by people in the polling booth. But even so: more than a hundred people stood to be Governor, paying a non-refundable deposit of $3,500 each for the privilege, and 71 of them persuaded at least 1,000 people to put an X next to their name. Not just a few mates, a thousand.

Among the names on the ballot paper we can see teachers, engineers, an "adult film actress", a "retired meat packer" and a "middleweight sumo wrestler". There is a Michael Jackson (not that one, but a satellite project manager who got 746 votes - not many were fooled then), a Bob Dole (a small-business owner who got 273 votes) and an Edward Kennedy (educator and businessman, 3,007 votes).

What a great demonstration of democracy. Or what a bunch of nutters, I'm not sure which I think.

Either way, little Arnold from Diff'rent Strokes outpolled most of them, getting 14,242 votes, a mere 4.2 million behind big Arnold from The Terminator. If only his parents hadn't spent all his money, how far could Coleman have gone in politics?

Canon and bawl

An amusing typo in Metro's review of the Globe Theatre's production of Henry VIII this morning:

"The last time [they staged the play] a spark from a canon caught the thatched roof and the entire building burned down."

At least I assume it was a typo, with one "n" eliminated from cannon. Maybe, given the subject matter, it really was a spark from a burning cleric.

A load of bull

What a fabulous picture this is of the shock result in Friday night's big Madrid bullfight.

Julio Aparicio, a 41-year-old matador, takes defeat by his taurine foe on the chin. And, indeed, through the chin. It's a man's sport is bullfighting.

Except it isn't, really, because the odds are hugely weighted in the matador's favour. Six bulls are killed in an average night's entertainment, about 10,000 a year in total.

The last time a Spanish matador died from a goring was back in 1985. Signor Aparicio is reportedly recovering well in hospital.

I've never been to a bullfight but would love to one day. I imagine as a theatrical spectacle, rather than sport, it is gripping and strangely beautiful. Some call it barbaric, but the beasts are treated with respect and dispatched with dignity. And it's great when one of them gets their own back.

Which reminds me of a joke...

A man was on holiday in Andalucia and found himself at dinner one night sitting next to a couple who had been served the most delicious-smelling stew.

Inquiring of the waiter what was in the dish, he was told that it was a regional speciality. "During bullfighting season, we take the testicles of the defeated bulls," the waiter says. "We fry them in garlic and oil and then add chillis, tomatoes, peppers and a good slug of sherry. It is very popular at this time of year."

Intrigued, the guest asks for a portion but is told that there are no testicles left. "But there is a fight tomorrow afternoon, sir," the waiter says. "Come back in the evening and I'm sure we will have a fresh supply."

The man returns the next day, orders the special and is delighted to be served a bowl of the delicious stew, which he wolfs down. But when the waiter asks for his opinion, he has one small quibble.

"I thought the testicles looked rather larger in the stew you were serving yesterday," he says.

"Well sir," the waiter replies. "Some days the bull wins."

Go and be democratic elsewhere

Boris Johnson is quite right to seek High Court permission to evict the anti-everything protestors from Parliament Square. Everyone has a right to protest, but the so-called Democracy Village camp, which has grown dramatically in the past few weeks, has become an eyesore and is destroying a World Heritage Site.

Parliament Square is owned by the Greater London Authority and, being taxpayer-funded, is supposed to be an open space for all of us to wander in. It is not a campsite or a squat. Those who have set up permanent base there are trespassing and they should be moved on. This wouldn't be tolerated in Trafalgar Square or outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Once he has finished with the protestors, can Mayor Boris also get those hideous security bollards removed outside Parliament too? They are just as much of an eyesore, if rather less smelly.

Burnham shows backbone

What a very odd photo accompanied Andy Burnham's pitch for Labour leader last week.

Never mind the mad eyes and the clenched fist (has he just won a game of scissors-paper-stone against Ed Balls's scissors?), but why is there what appears to be a spinal column hanging from a peg in the corner?

What message is Burnham hoping to send? "I've got backbone?" Or maybe "I've had my backbone removed."

Perhaps he is demonstrating what will happen to people who cross him. And why is the spine hanging the wrong way up? The key message that seems to come across: "What a silly coccyx."

At least we're good at something

Every country needs something to be proud about, something that they can definitively say they are the best in the world at doing. So this map is quite useful.

