Features

Taki What a pity this competition is not open to members of the fairer sex. Marie Christine of Kent would make an ideal winner. Among the men, of course, we have an embarrassment of riches. Tony Blair, John Bercow, Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, A.A. Gill, Charles Saatchi, I could go on until the next millennium. However agonising it was to pick the cad of all cads, do step forward Matthew Freud, a man I’m fortunate to say I have never met but have heard and read enough about to convince me he’s the one. In his never-ending quest for power, riches and fame, Freud has managed to reach the depths of narcissism, lubricity, arse-licking and bullying, always couched in a Uriah Heep manner towards those richer and more powerful.

Few people, don’t you find, are as irritating as those who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious? There was a riveting  piece in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine last week about them, featuring people who were both fabulously stylish and spiritual. Among the names checked was a shop called Celestine Eleven (‘when you buy a new dress, you’re buying into a beautiful piece of energy’) and a website called Numinous (motto: ‘material girl, mystical world’). So, you can be spiritual and design-conscious, as in Pamela Love’s pentagram ring, £1,500.

There is really no question about whether it is best for babies to be breast-fed, at least for the first few weeks of life. Plenty of research from around the world has proved conclusively that breast-fed babies, who receive all the mother’s antibodies from the colostrum (produced during the first few days) and then the milk, have a better resistance to infections and viruses, and get them more mildly if they do succumb. They have fewer allergies, have a 20 per cent lower risk than formula-fed babies of dying between the ages of 28 days and one year, and may be protected against some diseases that strike later.

World Cup fever has arrived. Every morning on the way to work, more little plastic flags of St George flutter from white vans or, in my case, from the window of our trusty Audi A6. Many of my fellow countrymen regard this footie orgy as wholly unnecessary — not me. Bunting will go up at the front of our house if we advance to the quarters, whereupon my wife will spend most evenings in a curry house with a girlfriend, leaving me to invite the lads round for random games such as Honduras v. Ecuador. Result. More than anything, the tournament offers a chance to wheel out my one Roy Hodgson (he’s the England manager) anecdote. It was back in 1994 when he was coach of Switzerland and about to take his team to the World Cup in America, for which England did not qualify.

The Kindle has changed reading in so many ways. A library in your pocket rather than the hulk of a hardback. Uniform pixels where once dust motes rose from an ancient page. But the biggest change, the most fundamental one, is emotional rather than physical. Reading, which used to be the most private of activities, is now an increasingly public one. The same internet that lets you download a book’s content also lets you upload your reaction to that content. As well as allowing you to mark passages in a book, Kindle’s highlighting feature shows you which passages other readers have marked. What’s more, Amazon ranks the results. Of the 25 most highlighted passages, all but six come from the Hunger Games trilogy.