Remembrance? First read the terms and conditions.

I HAVE just bought one of the 888,246 ceramic poppies planted at the Tower of London to mark the centenary of the First World War. I urge you to do the same before they are snapped up by the spivs. Today's cherished souvenir has a nasty habit of becoming tomorrow's nice little earner on eBay.

BACK in 1914-18, people would have been pleased and surprised that their sacrifice was remembered, 100 years on, by the sale of such poppies to support military charities. Mind you, the shilling-a-day soldiers of the First World War would have been even more surprised that the price of a ceramic poppy was £25.

ABOVE all, the 1914 generation would have been absolutely gobsmacked that a British subject could not do something as simple and straightforward as purchasing a poppy without first agreeing to a terms-and-conditions document running to 5,246 words. Our age could be commemorated not with a sea of red poppies but with endless swamplands of red tape.

IF Boris Johnson is the answer, it must be a very, very strange question.

AFTER this week's item on the use of pigeons to carry messages in the First World War, a reader asks if these intelligent birds were ever used in a military coo.

OVERTAKEN by events. The latest Private Eye magazine has a cartoon showing Bernie Ecclestone with a speech bubble saying: "If I give you £20 million, will you drop the bribery charges?" Between conception and distribution, fiction became fact. The case against Ecclestone was dropped by a German court after the F1 boss agreed to make a payment of £60 million.

IT seems, little by little, the Government is paving the way for genetically modified (GM) foods, even though polls repeatedly show most people are against the stuff. We are told that the first GM crops to be "enriched with nutrients to improve health" will be harvested soon from a field trial in Britain. A crop of false flax has been tampered with so that its seeds will produce an oil rich in fatty acid which is normally only found in fish. They will feed this stuff to farmed fish. We will then eat the fish. What could possibly go wrong? Our leaders have been well and truly lobbied by the massively rich and quite unstoppable GM industry. They have become what the Ecologist website wearily refers to as "Genetically Modified Politicians."

IT'S been heart-warming this week to see politicians from France, Germany and Britain embracing each other to mark the centenary of the First World War. It will be fascinating to see if the embraces are quite so warm two years from now for the centenary of the Easter Rising (or if you prefer, the Easter Rebellion) in Dublin, where memories are long and bitter. In Ypres, 1914 was 100 years ago. In Dublin, 1916 was the day before yesterday.

HSBC's pre-tax profits have fallen from 14,000 million dollars in the first six months of last year to a pitiful 7,300 million dollars for the same period this year. We can all help. A new Bentley for an investment banker costs only £220,000. You can send a banker's child to Eton for as little as £80,000 a year. Please give generously.

POINTLESS inventions. The latest fishing-kit catalogue arrives at Chateau Rhodes offering camouflaged boots. You see the problem? Dammit, I definitely put them down here somewhere...