Take a bow Nepal, No 1 for mustard seeds. Well done Iran, the world's top suppliers of pistachios. Way to go Mali with your fertility rates and Somalia, the best employer of pirates on the planet. Cuba has more doctors. Canada has more fruit juice drinkers. And no one does rubber gloves like the Malaysians.

What about the wealthier countries? Oh chortle: America is the No 1 place for serial killers. Australia is the place to go for the best chance of getting your car stolen.

And Britain... well apparently we're No 1 for CCTV. Yep, the country that gave the world George Orwell turns out to be pretty tip-top at spying on its citizens. I'm so proud.

Which gives an excuse to use this splendid photo I saw on Dizzy's website.

The new face of London

Sports mascots are like tuberculosis injections. They are designed by adults for the benefit of the children, who never asked for them. Supposed to be a shot in the arm, they just leave the target audience feeling a little queasy and confused.

Sports mascots are meant to be crap and the two launched yesterday to promote the 2012 Olympics fitted the bill. One blue, one orange, both one-eyed, slightly lovable yet slightly sinister.

Yes, meet Dave and Nick, the new face of the Olympics.

Actually, these mascots have rather cool names: Wenlock and Mandeville. So much more classy than Whizzo or Flubble or whatever other previous Olympic mascots were called.

Not only do they pay homage to the origins of the Olympics - the Much Wenlock games in Shropshire inspired Baron de Coubertin to create the Olympics, while the Paralympics were born at Stoke Mandeville - but they sound like proper names from English literature.

You can imagine a Mr Wenlock owning a dingy inn in a Dickens novel or perhaps a Squire Mandeville being caddish to milkmaids in something by Thomas Hardy.

The last decent sports mascot was World Cup Willie in 1966, but he was basically a lion in a Union Jack waistcoat. Nowadays mascots always have to look unearthly, like an anaemic Teletubby.

Still at least Mandeville and Wenlock are better than the 2012 Olympic logo, which I can never see without thinking of the judgment of my boss when it was unveiled a few years ago: "Looks a bit like Lisa Simpson performing oral sex."

Byrne notice

After Liam Byrne's blunt note of advice to his successor as Chief Secretary of the Treasury - "I'm afraid there's no money. Good luck!" - the Vole has been sniffing through the archives and found some other unhelpful valedictories.

"To whichever wench is next: Henry is quite demanding. Try not to lose your head under pressure"
- Anne Boleyn

"Hope you can speak Russian. Tell the new guys they won't need to walk Blondi."
- Adolf Hitler

"Dear Colly, Try and keep one eye on the French and one eye on the Spanish. Be warned: Hardy doesn't put out."
- Horatio Nelson

"All yours. Felt a slight bump a while back but everything seems ok. Probably just a whale. I'm turning in for the night."
- Anonymous look-out on RMS Titanic

"Barry! God are you lucky: the economy is shooting ahead and the Taleban have disappeared. Or is it the economy that has disappeared and the Taleban doing the shooting? I can't remember. Ask Dick if you get stuck. By the way: never trust a pretzel."
- George W Bush

Miliband v Miliband... to the death

So who is your favourite Miliband? David? Ed? Daddy Ralph, the noted sociologist?

Personally, my favourite is the Steve Miller Band. "Some people call me the space cowboy..."

Now that Ed has said that he will stand against David for the leadership of the Labour Party, constitutional experts and historians have been thumbing through the party records to find how to settle a brother-on-brother election. Normal rules are thrown out of the window, a straightforward ballot would be too awkward, debates would just be weird. Fortunately Labour Party history reveals plenty of precedents...

* Man-on-man wrestling. Naked. In a barn at midnight, lit only by torches. It's how Keir Hardie claimed the leadership over his brother Kevin. Many felt that Keir's bollock-twisting maneouvre was rather ungentlemanly - you wouldn't get that in a Tory naked wrestling leadership contest - but it proved the difference. Kevin's balls never forgave Keir.

* Cutting cards. It's a little-known fact that George Lansbury won the Labour leadership from his brother Harry in 1932 in a game of chance. Winner got to shout in vain at Stanley Baldwin twice a week, loser had his entry removed from Wikipedia (go and look: no Harry Lansbury). The first cutting of the cards ended in a row when they realised that no one had ruled whether Aces were high. On the second, Harry thought he had won with a ten, but George drew the Queen of Hearts and thus became Labour leader. George Lansbury went on to be more famous as the grandfather of both Angela "Murder She Wrote" Lansbury and Oliver Postgate, the creator of Bagpuss. No joke.

