GAZA FLOTILLA: Am I the only one asking ‘what was on the ship?’

What any objective observer of these most recent Middle Eastern
events should want to see is evidence

Benjamin Netanyahu has tonight claimed that Israel “wants to see humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza…..but not weapons and missiles that can be used against our civilians”.

That seems fair enough. It’s just that I’ve been watching the news coverage of this series of events all evening, and I’m left asking one blindingly obvious thing: what cargo was on board the flotilla that Israel attacked?

I’m too long in the tooth now to be taken in by Palestinian protests of total innocence, and accusations of unprovoked Israeli aggression. I’m sorry, but I refuse to see Israel as the fount of all evil, and wicked instigators of aggression in the Middle East. Israel does not, after all, have delusions of imperial grandeur in the region. Israel does not want to see any Arab nation ‘wiped from the surface of the Earth’. Israel is a democracy, with proper elections that aren’t fixed – and then awarded to security chiefs. Israel has a thriving economy – as opposed to an anarchy of rifles being fired in the air, or an economy being sacrificed to the aim of producing atomic missiles to be used in support of Islamism’s crazy, misogynist principles. Israel does not have any international terrorist organisations harboured within its borders.

So all I want to ask is one thing: can we please get a UN force to board the flotillas and search them thoroughly? Then at least we will know whether Israel has committed an act of international piracy…or, as so often during its troubled history, merely a desperate act of self-defence.

And yet, and yet – I see the reactions of everyone over here – William Hague, The Independent, The Guardian, and the endlessly demonstrating masses we seem to allow into Britain – then I feel impelled to ask three further questions: if you could choose to have one neighbour on your border as a sovereign State, which would you rather have – Iran or Israel? If you could choose the ruling body of that State, what would it be – Hamas or the Knesset? How would we in Britain like it if the French lobbed scud missiles into the Home Counties day in, day out – and then 25 EU States took their side when we chose to search French vessels crossing the Channel?

These are all reasonable questions. Why can’t we apply it our judgement of heroes and villains in the Middle East?

NOSTALGIA: The Labour-saving Device

The 1950s Ideal Home Exhibition was the ancestral home
of the gadget

The first Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition took place in 1950, and after a few years there was a northern version based in Manchester. As a local cloth merchant of some standing by then, dad used to get preview tickets. My plan most years was to find an excuse for not going, but mum revelled in the futurama laid before her each year: for people moving up, by 1957 the Exhibition had become a recgonised aperture into that future.

Nothing gave a better view of quite how amusingly imperfect the future was going to be than the labour-saving gadget. But at the time, such innovations weren’t seen like that at all: every new way of doing things was seen as progress. After all, if DDT could mean that the boll weevil was doomed, then anything was possible.

The first of these inventions with which mum returned home was an electric potato-peeler. At the time, peel was seen not as the main nutritional value of potatoes,but rather a useless and dirty packaging format which had to be removed before your pomme de terre was fit to be put on any hungry husband’s plate at 6.01 pm.

The electric potato peeler consisted of a large plastic Wall of Death thing which took up most of the kitchen work surface. Inside this bowl of technological promise was a heavily pockmarked surface. When you plugged in the device, the spuds were mercilessly chucked about inside, and the peel scratched off by crude friction. The whole process took, oh, less than four hours – and used up a gigawatt of electricity. It gave the subsequently boiled potatoes an odd consistency, and a size a fraction of that of the original raw input. It took mum about six months to finally admit defeat, and put it the infernal thing into a dark cupboard somewhere. By this time, the drains were blocked up with raw mashed potato, but at least we could get back to eating potatoes that didn’t look like obese peas.

Another belter was the ironing board/breakfast bar combo. Mum had seen this demonstrated at the Ideal Home – there must have been a thousand or more demonstrators there every year – and at this particular event (I’d guess it was about 1959) the general view was that the breakfast bar was going to transform everybody’s life. There was no limit to what the breakfast bar might do: tables would become extinct, and a whole new enforced intimacy would be added to morning meals the length and breadth of Britain.

