Lawslot

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2008 on BBC2 all this week is unmissable. This year there is a new attraction, Alan Titchmarsh’s quite extraordinary facial topiary. What he was thinking when shaving his sideburns can only be imagined.

I was rather taken aback reading Anne McElvoy’s Diary in this week’s Spectator. Apparently ‘You’re a star!’ is to be avoided as “an apparent compliment but with the undertone of addressing a slightly simple housemaid”. Leaving aside the fact that I do not have a housemaid, simple or otherwise, it is a comment I used only recently to my secretary at work (I suppose the modern day equivalent of the housemaid). Let’s hope she doesn’t read The Spectator.

A snippet on the Radio 3 news this morning (which is not yet up on the BBC News website), about coastal erosion. Apparently this is happening and, according to “environmentalists”, the government should do something about it. Quite what we weren’t told. If they still taught history properly in schools we would be spared this sort of story!

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.