Commentariat

Independent Columnists

Recent readers of my husband Cooper’s column will undoubtedly know that he was having some problems with the immigration authorities here in the United Kingdom. They took him away for questioning 10 days ago and he was held for three days against his will and then released – but his passport was retained. Three days ago they came for him again – they knocked on our door at 5am, forced an entry and took Cooper away. They told me that he was being extradited back to the United States that morning. That is the last I have heard of him, apart from a mysterious telephone call from someone who said that he was a “fan” of Cooper’s column – he warned me that he was being taken to Guantanamo Bay.

Stand by for fireworks between Jack Straw’s Ministry of Justice and members of Britain’s “exotic” artistic community.

There’s something Oedipal, even Shakespearean, about Marcus Wareing’s eclipsing of his former mentor and boss, Gordon Ramsay, in the hierarchy of top London restaurants. It’s part of a syndrome in which a former protégé rises to match, then overtake, his beloved master. It happened with Gordon Ramsay who, after enduring years of training, abuse and belittling by Marco Pierre White, left him to go it alone, and comprehensively outclassed him in stars and media recognition.

I have just returned from a couple of weeks in the blazing south of Italy, and yes, it was lovely, thank you for asking. But without wishing to sound ungrateful (and now that I’ve seen the miserable weather back here, I know I will), I have to confess that I’m not really a beach-holiday kind of a girl. Lying around aimlessly gives me far too much anxiety time. Behind my sunglasses, I can indulge all my darkest fears without my husband suspecting a thing. And there are all those beach-related worries to add into the mix: have the children got enough suncream on; should they be out that far in the sea; are there jellyfish, paedophiles, abandoned syringes, broken bottles, dog faeces?

Chickens fighting, sheep always falling over, pigs had measles, dog’s got fleas. Tractor, quad bike and digger, in pieces half the year. Roofs blowing off, hedges sprouting out of control like magic beanstalks, mulberries ailing. Beams failing. Badgers, rats, rooks, rabbits all gatecrashing the party. There is always some small emergency or other unfolding in this tiny soap opera, something that demands my full attention and since I became a farmer I’ve noticed that the existential angst, the malaise that afflicts all those with no tussles, has evaporated completely. I pity anyone who knows what they are doing. The utter boredom afforded by the riches of Croesus

When an exciting new project involving Michael Jackson and his family is announced, the form book usually requires us to take it with a large pinch of sodium chloride.

The new Orangina adverts have drawn complaints from viewers for being "too
sexy" because, according to the Telegraph, the finale features "shots of
Orangina bottles exploding between the thighs of zebras and squirting on to
the breasts of other animals."

I had a shocking crush on a nun when I was 12. She was a friend of my mother’s, Sister Martina, and she had china-blue eyes, peach-pink cheeks and an astonishingly pouty upper lip. You could see no more of her physical attributes than that, because of her pre-Vatican II full-body habit, but it was enough. She radiated sweetness and kindness. Her eyes would brim with tears at the smallest evidence of human – or animal – injustice anywhere in the world. She seemed too sensitive to be heading into the jungles of Malawi to join the missions. (”Off to help the little black babies, John,” she would say, her red lips trembling.) I thought she lacked the toughness for dealing with dictators, tribesmen and brigands, and told my mother so in the strongest terms. It was, I harrumphed, ridiculous to send such a lovely young girl among savages.

The myth that you can see the Great Wall of China from space is just that … a myth. But on Sunday night, thanks to a Chinese invention – fireworks – I’m pretty sure that you could see Beijing from up there.

The Prime Minister has announced that it is time we had more competitive sport at school, choosing the Olympic closing ceremony as a good moment to repudiate the received opinion that left-wing administrations are hostile to the divisive business of saying one child has done better than another. The Government had now begun to “correct the tragic mistake of reducing the competitive element in school sports”, he said, rather implying that this was a new initiative.

Curious news from the Strand. We hear that Salman Rushdie and his former wife Elizabeth West are to be reunited at the High Court today. The pair will receive an official apology from a former bodyguard over allegations he made regarding their marriage.

Patsy Kensit might not be everyone’s idea of a literary genius, but she’s about to become a major player in the publishing world.