Mum’s triumphal entrance with the dual-purpose ironing and rice krispies consumption surface was a surreal affair. Flatpack was an invention still far away in the real (rather than imagined) future, and so it was a struggle to get the thing through the front door. Dad smiled while describing the task of getting it into our two-tone Zephyr Zodiac, a process that seemed to have involved many hand signals, and the use of very quiet roads.

The next day when I got back from school, mum was ironing in the kitchen – something I’d never seen her do before. The problem with our kitchen at 43 St Margaret’s Road was that it was about thirty yards narrower than the set at the Ideal Home Exhibition, and the first room one encountered after opening the back door. The following morning, the four of us held cereal bowls to our faces in the manner of Chinese coolies eating rice. The smell of damp clothing was overpowering. There was some discussion of blocking up the back door and other structural alterations; but soon the breakfast bar was consigned to the garage, and mum went back to ironing in the boxroom. I think dad made a television cabinet out of it. It was what dads did in those days.

My mother was a model of rational organisation and wonderfully broad mind in most things. She was also a vocal critic of pretension. But gadgets were a mild form of mental illness for her, a little bit of science fiction to be grabbed and sustained in the hope of something better than the grey austerity that had marred her years as a young war mother. It’s hard for anyone in 2010 to understand what this transition from post-war rationing to You’ve Never Had it so Good was like – and getting harder for those who were there to remember – but there’s no doubt that the Daily Mail was onto a winner the minute it invented the Ideal Home Exhibition.

The Teasmaid alarm clock, the solar car, the miracle ice-cream maker, the combo nutmeg grater and corkscrew, and even the yellow lady plastic vinegar sprinkling bottle: all these played their part in a tableau called ‘The future will be better’. Like so many mums of the era, mine bought into this concept lock, stock and rotating buttermilk barrel with attractive mock teak churning-handle feature.

What are we looking forward to now? Well, today’s news choice – picked at random – includes Chinese computers doing twenty-seven trillion things a nano-second, human-built not quite human life, sovereign bankruptcy, babies designed to order, and cameras that can swivel through 360 degrees and observe us 24/7. My mother would have recognised much of it in the works of Orwell and Huxley. I’m not sure it’d give her the same sense of optimism she had in 1955.

BREAKING….NOW GOLDMAN SACHS TO FACE CRIMINAL FRAUD CHARGES

Aussie hedge fund manager Mapley calls Goldman product ‘a fraudulent concoction’.

The federal prosecutors investigating Goldman Sachs are focusing on Timberwolf, the infamously repeated scam cited in US Senate hearings last month.

The probe raises the possibility of criminal charges against the firm, already charged with civil fraud by the SEC.

Investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s office have been interviewing David Mapley at length, the former independent director of an Australian hedge fund. Mapley claims that the firm collapsed shortly after Goldman sold it $100 million of securities in Timberwolf, a rubbishy CDO.

In an interview with The Huffington Post Mapley confirmed having been contacted by the U.S. Attorney’s office. The Aussie brought his complaints about Goldman’s role in the deal to the SEC in December 2007, met with SEC lawyers several times in 2008 and told the Huff he continues to talk to them.

Among the most serious allegations, Mapley claims that Goldman sold Timberwolf securities to the fund at marked-up prices — while Goldman’s trading desk was busy shorting such CDOs tied to toxic subprime mortgage securities.

The Slog said some time back that Blankfein will not survive. This development more or less guarantees that happy outcome.

Associated stories on The Slog: Is Goldman’s O’Neill losing Midas touch?

Slog inside track on ECB Board split vindicated as Weber, Draghi and Stark join bond purchase hawks.

Dark clouds on the horizon for the eurozone
as ECB revolts against political interference.

As exclusively reported here over a fortnight ago, the pro-German hawks on the EU central bank’s board are gaining ground.

