All at sea

A MUCH loved old joke has been cleaned up and hailed as one of the best at the Edinburgh Fringe. The new version: "Crime in a multi-storey car park - it's wrong on so many different levels." The original version: "Breaking wind in a high-speed lift - it's wrong on so many different levels."

THERE must be an election coming. Why else would the Government promise a new law to jail those who use non-violent "controlling behaviour" in relationships? It is a promise rich in good intentions and fine sound bites but almost impossible to turn into solid prosecutions. For starters, what about those cultures which regard a wife as the property of her husband? If you can't control your own property, what is British justice coming to? (And if you disagree with that you're insulting my culture).

MORE BBC globe-trotting at your expense. Today (Radio 4) on Wednesday found it quite impossible to tell us that Dubai has more passengers than Heathrow without sending a reporter to Dubai. How wonderful it must be to run the BBC, an organisation which gets an annual bung of £4,000 million from the public purse and can enforce its licence fee with the threat of jail.

AND don't get me started on those ludicrous live dispatches on the news programmes. Why, in the name of sanity, does the reporter telling us about events in Iraq have to be dragged from a warm studio, put in a taxi, ferried across London and shown standing in the rain outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, with every dimwit passer-by waving at the camera?

HOW should America respond to the pitiless beheading of one of its citizens, the journalist Jim Foley? Rudyard Kipling, that great spokesman for the British Empire, had no doubts. In his poem, The Grave of the Hundred Head, he tells how the soldiers of a native Indian regiment reacted when their British lieutenant was killed by a sniper. They raided the enemy camp, beheaded a hundred fighters and piled the heads into a bloody cairn to remind the enemy that if they killed a single Englishman, it "must be paid for with heads five-score." No civilised nation should fight a war on those terms. But the Islamic State is a savage, uncivilised enemy which thinks it has the monopoly on terror. How does a superpower defeat a medieval foe like this without the almost-biblical promise that if you kill one of ours, we will kill a hundred of yours?

FIVE miles out to sea in a tiny dinghy, a sailor was rescued by a lifeboat from Dorset a few days ago. He had no lifejacket and no lights and was equipped with nothing more than a bag of food, a US passport and a street map of Southampton. It turns out he was a Bulgarian but surely he has shown all the fearless (not to say brainless) maritime qualities required of any true Brit. I suggest we grant him immediate UK citizenship and full membership of the organisation which provides so much summertime employment for the lifeboat crews, the Birmingham Navy.

I WROTE a couple of days ago about the slowness of the new scan-it-yourself "fast till" at my local paper shop. Determined not to be beaten by technology, I tried it to buy my daily newspaper. It panicked and started wailing "Unexpected item in the baggage area." Another customer approached. I invited him to have a go on the fast till. "No, thanks," he said, heading for the old manual till. "I'm in a hurry."