* Deed poll. They both can do it (at different times) but only under the same name. Ed needs to change his name to David or vice versa. Or they could both change their name to Mavis Figworthy. It's what happened with Arthur Henderson, who was Labour leader three times, from 1908-1910, 1914-1917 and 1930-32. The first time it really was him. The second time it was his brother Nigel, who had changed his name to Arthur. The third time it was Winston Churchill, who was just desperate for power. People wonder what Churchill did during his Wilderness Years between 1929 and 1939: the answer is he ran the Labour Party.
==

Incidentally, on the subject of name-changing, I learnt from looking at Papa Miliband's Wikipedia entry that his real first name was Adolphe, but as a Polish Jew didn't find life all that great in 1930s Continental Europe and fled to London, where he changed his name to Ralph.

I wonder how many other Adolphes changed their name through a desire not to be confused with Hitler. You never hear anyone called Adolphe or Adolf these days. Except for Dolph Lundgren, of course, who actually changed his name from Hans.

Welcome home

A typically superb observation by Beau Bo D'Or

Don't forget the celebrities

I do hope the Lib Dems argue for peerages and government posts for their celebrity endorsers.

John Cleese to be Minister for Silly Walks! Daniel Radcliffe to be Minister of Magic! Floella Benjamin to be Minister for Housing and Bears (only houses with round windows and square windows will be considered)!

How will it all work?

Day 1 of a new Government and the sun is shining, there was hardly any traffic on the roads as I drove to work, England are in the semi-finals of a cricket tournament and all is right with the world.

The only question is: how on earth will this coalition with the Lib Dems actually work?

Some of it will become clear as the day goes on, but a lot of the logistics will have to be thought up on the hoof. Here are eight questions that worry me:

1) Will Nick Clegg get to question David Cameron at Prime Minister's Questions? He was able to ask Gordon Brown two questions a week, now will the Lib Dems get no opportunity to criticise the Tories?

2) When Cameron is away, Clegg as Deputy PM will be at the despatch box for PMQs but how wholeheartedly will he defend Tory policy that he doesn't really agree with? Expect many of the Labour questions when Clegg does PMQs to be about Europe and defence. And will senior Tories decide to attack Clegg while their master is absent?

3) What will happen at by-elections? Presumably both parties will field candidates and they will fight on slightly different platforms yet both will effectively be campaigning to join the Government.

4) What will happen to the Lib Dem quota on Question Time or Any Questions? They are entitled to appear on five out of every seven programmes at present. Will that go up or down and how much attacking of the Tory panelists will they do?

5) What happens when MPs die or defect? If 19 seats move (maybe some Lib Dems would consider defecting to the Tories if they enjoy life in Government), the Tories wouldn't need their partners any more.

6) Where, physically, will they all sit? Although there are 650 MPs, there are only about 430 seats for them, which means that if the entire Tory Party sits on the Government benches, there will be room for only half a dozen Lib Dems. Do Tories get seating rights over the Liberals or is that divided proportionately?

7) Will all jokes about quiche-eating beardies and fox-hunting toffs be banned?

8) What do we call this coalition? Conservacrats? Conliberalives? Democons?

The Vole: asking all the key questions

The view from within

The twelfth Prime Minister in the reign of Elizabeth II enters his new home.

Things are going to be a bit different for the Cameron family from now on. Wonder how often he will be photographed going for a jog or a cycle without a full security detail?

Dignity matched with dignity

A classy beginning to his first speech as Prime Minister by David Cameron:

"Compared with a decade ago this country is more open at home and more compassionate abroad. On behalf of the whole country, I would like to pay tribute to the outgoing Prime Minister for his long record of public service."

In Gordon Brown's farewell and Cameron's hello, we have seen two statesman acting with grace and dignity. Such a change from the Blairs' departure and all that "tah-rah, we won't miss you" chippiness.

Early steps

So what should be David Cameron's first task as Prime Minister when he returns to Downing Street?

Personally, I'd order a curry, find an iPod docking station and put Whatever by Oasis on at full volume, but I guess Cameron will want to start appointing Cabinet ministers and taking phone calls from Washington and Berlin.

