Dietary requirements

Tim Rice confides in his Diary in this week’s Spectator that whenever he gets a form asking for his dietary requirements, he always put “large helpings”, which request, he says, is unfortunately (but quite correctly) rarely acted upon. I usually put “Summer Pudding”, with much the same result.

Bhutto: a (yet) more detached view

In John McNaughten’s blog, Memex 1.1 http://memex.naughtons.org/, an interesting excerpt from a piece by David Warren on Canada.com about Benazir Bhutto.

My abiding memory of Benazir (I too was an exact contemporary at Oxford) was our first meeting: she was wearing pink hotpants and stretched out on the floor of a close friend of mine, eating Turkish Delight. McNaughten’s summary, “attractive, rich and petulant” is accurate to a point; Benazir was also great fun. It was that girl I remembered when I heard the news of her death, not what she became.

Whither Hillary?

An interesting post in Coffee House (The Spectator’s blog) this morning by James Forsyth: Is there a way for Hillary to recover from this defeat? His view is that there are only “two things that spring to mind that could revive the Hillary campaign, but both are out of her hands. One is a game changing gaffe by Obama. The other is an event that makes Americans want a president who is above all, tough.” The latter he believes is something that worries the Obama camp. My take is that although Hillary (and Bill) are and should be worried, we shouldn’t be. Four (or worse eight) more years of a Clinton in the White House is a dreadful prospect: bring on the young!

George MacDonald Fraser: Home at last

“The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry river-bed in the dry belt, somewhere near Meiktila.” So starts George MacDonald Fraser’s Recollection of the War in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here. Although he will be remembered more for Harry Flashman , if you haven’t read this memoir, you should. It is not just a classic of military autobiography, but a very moving account of war seen through the eyes of a young man.

Why DEFRA is a five letter word

I have no idea why Hilary Benn seemed surprised that his senior civil servants at DEFRA have been pondering why Britain has an agricultural industry, and whether they can close it down. Clearly he hasn’t been exposed to them for long enough. Rural Britain knows that DEFRA is a hopeless basket case. Public servants? You must be joking.