I couldn’t find it on the web, but was reading in the Sunday Telegraph a review of the autobiography of the actress Liz Smith, Our Betty: Scenes from My Life. It records:

“Her grandmother [who had raised her] died while Liz was serving in the Fleet Air Arm. Her parting words as she set off for the Second World War were: ‘Always make sure your vest is aired.”

That reminded me irrestibly of our “home economics” teacher from high school, who was a very old-school “cookery” teacher who’d never quite made the leap. (She thought I was great because I was always finished first; little did she know that I achieved that by only really cooking the top layer of pikelets or whatever, and burying the half-cooked ones underneath. It didn’t really matter, since nothing we cooked was actually edible anyway. The “boiled frozen vegetables in white sauce” still sticks in my memory as a particularl culinary highlight.)

She was very concerned about safety when the Indonesia class went on a field trip to that country, and had some essential advice:

Always carrying a clean pair of underpants in your hand luggage, in case you get kidnapped.

The world’s top 25 food companies have not taken significant action to improve diets, with only a handful acting on excess fat and sugar and only 10 are tackling salt levels. That explains why, increasingly, when I pop into Sainsbury’s (sorry – I try to avoid it, but it is on my way home) about 10pm, starving, without having made any dinner preparations, I increasingly can’t find anything I want to buy. (Increasingly because I have got more fussy since I’ve got into organic fruit and veg and more home cooking – or at least home food-assembly …)
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The arrest of Charles Taylor and his trial for war crimes is one further small step for humanity. A reasonable comparison with him is probably Idi Amin – who was able to live out his natural lifespan in peace and comfort in Saudi Arabia. The increasing application of international law is a really significant advance for the human race and might, you can only hope, act as a check in future on dictators tempted to act similarly. An interesting thought:

The term “international law” was invented in 1780 by the jurist Jeremy Bentham who said he hoped it was an “intelligible” phrase. By 2080 it will probably be the most important form of law across the world.

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Combining history and politics, Jonathan on Frog in a Well reviews Libby Lewis’s novel The Apprentice. Apparently the history is reasonably well done – as for the politics, well you can judge for yourself…

If you saw the standard bay tree and the Salix caprea walking up the stairs at Euston Square Tube this afternoon I hope you didn’t get too much of a shock – it was just me spending the Homebase vouchers acquired during last year’s DIY frenzy before they ran out.

Having got them out without home without too much damage to the skin of my hands (standard trees not being well-balanced for long-distance carrying), I decided before setting them in place on the balcony it really was time to clean the windows – which is pretty well what counts as spring cleaning as Chez Natalie.

So I guess you could say spring is sprung …