Might be useful to find out where the nuclear button is too. You know, just in case the French go weird.

Thank you and goodbye

Just watched Gordon Brown make his resignation statement outside Downing Street with a slight tear in my eye. I am no fan of the man, his party or his policies, but in his brief statement of farewell he spoke with a dignity befitting a man of great principle and honour. I'm a sucker for a politician who praises his wife and children, too. Not everyone can carry it off with sincerity.

As if to remind us of the calibre of statesman who has just left the stage, Channel 4 News cuts to John Prescott for a eulogy, who says he has got his battle bus warmed up ready to fight the Tories in another election. Hard to see either Prezza or Blair leaving with similar gravitas or decency.

Quote of the day from John Snow on Channel 4: "If the Queen really does watch Coronation Street - and they say she does - she will be postponing it tonight."

And on and on and on...

So Gordon Brown is resigning as Labour leader and hopes that this will help his party to reach a coalition with the Lib Dems. But he also says his replacement as leader will not be in place until the party conference in late September. Does that mean that Brown thinks he will carry on as Prime Minister until then?

He is like one of those dinner party guests who won't leave even when the dishes have been cleaned away, the cat put out for the night and the host is removing his trousers for bed.

If the Lib Dems really want to strike up an arrangement with a Brown-free Labour party then that is their own business, but it is ridiculous that a man who they cannot deal with should be answering questions as PM and driving through legislation before then. The only sensible solutions would be for a temporary Labour PM to be appointed by the Queen (Harriet Harman??) or for Nick Clegg to serve as Prime Minister on the understanding it is as caretaker until the leader of the majority party in their weird little romance is chosen.

70 years on: a day that changed the world

The party leaders attended the ceremony at the Cenotaph on Saturday, marking the 65th anniversary of VE Day, which gave photographers a chance to get the necessary photo of Nick Clegg and David Cameron looking in the opposite direction to Gordon Brown (I presume the Daily Mirror managed to find a snap of Clegg and Brown looking away from Cameron).

With three exceptions, the veterans of the First World War have all now passed and those who fought in the Second World War are also fading away. The 200 or so veterans who attended the Cenotaph are now pushing 90. Many will not be there for the next major anniversary. It is right that political arguments in the present are put aside to pay respect to those who fought and died for our democracy.

Yet today marks another, more significant, anniversary in our national story. It was 70 years ago that Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister, replaced by Winston Churchill, and Britain was governed by a coalition Cabinet.

It was the perfect meeting of man and moment. On the same day that Churchill, the former maverick outsider, was received by George VI at Buckingham Palace, Germany began its onslaught on France and the first bombs started to fall on England. The greatest test of Britain's unity began.

Hitler had planned his attack to take advantage of the political crisis in Britain but Chamberlain, who had resigned after losing a vote of confidence in the Commons, said: "If he has counted upon our internal divisions to help him he has miscalculated the mind of this people."

Churchill's initial War Cabinet consisted of three Conservatives (himself, Chamberlain and Lord Halifax) and two Labour MPs (Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood). As the war progressed, the Cabinet expanded but remained balanced. For every Anthony Eden there was an Ernest Bevin or Stafford Cripps.

Those remarkable men faced remarkable times, of course, and the current situation requires a coalition for the expedience of governing rather than to present a united front to the world and the country. But the lesson of Churchill's Cabinet suggests that reasonable men with the same basic objectives can work together regardless of their party backgrounds.

Of course, another lesson for David Cameron is that once the coalition broke up at the end of the war, the supposed junior partners from Labour ousted him from power.

There go the girls

Iain Martin makes the astute spot that a Con-Lib coalition could result in the first woman-free Cabinet for 18 years.

There are no female Lib Dems involved in the coalition talks and it is hard to see any of their seven woman MPs - down from nine before the election - pushing for a seat in a combined Cabinet.

But if the Lib Dems do strike a deal where they take three or four Cabinet posts, it could bump a couple of Tory women out. Theresa Villiers must be particularly vulnerable as transport, the role she handled in opposition, has been identified as one brief that the Tories might give up.

Theresa May and Caroline Spelman could also be under threat, although there are a few male Cabinet colleagues that I'm sure David Cameron wouldn't mind an excuse to lose. Surely he would be too savvy to leave himself open to accusations of sexism.

It is a travesty that in the 81 years since Margaret Bondfield became the first woman to hold a Cabinet post, only 27 women have followed in her steps.

