The £100 million metatarsal

A READER points out that my suggestion of using Hadrian's Wall as the new England/Scotland border would mean losing most of Northumberland. Fair point. However, I can't help noticing that the county motto of Northumberland is "An Independent Spirit." Which means we could go to all the bother of building a new wall to include the people of Northumberland, and then they'd decide they wanted a referendum, too. Auf wiedersehen, pets?

SO the Czech Republic with a population of just ten million has proton-beam cancer treatment but the United Kingdom, with six times the population, does not. Two things that we Brits are supposed to cherish have been exposed as rubbish in the Ashya King saga - British justice and the NHS.

IT was hardly surprising that "Gorgeous" George Galloway MP was attacked in the street while posing for photos. George is a great poseur. He is also one of the finest orators in Parliament and, with hindsight, his furious opposition to invading Iraq in 2003 makes more sense with every passing year.

DESPITE spending millions on adverts, the Army Reserve (formerly Territorial Army) signed up only 140 new recruits in the first six months of this year. No surprises there. The TA was traditionally a citizen army, to be mobilised in the event of general war. The Army Reserve is a subs' bench for any madcap adventure ordered by Downing Street. There is a world of difference between joining up to keep the Hun on the other side of the Channel and getting your head chopped off in Iraq, for a cause you don't understand by a feral pack of demented jihadists from Cardiff.

AND I do hope the Army Reserve is keeping a very close eye on those who are joining. In the 1970s there was a persistent rumour that the IRA was using TA units in Ulster to give its volunteers basic training. After six months with the Terriers, so the story went, the boys could shoot straight, keep their weapons clean and use camouflage. They would then disappear from their local drill halls and reappear as IRA guerillas in South Armagh. Let us hope the jihadists are not using the same training programme.

WELL, fancy that, Darling. If you had to name an actor who would never, ever be called upon to play big, gruff Winston Churchill, you might well choose Tim McInnerny, best known as the idiot Lord Percy and the even bigger idiot Captain Darling in Blackadder. Yet McInnerny plays Churchill tomorrow in Castles in the Sky (BBC2), and I bet he's excellent, because he always is.

BEING born without the football gene, I don't understand how a midfielder can be worth £60 million, the sum agreed by Manchester United for Angel di Maria. A pundit on the radio made the point that, taking his salary into account, the true sum was about £100 million - "invested in a single human being," he added for dramatic effect. In fact, it's even more than that. A footballer, like a chain, is only as strong as its weakest link. So they're actually investing £100 million in a groin, a tendon or a metatarsal.

PART of my misspent youth was as a driver's mate so I know the discreet little signal used by truckers to alert other road users to police speed traps. But the knowledge seems to have died out. A retired trucker tells me he still uses the signal but, time after time, ignorant and aggressive young drivers give him a V-sign in return and hurtle past, to be duly nicked.