Speaking about the (in The Slog’s view insane) sovereign-bond purchase programme, ECB Board member and Bundesbank Head Axel Weber said today, “The policy entails stability risks and must be precisely targeted and limited. In a synchronised statement, Bank of Italy Governor Mario Draghi said in Rome, “These measures will have to be discontinued as quickly as possible, as soon as the markets spontaneously resume trading of the securities of the countries involved”. The Slog also hears from German contacts that the country’s Chief Justices will express misgivings (at least) about the bond-purchases as being unconstitutional under Bundesrepublik law.

The problem remains that spontaneous resumption of securities trading in the region is about as likely to happen as spontaneous combustion in a swimming pool. This somewhat bleak view is shared by Financial Times Germany guru Wolfgang Munchau, a man whose pessimism to date has been right on the money. He points out that none of Italy, Spain or Greece proposes major structural reform. France’s powerful CGT will also resist this, even if Sarkozy doesn’t.

The Slog expects the market-led devaluation of the Euro to continue….but the theory being advanced recently that this will make the debtor EU States more competitive is a pipe-dream: it would have to devalue by so much that banks and politicians would be forced to step in to avoid every non-EU investor treating the Union as radioactive. President Obama’s export plans would also ensure some fairly drastic action from that quarter. And last but not least, an increase in Germany’s budget surplus would simply make the EU’s north/south monetary imbalance that much worse.

The European consumer’s confidence in the economic outlook ‘unexpectedly’ worsened in May, and inflation accelerated less than ‘experts’ forecast, as the euro region’s debt crisis shook markets still further in overnight and early trading. I use the inverted commas advisedly there, as pretty much since the end of 2007, every likelihood has been unexpected – and almost every expert proved wrong.

The bond market yields, lenders and currency dealer sentiments will yo-yo up and down with each day’s spin from governments and bankers, but the unpleasant truth about the eurozone isn’t going to go away: we have another EU summit in June, but individual member governments are already diluting the fairly tepid proposals of the last one.

The simple reality is that the EU is a loose arrangement of members with one quasi-federal currency. Not only was that never going to work, it is exacerbated by out-of-touch control-freak regulators in Brussels. Like many politicians in their own States, the current nature of the European Union is going to be swept away by the speed of events.

Best to be out of the way when that happens.

MPs’ EXPENSES: TELEGRAPH MUST STOP THIS VINDICTIVE CYNICISM NOW.

Our media play a vital role. But the Telegraph’s obsession with the Coalition is yah-boo playground nonsense….and playing with fire.

Brogan….time to call time on bad losers

I think the time has come to give some robust advice to the Brogan/Winnett/Watt expenses axis at the Telegraph.

I don’t know if you’ve been to the Daily Telegraph website of late. I’m there several times a day, because its business coverage is up there with the Guardian and the FT these days. But of late, the site is plastered with articles about CGT. Good God, it witters on, this young whippersnapper Cameron has compromised with Clegg on CGT: how dare he!

Well I’ll tell you why Brogan and friends: because David Cameron is the Prime Minister, and neither you nor Simon Heffer nor even Tammy Winnett are. In the end, you’re members of the Fourth Estate, and I’m afraid your chaps lost. Not only did they lose, but Norman Tebbit is over eighty and it’s time he got off his bike.

Whether you lot think they were right or wrong (and I have grave doubts about that too) this is what 68% of the people out there (according to MORI) say they want, and so that’s that. It’s called democracy, now get over it.

Why does this whole episode – being myself a man far from the fluffy centre of politics – make me as angry as those opening paragraphs suggest? The answer is simple to discern if one is still in possession of the plot: step over the line that separates wannabe power-brokers from real newspapers, and at best the thinking folks will dump you – at worst, you’ll suffer the same fate as the Trade Union movement.

The hypocrisy and double standards involved in the vendetta – which last night moved on to Danny Alexander – was plainly explained in yesterday’s Slog piece about ‘niche’ journalism. Having done Charles Kennedy’s dirty-work for him last week, the Torygraph chooses just now to unleash information it’s had on Alexander for months. Why? In the public interest? Bollocks: it is trying to apply pressure on the Osborne team to tone down the CGT proposals – and it is trying over time to destabilise the elected Government of the United Kingdom.