Tories have a pretty bad record at elevating women to the Cabinet. Virginia Bottomley and Gillian Shepherd served in John Major's Cabinet from 1992-97, but for the first two years of Major's premiership there were no women.

And while the Conservatives are rightly proud of producing the country's only female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was hardly supportive of the sisterhood. Her only female Cabinet minister was Baroness Young, who led the party in the Lords for only two years.

Perhaps future Tory Cabinets will be more enlightened. Gradually the talent pool is growing, with 48 Tory women elected last week, up from 18. The more there are, the more good ones will emerge and, one hopes, get the tap on the shoulder.

Gordon Brown's last (we assume last) Cabinet had four women in it - Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell, Yvette Cooper and Baroness Royall. This was half the number that Tony Blair had in his Cabinet at the peak, with 15 women being given a Cabinet post during Blair's ten years as PM.

The overall number of women MPs has gone up from 126 last week to 141, with the likelihood that Anne McIntosh will win the held-over Thirsk and Malton election on May 27. But that increase of 16 is some way short of the 40 extra women MPs that the Centre for Women and Democracy envisaged in a report before the election.

Labour's contingent of women MPs fell from 94 to 81 last week, but as a proportion of their overall intake it rose to 31 per cent. The Tories are improving, but Labour remains the best place for a girl to get ahead.

Chopperholics

Sitting in the Pavilion at the Oval today, watching Surrey play Bangladesh, I saw two helicopters hovering in the distance, roughly over Downing Street. Then a third came zooming overhead to join them. Something seemed to be up.

I called my wife, who works in Westminster, to ask whether the moment had finally come. Was Gordon Brown heading to Buckingham Palace to hand in his resignation?

No. Apparently those three helicopters were there to capture the moment when Brown drove back to Downing Street after a day in Scotland. Thrilling, but surely a story that could be covered adequately from the ground. And with helicopters costing about £500 an hour to hire, it seems an extravagant use of money for the broadcasters each to need their own.

Presumably these three helicopters are on permanent stand-by for that moment when smoke emerges from the roof of the Cabinet Office to herald the selection of a new Government and staff at Buckingham Palace are asked to put the kettle on for when the new PM calls by.

I can understand the desire to capture that historic drive from the air (left out of Downing Street, up Whitehall, left at Trafalgar Square, under Admiralty Arch and down the Mall), but it must be expensive to keep three newscopters and their pilots hanging around in a hangar somewhere near the M25, waiting for Nick Clegg and David Cameron to cut a deal.

Never mind the ballots: it's election night

"You know," Richard said at around 5am this morning. "For the most exciting election of our lifetimes, this is incredibly dull."

He had a point. No high-profile MPs lost their jobs - Richard left after Ed Balls kept his seat muttering something about being thrilled that he could tell his grandchildren that he had stayed up for Lembit Opik, although Jacqui Smith and Charles Clarke went within five minutes of him going - and very little churlishness by the beaten as we had from David Mellor and others in 1997.

Joanne Cash was horrid, blaming her defeat on the media for focusing on her friendship with "Dave", and Balls was pretty pathetic to have a rant at Michael Ashcroft after he had suffered a 9 per cent swing against him, but I didn't expect anything better from him. To Balls's credit, he did praise his Tory opponent graciously.

The BBC's coverage was quite poor, too. Jeremy Vine has done a couple of these now and he really is no Peter Snow. The Swingometer was meaningless and used badly this year and we ended up turning over to ITV in the end because they were better at trying to extrapolate what Parliament might become once a decent sample of votes arrived. ITV also, for some reason, tended to be about 40 declared seats ahead of the BBC.

One last BBC rant: how much of the licence fee was spent on that ship of fools moored by the London Eye? Who really thought that the first talking heads we wanted to hear from after the exit polls were Bruce Forsyth and Ben Kingsley? Did Joan Collins say anything coherent (and why is she so loved as a writer by the right-wing press)?

