Any other business

Today’s Friday so we must be in Spain Recently a Syrian lorry driver, making his cumbrous way across Turkey and Europe to Gibraltar, and following his satellite navigation system and online mapping service, found himself in Lincolnshire, on the Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve. These devices cannot make allowance for monoglot ignorance and soggy IQs of that magnitude. Nor do they merit the attack on what she called ‘corporate cartography’ recently launched at the RGS by Mary Spence. She is president of the Cartographic Society and ought to know better. Route maps on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, that is, omitting everything you don’t need, are not new: far from it.

My one regret at having retired from the National Health Service is that I no longer receive official circulars. I used for a time to derive a small secondary income from publishing them; and such was their idiocy that very little commentary on my part was required. They spoke for themselves; it was money for old rope. I am glad to say, however, that old friends keep me in touch with Gogolio-Kafkaesque-Orwellian developments in Europe’s biggest employer (now that the Gulag is no more).

If Britain’s housebuilders really want to sell more homes, they ought to slash their prices rather than lobby the government for packages like last week’s ill-conceived attempt to boost the property market. That’s what the rest of us have done, but while prices of all other houses have plunged, new homes have still been selling for more than they did a year ago. When the Halifax announced that the fall in house prices had reached double digits in the year to July, the figure that failed to catch the headlines was that new homes had gone up by 1.1 per cent over the previous year. Are we really to believe that new-build is the oasis in the housing market desert — or are the builders playing tricks? There is indeed sleight of hand by the housebuilders.

Judi Bevan finds her local Lidl discount store full of bargains — but not Boden-clad middle-class shoppers Intrigued by reports that the middle classes are shopping at the German discount stores Aldi and Lidl — and even stuffing their purchases in Waitrose bags — I set off to track them down. My nearest Lidl is a couple of miles from my house at the northern end of Cricklewood Broadway — not exactly an area known for yummy-mummy sightings, and without a Starbucks or Caffè Nero for miles. Yet the statistics say that sales at both Aldi and Lidl have been growing strongly since householders have been hit by higher petrol and utility bills.

The credit crunch reaches the home of the rotten apple and the ‘Rolexo’ watch James Gregory Pool III is an elderly, stooping Canadian with a most un-usual job. Every month he boards a plane from Canada with 200 sedated heifers and flies with them to Almaty to beef up and variegate Kazakhstan’s breeding livestock. He’s the archetypal eccentric foreign entrepreneur one finds in this eccentric Central Asian city.

It is an indictment of our society that, despite huge scientific advances in the last century, particularly in the production of food, millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, do not get enough to eat. The principal culprit is the Green movement, in its many species or fanaticisms. The Prince of Wales, who might be described as the most prominent Green man, has recently drawn attention to the destructive power of his ideology by attacking the growing of genetically modified crops, perhaps the largest step forward ever taken by mankind to reduce the cost of basic foodstuffs, and to increase their production and worldwide availability.

Does Medvedev really believe in the rule of law? The fate of TNK-BP is the test Is President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia — who looks and sounds like a liberal-leaning modern technocrat — really his own man, or is he merely the stooge of his predecessor, the sinister, warmongering Vladimir Putin? The mad situation engulfing BP’s Russian joint venture, TNK-BP, is surely the test of this question. Its BP-appointed chief executive, Robert Dudley, has met such hostility from the gang of oligarchs who are BP’s partners in the company that he is now trying to run it by email from a secret address somewhere in eastern Europe.

One of the great paradoxes, for most of us, is the hatred of work, and the need for it to fill what Dr Johnson called ‘the great vacancies of life’. We sigh for leisure, then don’t know how to handle it when it comes in abundance. Occupation is wearisome, but essential, and retirement is longed-for but disappointing. A typical example was Charles Lamb. During the 33 years he worked at the East India House he perpetually grumbled about the way his work gobbled up the best hours of each day and left him tired and listless, with virtually nothing for himself and his pleasures.