I need Ben Brogan to explain to me how this makes his staff any better than the Reds in Unite, the LibDem rumpy-leaky tendency, Mandelson’s rapier-thrusts to the throat, and Campbell’s deeply nasty appearance on the BBC’s Question Time last week. (Had you already tipped Chemical Ali off, Ben? I think we should be told.)

There’s a rainbow-in-negative cacophony of bitterness at work in Britain today – and what a ghastly crock of shit lies at the end of it: Balls, Whelan, Farage, Tebbitt, and every other grumpy, out of line dinosaur from Rupert Murdoch to Piers Morgan.

If the Daily Telegraph wants to join that shower, then good riddance. But I certainly won’t be reading it. I am a friend of the Telegraph and all its fine traditions. I think Robert Winnett a fine journalist of enormous intellect and talent, and Brogan a political editor of rare insight. As a real friend, however, I don’t ask the DT team to live up to my standards: rather, I accuse them of falling below their own.

They are guilty on that count. And somehow, I think sane minds in the Telegraph building know it.

Goldman’s O’Neill looking sick on Euro, China outlook.

Goldman’s O’Neill….losing Midas touch?

This from Bloomberg this morning (my italics):

‘Investors are demanding greater yields to lend to China property firms, a sign they expect borrowers will have a harder time meeting debt payments amid a government clampdown down on lending. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Credit Suisse Group AG cut their profit estimates for Chinese real estate companies after a 12.8 percent jump in real estate prices in April from a year earlier spurred the state to increase regulation’.

That’s odd: wasn’t Goldman’s BRIC-inventor Jim O’Neill the permabull advising investors to be bullish about China the week before last?

(This whole thing’s a bit bizarre, because the May 21st property price data released by Beijing showed prices screaming to a skidding halt. What gives here?)

Also Jim seems to be wobbling a bit on his outlook for the Euro, which fell further in Asian trading overnight. “The more time goes on” he said last Thursday, “things look a little darker than we thought”.

Meanwhile, Jim ONeill’s Red Knights have given up on buying Manchester United off the Glazers. Not surprising really, given they want £1.5 billion.

Be patient, Mr O’Neill. You’ll pick it up for a lot less this time next year.

Skin cancer is NOT increasing because of exposure to sunlight.

Deconstructing skin cancer bollocks is painfully easy

Here we go again, courtesy of Cancer Research UK: ‘men’s skin cancer doubles in thirty years’.

Why might this be – blokes becoming sun-worshippers? Hole in the ozone layer? Or, um, men living longer?

Underneath all today’s lurid screaming headlines (exactly the same ones we had last year at this time) in tiny type are the words, ‘especially in elderly men’. Which is also a tad economical, because it is almost entirely among older men.

The rate has also doubled among women….who are supposed to be so much better at putting that sunscreen on whereas men don’t bother especially with their backs and oh, aaaaaaaaaaaarg.

Two initial things here. One, put factor 10 or higher on and you’ll almost certainly be fine. And two, the number of men over 65 has risen by almost a quarter in the last thirty years.

And now for the clincher. The skin cancer death-rate has gone up by two people per 100,000. But the number of people aged over 80 had risen by 1.2 million. Doesn’t sound like quite such an epidemic in that context, does it?

This is cynical stuff from CRUK. It’s aperture marketing: there’s a hot summer about to get going, so let’s raise awareness of skin cancer by putting out the same old bollocks we put out every year.

And it really is bollocks – completely needless scaremongering. In the UK, the average person incurs 60% of lifetime medical expenses in the last six months of their mortal existence…..because they’re dying. We are all dying of something, and the longer we all live, the more of us are going to die of genetic breakdown in one form or another. This is what happens to machines lasting 90 years which were only supposed to last 40.

The real problem we face is too many old people as it is. Within a decade, having nowhere to live is going to be a much bigger fear for old folks than skin cancer. Unless you lie in the Nevada desert all day covered in olive oil and lemon, the chances are still 37,000-1 against most people getting sun-related cancer.