Other thoughts on election night:

• You actually can order too much curry. I never thought that possible.
• As I get older, I have less enthusiasm for drinking heavily.
• Miriam Clegg (sorry, Gonzalez Durantez) really is quite sexy
• That's about all the good news for the Lib Dems who had a shocking night
• All the fuss about people not being able to vote filled the opening hours quite well, but I did find myself wondering why they hadn't managed to visit their polling station in the previous 14 hours
• Why did the Prime Minister fly back to London on what looked like a budget airline? Surely no one would begrudge him a Hercules.
• It is perfectly justifiable to ask for a recount in a close seat. It is bordering on ridiculous to ask for five recounts when your opponent has been 1,000 votes ahead in each one, as the Tories did in Edgbaston
• David Dimbleby is still good, but he is showing his age. He started to look - and act - really tired halfway through the broadcast
• Emily Maitlis is very good and underused.
• A few friends and former colleagues from my days in Westminster are now MPs. Many congratulations to Steve Brine, Penny Mordaunt, Paul Maynard, Kwasi Kwarteng, Damian Hinds, Gavin Barwell, Karl McCartney, Priti Patel and Rebecca Harris and bad luck to Chris Philp for pushing Glenda Jackson so close. I feel very envious and slightly inadequate just to be a mere hack. 

Celebs in the polling booth

I made a Labour teller's day when I cast my vote this morning.

"Has Glenda been down yet?" I asked.

"Glenda who?"

"Glenda Jackson, she lives just up the road. I'm sure she'll be down to vote soon."

At which a huge beam spread over the face of the lady with the red rosette. "Oh that will make sitting here worth while," she said. Always happy to make someone smile, even a Labour supporter.

Jackson is probably the most famous local resident in Blackheath. Jools Holland lives nearby but I think is in the Greenwich constituency and there is also supposedly Terry Waite, the former hostage and Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy, but he is never seen around the village despite an Indian restaurant boasting on its menu that one curry is "Terry Waite's favourite". Well anything must taste better than Beirut's finest slops.

I met Jackson in the pollling station five years ago. The double-Oscar-winner-turned-MP lives a couple of streets away from me (albeit in a far grander house, as befits a socialist), on the other side of London to her Highgate constituency.

"Morning," I said flashing a smile. "Who did you vote for then?"

The sour-faced old sow just scowled. If she was that grumpy when Labour were winning an election, it is probably just as well that our paths didn't cross this morning.

Decision day

Off to vote shortly. But for whom?

In general terms, the Conservatives have won me over. I think David Cameron would be the best prime minister of the options on offer. William Hague would be the best foreign secretary. Ken Clarke would be best at business (and best as Chancellor but Boy George has that sewn up), Michael Gove the best at education, Jeremy Hunt at culture, Liam Fox at defence (the last slightly by default). No one has a better option for Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster than Francis Maude.

And as for the economy, health, transport, home affairs... well they aren't really important issues, are they?

The trouble is that I think that an MP, as my representative (not, please, my servant), should be worth supporting for his own merits and I am not sure that my local Tory candidate is that impressive.

As well as his election literature being vague, bland and undetailed, he also seems to have a tenuous relationship with the English language. His website says that he "advises Local Council's". The capital letters are bad enough, the apostrophe unforgiveable. And then there is the policy section: he will stand up for "common sence", apparently. Sigh...

Not that the party as a whole is innocent of assaults on our language. There is the countrywide poster pledging national service for "16 year-olds". What, only 16 of them? And how good would infants be at national service?

Hmm, maybe Gove has a tougher job at education than I thought.

So if not our local Tory, who do I support? The Lib Dems have tried hardest here - they even brought Nick Clegg to our village on Monday - and their candidate seems a decent fellow, although he overuses the exclamation mark in his election literature. I don't agree with his policies but as this is a Labour stronghold, should I not just register a protest vote?

As for our Labour candidate, she is called Heidi but makes no mention in her literature of having spent her childhood living up a mountain with her grandfather. Can we really trust her on anything else?

Ho hum, decisions decisions...

Defenestration strategy

Almost time for "curry and Dimbleby night" chez Vole. Election nights are always something of an endurance sport but well worth staying up late to watch, especially on transition nights like this year when a few famous names are in the stocks ready for a pelting.

In 1997, seven members of the Cabinet lost their seats as the Conservatives suffered a meltdown. Michael Portillo (Defence), Malcolm Rifkind (Foreign), Ian Lang (Trade), Michael Forsyth (Scotland), William Waldegrave (Chief Secretary), Tony Newton (Leader of the House) and Roger Freeman (Duchy of Lancaster) were all sent packing, as well as notable former Cabinet ministers such as Norman Lamont and David Mellor. Not only out of office but out of a job as well.

