Posh nosh on the menu

The most important ingredient in any menu is imagination. That explains why youngsters at Oldbury College of Sport are dining on the freshest, tastiest, low-calorie fruits of the sea while other schools serve up pasties and chips.

Lobster thermidor and prawn salad are served on tables decorated with flowers.

So how is this possible? How can one Black Country college work wonders with school meals when so many others are a culinary disgrace?

The answer is that college cook Blodwen Hinton and her husband Des are utterly devoted to their calling.

They are not so much cooks as hunter-gatherers, harvesting seafood from the waters around their holiday home at Anglesey.

Des has just joined a shooting syndicate and may soon be adding venison to the school menu - and all at £1.85 per meal.

It is frankly astonishing, in these red-tape times, that a husband and wife can be involved in every stage of the cookery process from killing to garnishing.

But it is a good, healthy and profoundly important process. It not only provides nourishing meals but also keeps today's inner-city children in touch with the natural world.

They know where their food comes from. They know it has grown fat on the natural bounty of the world. You don't get that with a plateful of chips and turkey twizzlers.

Well done, the college. Well done, Blodwen and Des.

Iraq tragedy will haunt Tony Blair

Four years after embarking on war in the Middle East, Tony Blair is haunted by two four-letter words: Iraq and Blix.

Iraq was his war too far. After the hero-worship he received as the liberator of Kosovo, Tony Blair looked forward to another quick victory in 2003. Tens of thousands of deaths later, Iraq is an ungovernable shambles.

Blix is Hans Blix, the UN's former chief weapons inspector, who accuses Mr Blair of "exercising spin" in the build-up to war.

Mr Blix puts it very eloquently. He says that in preparing the case for war, Mr Blair "put exclamation marks instead of question marks."

In other words, Downing Street should have been looking hard for real evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and trying to avoid a war. Instead, Mr Blair and his colleagues were massaging the evidence to make war inevitable.

Mr Blix says the war was "clearly illegal." Tony Blair still denies that. But he will soon be out of power and the ultimate verdict will rest not with him but with history and, possibly, with the courts.

Tony Blair may want to move on from Iraq but this tragic, bloody mess will haunt him to the end of his days.