The ‘doctors say’ spots in the media are of far greater concern, and highly infectious.

‘Short life means early death say doctors’. Give me strength.

SINGLE MUMS v THE STATE: The Staffordshire tentacles stretch far and wide.

Top horror story in the last week or so has been the British mum Lianne Smith, charged with murdering her two kids in Spain. The alleged infanticide followed the arrest of her husband Martin in Barcelona after he was accused of child sex offences.

Lianne, who lived in Lichfield, Staffs, put the blame for her situation on the authorities in the UK with this chilling statement – the content of which will be all-too-familiar to nby and Slog regulars:

“Social services in Staffordshire and their policy of ‘forced adoptions’ are to blame for this. If we were dealing with the police and court system I would still be here for Martin.”

The reference is to her husband Martin who -rightly or wrongly – Lianne Smith thinks was wrongly accused of child abuse. But the reality is that the 43-year-old mum smothered Rebecca, five, and 11-month-old Daniel because she was worried that they would be taken into care over the allegations.

The balance of her mind must have been disturbed for her to do such a thing. But the fanatical rigidity of Staffordshire social services childcare division is infinitely more bonkers than Lianne Smith could ever be.

Last night, one of the single mums defended by The Slog against Staffordshire’s jackbooting social workers wrote this heartrending email to the site:

‘i am going to have to flee the uk john have you seen this Lianne Smith who killed her children is blaming staffordshire and forced adoptions’

The mother – who of course we can’t name thanks to the Harman-Balls axis of State Secrecy – is pregnant, and living in 24/7 anxiety about Staffordshire’s already stated intention to take the child off her. This is the same Council which awarded custody of her existing kid to the father….who was at the time out on licence following a jail sentence for gbh ‘glassing’ in a pub.

The Slog has long waged a campaign against Peter Traves, the boss of Staffordshire Social Services. This week he denied any blame over the two children found dead in a Spanish hotel room:

‘“At the time there was nothing to indicate the family would abscond. We believe our action was appropriate given our understanding of the case at the time. At no time was the daughter at risk here – our social workers did a good job.”

So the now-dead daughter wasn’t at risk, and threatening the mother did not in any way contribute to the fact that, as a Girona spokeswoman said, “She tried to commit suicide before police arrested her.” As always with these people, all blame and no responsibility.

Mind you, Mr Traves did this from the safety of being…..no longer in his post. For Peter Traves, whose staff face a police probe over the matter, quit as head of the department three weeks ago.

It’s all too familiar and ghastly. And in the matter of the shot of Traves at the head of this piece, one can only observe that the camera never lies.

NEW SHOCK AS TELEGRAPH REPORTERS REVEALED TO BE MAKING MONEY FROM EXPENSES

Robert Winnett….careful about personal privacy

The Slog today reveals how the two authors behind the David Laws ‘scandal’ (surely an exaggeration? Ed) have been making money from political expenses claims non-stop since 2007.

Scan the journalistic output of Gordon Rayner, Robert Winnett and Holly Watt at Journalisted, and you’ll discover that they share one niche: earning a living from other people’s expenses.
This practice is clearly not just to do with them: it is part of a culture of acceptance of this kind of sleaze at The Times and the Telegraph. In fact one way and another, it’s all a bit inbred.

Robert Winnett began at The Murdoch Times, writing about…..expenses. Then he was headhunted to work with Gordon Rayner at the Telegraph – writing about…..expenses. Together they wrote a best-selling book about…..expenses.

Winnett then attracted the young Holly Watt over from Murdochania to work with him, writing about…..expenses, because she had made a name for herself writing about…..expenses. (I wonder if, by any chance, Mr Winnett broke any Digger contracts about staff attraction? I think we should be told).

This is indeed a consistently shocking tale of hacks living off the back of MPs’ expenses. But now for the first time, The Slog feels impelled in the public interest to out Robert Winnett as a long-term Cleggeronophobe with a penchant for doing Simon Heffer impersonations.

