Cameron taking diplomacy tips from Prince Philip

Barely a day goes past without David Cameron being accused of making a fresh foreign policy gaffe. First there was the one about America being involved in the Second World War in 1940 (a more heinous error than any, I feel, given that he has a first in history from Oxford); then there was the comment about Gaza being a prison camp and the one about Pakistan exporting terror and, most recently, telling everyone that Iran has a nuclear bomb.

I'm only disappointed that he hasn't yet had a pop at the French.

Or, indeed, that while he was criticising the Pakistan security services for their failure to quash terrorism, he did not also mention the money given by Americans to fund the IRA. In any case, the Pakistan gaffe now seems irrelevant in the light of the tragic flooding that has killed so many in their country.

But now, the Daily Mash has revealed the reason: Cameron has been taking advice from Prince Philip on how to speak to foreigners.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "Shortly after taking office, the Prime Minister was briefed by the Duke of Edinburgh on the four basic, untrustworthy foreign types: dagoes, golliwogs, slitty-eyed devils and what His Royal Highness called the 'Olive-Skinned Fez Brigade'. The Prime Minister was given a bullet-point rundown on the key characteristics of each one, including thievery, violence, general laziness and surly ingratitude."

(Unnecessary taste rider: The Daily Mash is a British version of The Onion that satirises the news, often more miss than hit. Any humour expressed is at the expense of the PM and the DoE, rather than mocking foreigners. Except the French.)

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...

==

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.