Society

As readers will be aware, and without sounding too immodest, this column is absolutely committed to diversity. In an earlier era, that might have seemed unnecessary. A British oenophile did not need to search out bottles from great distances. He could merely take his pleasure from the first growths of Bordeaux and the grands crus of Burgundy, with perhaps a little dalliance on the Rhine or the Rhône. Nor was this only a British modus operandi. I covered the French election of 1981 from Burgundy (there were good political reasons for doing so, as well as other ones). The Burgundians knew that wine was made on the banks of the

Harry Cole wrote in the Sun that ‘like the sweating hero trying to diffuse a bomb in a Hollywood movie, Sir Keir Starmer looked a little green around the gills’. For his part, the top cop Gavin Stephens said: ‘Anybody in a leadership position should think about how we can reduce and diffuse tensions.’ Or so the BBC reported. The Guardian reported that he called on them to ‘reduce and defuse tensions’. What you do with a bomb in a Hollywood movie is to defuse it. Its fuse might be ticking away and you remove it. Tensions can be reduced by figuratively defusing them. But very often tensions and situations

Time to think about my diet. A test kit arrives from the NHS screening team who want to inspect a stool sample to see if a hostile cluster of cells is growing in my guts. What I eat horrifies everyone – except me. I live on Bran Flakes and Frosties straight from the box, and I enjoy chocolate bars or digestive biscuits coated with redcurrant jam (Lidl, 51p). Each year I spend about £600 on food – mostly processed pap full of fructose and additives. ‘Chemical rubbish,’ my mother called it. I avoid restaurants because I can do better at home. I like boiled rice or noodles smothered with sauces