It’s her eyes that really get me – big, gorgeous green pools magnified a thousandfold on the huge screens that hang above the “Bird’s Nest” Stadium. It is the very last event of the last evening of track and field, and this is the one I’ve been waiting for: the women’s high jump and I’m in love… big time.

And so my last day at the Olympics dawns. I shall really miss it all when I’m home although I long to see my family and my dogs (in that order).

If you ask me, being compared to a politician can ruin your day. And for some reason it seems to happen to me all the time.

Putting weather on one side, it’s the little things you miss when you switch from taking les grandes vacances in Charente-Maritime to having your hols in Filey, North Yorks. By little things, I mean, of course, comestibles. Over the decade that we’ve been coming to the Yorkshire coast, it has become increasingly possible to persuade one’s palate that it is on the Ile de Ré. The sourdough bread from Driffield farmers’ market could not be matched at most boulangeries and the same goes for the butter croissants from our village Co-op. It is even possible to get rillettes de porc from the Ginger Pig butchers in Pickering, though the French would find both price and texture on the stiff side. But certain items remain elusive.

I conceived the idea of walking from Flamborough Head to Spurn Head, along the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire. It was about 60 miles and I could do it comfortably over three days. Why this walk along this coast? Well, the soil here – loess or clay – was deposited during the last ice age, and ever since then the longshore drift has been carrying it away to the south. The Holderness is, in point of fact, the fastest-eroding coast in Europe, with some six feet a year being lost to the North Sea.

My final weird sport of the Olympics – I’m in the Indoor National Stadium, now vacated by the gymnasts for… handball, a men’s placement match between Poland and Korea (they don’t specify which Korea… I’m assuming it’s the South because the Northern players would have all defected by now). I think I’m supporting Poland because they’re such good plumbers, don’t eat dog and aren’t that likely to destroy us in a surprise nuclear attack.

Big occasions call for a willing spirit and if the BBC can do precisely that – enlisting Eddie Butler to apply his knowledge of loose rucks to the Zen niceties of Olympic archery – then who am I to hang back? Eddie, it has to be said, hadn’t entirely adjusted. The word “steamrollered” is probably indispensable when analysing an All Black attack, but it can sound a little out of place applied to three tiny Korean women with Hello Kitty stickers on their track-suits.

Should young Becky Adlington, our splendid double gold medallist swimmer, be given a damehood in the next honours list? The very question is absurd, let alone the answers it elicited in a debate on Five Live the other morning. Unfortunately, Kelly Holmes had earlier dared to suggest that Adlington was perhaps a little on the youthful side, with much yet to achieve, which prompted some listeners to call in accusing Holmes of “sour grapes”. It was nothing of the sort. It was plain common sense, sadly prejudiced, to some ears, by the damehood conferred on Holmes herself after she won two gold medals in Athens.

What a gift is Gary Glitter to the tabloids during the silly season. From a gutter press point of view, the trouble with so many paedophiles is that they don’t look the part. In too many cases, they may appear insignificant or even quite respectable.

I quite like the song “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am!)”, though I prefer “Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again”. Both are quite jolly and rousing in a rock’n'roll retro sort of way, but of the two, I would argue that “Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again” has the stronger interaction between singer and backing group and a catchier chorus line.

There’s a telling moment in Man on Wire, James Marsh’s lovely film about Philippe Petit’s wire-walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, when the man himself is describing the danger of the stunt. “What a beautiful death,” he says dreamily, “to die in the exercise of your passion.” Halfway through that sentence Marsh cuts to an image of a passenger jet flying over a city. The implication is unmissable. It’s the film’s one acknowledgement that there would come a time when other young men would converge on the twin towers with a spectacular stunt in mind, when a passionate obsession with this American landmark would end in its destruction.

It’s a long, uneventful bus ride to the Shunyi rowing and canoeing park – most of the journalists and photographers are fast asleep. The long hours are starting to take their toll. I’m not even supposed to be here. I was going to watch the BMX this morning but I was on BBC Five Live until 2am and slept through my alarm. This actually turned out to be quite fortunate as the event was postponed for a day because of torrential rain. So I decided to go see some canoeing… or kayaking, I wasn’t sure which, but was pretty sure that the rain wouldn’t be an issue.

David Cameron likes to swagger on to the stage at Tory conferences accompanied by music by The Killers, but his party’s core membership tends to prefer its music a little more old school.