I wonder how many members of the Labour Cabinet will be looking for new work come Friday morning. Some are in vulnerable seats, but it is hard to see more than a couple being chopped. With 100 Labour MPs deciding to stand down rather than face the electorate, opportunities for high-level scalps will be more limited than they were in 1997. The Hoons, Hewitts, Byers and Kellys of this world have left the stage early.

Here, though, is the Questing Vole's guide, with the help of the PA timetable of declaration times, of when you can expect to see "a Portillo moment" and when it is safe to go to bed.

• 10pm Polls close
• 11pm First announcement expected from Houghton and Sunderland South (Labour stronghold)
• 12.45am Gisela Stuart was one of the early successes for Labour in 1997, but her Birmingham Edgbaston seat is vulnerable this time with a majority of 1,500.
• 2am Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) is rated as only 50% likely to hold on to his seat, with the Conservatives the main challengers. Charles Clarke (Norwich South) has a majority of 3,653 and is expected to lose to the Lib Dems. Jack Straw (Blackburn) has been invisible this campaign. Has he been working hard to cling on to his 8,000-seat majority? It would take quite a swing and boundary changes have helped him. Chris Huhne (Eastleigh) would be a big loss for the Lib Dems. His majority is just over 1% but the polls are pushing his way.
• 2.30am Jim Murphy (Renfrewshire East) has a majority of 6,500 but the Tories are expected to oust the Scotland Secretary in what has become a two-horse race. In Oxford East, Andrew Smith, the former Work and Pensions Secretary, is expected to lose to the Lib Dems
• 3am This is the one we all want to see: Ed Balls (Morley and Outwood) has a notional majority of 8,669 in this new constituency, but momentum is swinging away from him. Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) has a majority of 10,000 but could go in a landslide. The Tories won't be gloating, though, if Oliver Letwin (Dorset West) loses his wafer-thin majority over the Lib Dems. This is also when we will find out how much of the vote Esther Rantzen has won in Luton South on an anti-sleaze ticket.
• 3.30am Not a Cabinet post, but an interesting seat nonetheless. Brighton Pavilion has a Labour majority of under 6,000 but became a three-way marginal. Now the Greens think they can win it.
• 4am John Denham (Southampton Itchen) has an interesting battle. If enough Lib Dems back the Tories, his 8,000-seat majority could be vulnerable on a bad night. Nick Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East) has a majority of under 7,000 and is being pushed hard by the Lib Dems. Alastair Darling (Edinburgh South West) has a 60% chance of holding his seat but if things are going very badly...
• Also at 4am In Poplar and Limehouse, George Galloway's decision to stand for the Respect party could cost Jim Fitzpatrick a seat that should be Labour heartlands. The Tories have a 7% lead over Labour in the polls there and Respect are taking 9%. Speaking of loony candidates, Nick Griffin will find out if he has won Barking for the BNP around now
• Also also at 4am: Derby North is statistically interesting. It is the Tories Target Seat No 130 and is the one they need if they are to get an overall majority.
• 5am The former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (Redditch) will have more time to spend with her husband's porn collection with her majority of under 3,000 in severe threat
• 5.30am What could be a good night for the Lib Dems will be spoilt a little if Sarah Teather loses Brent Central. She is neck and neck with Dawn Butler (Lab) in this super-marginal. Will we all still be awake, though?

A polite protest

I felt very proud to be English when I read the story today of the polite button-pushing protestors of Dorset.

The villagers of Chideock were fed up with the volume of traffic that goes along the High Street - much of it directed by sat-navs that seem to think the A35 is a decent alternative to the A303 (I've driven both: it isn't) - and so finally took action into their own hands.

The council installed a button-controlled pedestrian crossing on the main road, so the locals decided to man that crossing, pressing and repressing the button so that the lights would change constantly, bringing traffic to a regular halt.

Their action yesterday caused a seven-mile tailback of angry motorists. The villagers say they will carry on pushing the crossing button until the council agree to build a bypass. Or, presumably, until the council takes the crossing away.

Of course, this story is only charming if you don't have to use that stretch of the A35 to go to work or pick up children or any other essential business. The locals wanted to protest against juggernauts thundering through their village, but everyone will end up suffering.

Then again it is a very civilised and polite form of protest. So much more dignified than those stroppy Greeks with their firebombs and riots.