We can now reveal that guilty man Winnett is:

* The man who wrote the bollocks about Clegg’s EU expenses
* The man who wrote the bollocks about YouGov’s Peter Kellner being biased
* The man to whom the New Statesman refers as ‘a peddler of vomitous Tory propaganda’
* The Deputy Political Editor who never misses an opportunity to slag off the Coalition Government.
* A really very Right Wing journalist indeed who thinks David Cameron is a Spawn of the Devil.

Anyone fancy a further bit of smearing? On 19th September 2004, Robert Winnett wrote this piece which some would consider an argument sympathetic to the BNP.

Not good enough? OK, want to read a nasty homophobic article by Robert Winnett? Then follow that link.

We all need to remember at all times that everyone – no matter how sanctimonious – has an agenda. And the more sanctimonious the person, the more hidden the agenda.

Those who live by the sword shall surely die by it, Robert baby.

UPDATE: A day later, and The Telegraph is after Kaws’ replacement Danny Alexander.

DEVELOPING STORY: WHO SHOPPED DAVID LAWS & JAMES LUNDIE?

EXCLUSIVE: DAVID LAWS NOBBLED

BY ANTI-COALITION LEAKERS
____________

David Laws was targeted by ‘disgruntled LibDem leakers’ a senior House of Commons source alleged last night. Further research carried out by The Slog this morning supports the allegation’s veracity. It also suggests that James Lundie was as much a target as David Laws – and the motivation of one of the story’s authors – the Telegraph’s Robert Winnett – was equally political….despite him holding entirely different views to his source.

Our informant – who is close to these events – asserted that there was “a sort of disconnected rainbow of Coalition enemies” working overtime to destabilise the new Government. This is hardly news (Alastair Campbell does little else at the moment) but what is beginning to emerge is that for some diehards, the Laws/Lundie story has been something of a billiards cannon.

The key thing to establish would be not just who might benefit from a Laws absence in Government – that’s a long list – but more, who would know that Laws and Lundie were an item….or indeed that David Laws was gay – a secret he kept tight from all but an inner circle for many years.

James Lundie is not just a PR man – he works for lobbyists Edelman UK. And he isn’t just any old lobbyist, he is a highly active pro-Coalition LibDem…..from long before Laws’ appointment to the Treasury. He is seen by some on the LibDem left as being too much in favour of ‘new’ political alignments. Last week he penned this blog extract on the Edelman site (my italics):

“The Liberal Democrats genuinely want this coalition to work, both because it allows them to introduce policies in which they believe but also because it shows the British people that co-operative politics can not only be made to work, but actually to flourish….’

Flourishing cooperation is anathema to all those LibDems worried about the Party’s identity being swamped by the Conservatives. Chief among these is Charles Kennedy.

Two weeks ago, Kennedy wrote in The Observer:

‘I feel it is worth recalling that great statesman who split the political family and ended up as a Liberal Unionist. Several decades later and a similar trick was to lead to the emergence of the National Liberals and their subsequent assimilation within the Conservative fold…’

Another is Paddy Ashdown, whose comment on events (caught on the hop for once) after the LabLib talks broke down and the ToryDem talks steamed ahead was that this was “a rather unexpected moment”.

As The Slog revealed at the time, many senior LibDems had mentally ‘scripted’ a post-Election hung result. They saw the ‘principled Tories-first’ speech by Nick Clegg as a feint: the act of going through the motions prior to an inevitable breakdown in the talks. But they hugely underestimated the personable negotiation skills of William Hague and Oliver Letwin. Now they find themselves isolated because of a plan that went badly wrong.

The clue as to who would have been in the best position to know about Laws’ sexuality, however, comes via the Lundie connection. For as a professional and LibDem activist, he had two direct clents as a press sceretary between 2006 and 2009: Charles Kennedy and Paddy Ashdown. In two such close working relationships, it is near inconceivable that Lundie’s sexuality and/or partnership with David Laws would not have been known.

A last word from The Slog’s mole:

“You’re very warm. Of course, they wouldn’t pull the trigger. But they must’ve sanctioned it”.

