Strike at the head

MAY has been designated Posture Month. I'm not standing for it.

AS old soldiers, doctors and nurses shudder at the memory of the concentration camp they liberated 75 years ago, how many British schoolchildren today even recognise the name of Belsen?

DAMNED if we rescue them, damned if we don't. There are no easy answers to the daily horror of would-be African migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. But by scouring the seas for survivors and bodies, we are surely tackling the wrong end of the problem. The people smugglers of Libya are evil personified. They are worse than 18th century slave traders because they don't even have a vested interest in getting their charges to their destination. If a few hundred Africans perish at sea, so what? There are thousands more willing to take their place. In the ports of Libya the big players in the smuggling industry must be well known. They will be fabulously rich. They will have huge houses, private armies and the hardware of modern terrorism. There is no better way for the West to show its revulsion of their trade than to bomb a few mansions, wipe out a few Mr Bigs, sink their ships at harbour and put a bounty on the head of every people-smuggler in the chain. Instead of wringing our hands and plucking bodies from the high seas we should be striking at the head of the most evil trade on earth.

THE wedding I mentioned a few days ago was wonderful, thanks. It took place on the south coast and we drove down the old-fashioned way, avoiding motorways and heading for Cirencester, Chippenham and Salisbury. The air force base at RAF Kemble was always a highlight of the summer-holiday journey with its immaculate lawns, smart RAF types in blue uniforms and a Gloster Meteor jet mounted proudly at the main gate. Today, Kemble is a graveyard for retired airliners due to be scrapped, with an industrial estate attached. The old air base has been civilianised, swapping weapons of war for the hardware of peace. The Bible calls this process beating swords into ploughshares. It may sound uplifting but, Lord, what an ugly, dispiriting process it can be.

ON the morning of the wedding the traditional queue formed at the hotel's automatic toast-making machine, one of these devices you feed with bread which is browned on one side, flipped over, browned on the other and delivered a few minutes later. My sister-in-law recalled a friend of hers who, not having thought it through, assumed one of these machines could also cook cheese on toast. She fed it with large slices of Cheddar. Small fire, no-one hurt.

THE South of England was as busy, crowded and noisy as ever. Judging by the width of its cycle lanes, Christchurch must have been planning for the fattest cyclists in the world. The odd thing was that the only cyclists we saw were thin and, very wisely, using the pavements.

STRANGE job titles of our time. The hotel leaflet informed us that any complaints should be directed to the cluster manager.

I THOUGHT I knew my Ogden Nash, but I'd never come across the American poet's reflections on marriage, used in one of the wedding readings, which ends: "I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable."

A READER writes: "Our local hospital has opened a £1 million endoscopy unit. Things must be looking up."