Meet the viral concept designer

OUR changing language. The Met Office warns of "localised surface water issues."

"ARISE and be a nation" must be the most potent election slogan ever. Surely those five little words would galvanise the people into the Yes and No camps. Apparently not. The mystery in Scotland is that the polls still show a quarter of Scots have yet to make up their mind. Arise and be a don't know.

ZBIGNIEW Brzezinski looks like a winning line in Scrabble but was actually President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor in the depths of the cold war. He popped up on the radio, discussing the Ukraine crisis like a wise, old and chillingly pragmatic owl. Brzezinski believes the West's response depends on what the locals do if the Russians invade. If Ukrainians don't fight back, why should we?

ZBIGNIEW, indeed. Politicians used to have such colourful names. Whatever happened to Ndabaningi Sithole? These days if you type "improbable names in politics" into Google, all you get is Ed Balls.

LIONS led by donkeys. In marketing, nothing is more precious than a great brand name. If they suddenly rebranded Heinz Beans as haricot nuggets, sales would plummet. Yet the Ministry of Defence has scrapped one of the best brands it ever had. One hundred years ago as the Great War broke out, the Territorial Force (later the Territorial Army) was mobilised. Territorials were rushed over to France to hold the front line. They covered themselves in glory. This year provided a unique opportunity to recall 100 years of Territorials for recruiting purposes. And what does the MoD do? It drops the name entirely, rebrands the Territorial Army as the Army Reserve and then watches in surprise as recruiting figures drop through the floor. Britain's part-time army is vanishing before our eyes. Fight a war? This generation of politicians and top brass couldn't be trusted to sell baked beans.

TALKING of which, have you figured out yet why people who eat seven portions of fruit and veg a day live longer? Do the maths. Tot up the cost of buying seven items of fresh fruit or veg per day for a family of two adults and two children. The bills are horrendous. That sort of diet goes with being rich and rich people have always lived longer than poor people.

A READER asks: "Does making a call on my Orange mobile count as one portion?" Of course it does.

AS the Tories creep up in the polls, what's really worrying Labour is not last month's popular Budget, but the threat of a give-away Budget just before next year's General Election in May. I would still bet on Ed Miliband being the next prime minister but he has taken a serious clobbering from George Osborne's rabbits in the hat. By this time next year he may have been kicked into the dustbin of history by a whole warren of the little blighters.

AND if you want to know what rabbits to expect, I recall David Cameron on the campaign trail before the 2010 General Election in a hall filled with working and middle-class people and not a millionaire in sight. Yet the issue that got the loudest applause was Cameron's plan to raise the threshold on inheritance tax to £1 million. There is something about this vulture tax, of the bereaved being forced to pay tax on money that has already been taxed, that offends our sense of justice.

BEEB-talk. The excellent spoof W1A (BBC2) gives us the job titles: head of generic comedy drama, director of strategic governance and viral concept designer. Somehow, you suspect they are real.