Coming up: other people who make money from MPs’ expenses

David Laws: Why The Slog was wrong

David Laws may be the victim of more
than just a homophobic newspaper.

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve been digging into the David Laws case more deeply….and reading as much as I could about the man. I have also finally made contact with The Slog’s favourite LibDem mole.

I want to offer an apology to Laws this morning – not because he reads this site (he doesn’t) but because first, in the light of what Slogger’s Roost has since learned, I appear to have made an error of judgement – and the readers deserve to know this.

It seems that Laws’ chief motive was to hide his sexuality – and given his treatment by the Telegraph, he was right. Fine, he’s rounded up the odd expense claim here and there – but he doesn’t claim for his house in Somerset, and it was the 2006 expenses rule change on ‘partners’ that caught him out. He has since bought a property separate from James Lundie. And last but not least, he did the decent thing by resigning quickly, honestly and unreservedly. I got that wrong: he is a better man than I thought.

Secondly, however, there are some aspects of this case – circumstantial at the moment, but they’re there – which suggest there might be more to this case than has been made public. Funny how you dig for something….and then find something else.

Stay tuned.

MARRIED LIFE: Eating people is wrong

“How about some dickheads for breakfast tomorrow?” my wife Jan said last week. I thought this a bit random as a suggestion, not least because Jan is getting more vegetarian with every year that passes. And while I’ve always believed a hearty breakfast is important, a large helping of Comte de Mandelson sur ses blanquettes d’oeufs would be a bit too much for a chap in his seventh decade.

But Mrs W was merely making reference to the system of barter that pertains here in Lot et Garonne. If you have a surfeit of something in this region, the word goes out to one’s neighbours, “Il faut profiter!” and the locals pitch up to take advantage – armed with gifts.

Our surfeit right now is the old wooden roof tiles being stripped from our house by the thousand. And as aged chestnut makes excellent kindling for fires, the world and his trailer has been turning up to take away those wooden blocks for which we have no room – the woodstore being already full to overflowing.

An English neighbour Kevin chose to swap duck eggs for the tiles, and so Jan was really asking if I wanted some for breakfast. I did, and they were wonderful. But the idea of dickheads for breakfast continued to intrigue me for several days.

The global overpopulation problem seems at times to be an intractable one, but if people are too dense and lacking in self-control to stop reproducing, then perhaps they deserve to be eaten. I’ve never sampled human flesh myself, although I was told by a shady character on one occasion that it tastes like a cross between chicken and pork. Personally, on that basis I’m quite attracted to this as a solution.

My wife was less impressed, and gave me one of those looks suggesting uncertainty as to whether I might be joking, or mad. By that stage – having served up scrambled duck eggs – her concerns had anyway moved elsewhere….to the subject of des loirs.

The loir is the common European dormouse, known in the UK (where it is very rare) as the edible dormouse. We’re back to carnivorous matters again – but the English name does suggest why it’s rare. They’re charming little creatures, the size of a large rat but like a cross between the bushbaby and the koala. They also have squirrel-like tales. And most endearing of all, once inside a house they treat humans as if our species might be the telly.

They really will stare for hour on end at everything you do. “‘ere Maisy, you’ll never guess what ‘e’s doin’ now….’e's only going to the big white box and bringing out a bottle of that brown stuff that smells like pine marten piss”.

Anyway, our roofer M.Ruggeri told us last night – as he departed for the weekend – that he’d found a loir nest in our roof-void. This sent Jan scurrying to her laptop and into Google. Eventually, I was asked to ring Ruggeri and ask him what he’d done with the nest.

He greeted my question with that eerie silence the French always employ when asked something incomprehensible by the English. Then – at last – he spoke.

“It was an old nest” he said, “and so I threw it away”.

My wife burst into tears of joy and relief. I thought she was reassured that there would be no further verminous invasion of our house, but I was wrong: it was merely that Mrs Ward would not have been able to sleep with the death of loir babies on her conscience.

Women are like that. So our blokes, when they think about it.