How to find the poorest kids

BATTLE of the titans. On a hot, dry morning the two most pointless weapons in our local council's armoury were deployed. First, heading east, the lorry with the huge bristle brushes which is supposed to sweep the road edge, but in reality sweeps around all the parked cars. Next, heading west, the man with the man-pack leaf blower. They met in a narrow part of the road with no pavement. The huge brushes swept a great cloud of leaves towards the blower-man. The blower-man defended himself, using his blower like a sword and blowing the leaves back into the road. I pay £50 a week council tax for this nonsense.

OH, the dilemma of being anti-semitic. On the one hand you want to congratulate the Fuhrer for slaughtering six million Jews. On the other hand, you are supposed to believe the Holocaust was a Zionist fiction and never really happened. So as you scrawl your banner for the next anti-Israel rally, do you go for "Hitler Was Right," or stick with something safe like "Death to the Jews"? Until the weekend, did anyone imagine that such banners would ever be unfurled on British streets?

AFTER last week's item on plans to send poor kids to the best state schools, a reader writes: "Social engineering stinks. How will the education authorities know who is poor or middle class?" As I understand it, kids are officially poor if they qualify for free school meals.

MIND you, I got free meals all those years ago, being one of five children. In those days, having lots of kids was supposed to be an indication of poverty and the system would simply not allow you to pay. Every term my father, a successful builder, would send a cheque to cover our school meals and every term the school would send him a cheque back in respect of my meals. Of the five sons, I was nominated as the "free kid" on the grounds that I was the one robust enough to cope with the snarling sarcasm of the teacher who collected the dinner money and whose socialist principles were offended by the arrangement. Happiest days of your life.

HINDSIGHT is always crystal-clear and you can't libel the dead. So I'm not hugely impressed with the latest crop of books and articles telling us what a sinister, creepy predator Jimmy Savile was. One weekend review hailed a new biography of Savile as "compulsive, colourful and chilling." This is all very well, but where were these pundits when the old groper was alive and working his evil?

THE sole exception I can find is Quentin Letts who fearlessly included Savile in his 2008 book Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain which was published three years before Savile died. At a time when the Establishment was fawning over Sir Jimmy, Letts described him as a maniac who, roaming among the Top of the Pops audience, "slung his arms around their teenage waists." Letts wrote: "We can ask if such a creature would be allowed anywhere near today's primetime children's shows." Back in 2008 no-one seemed to take much notice of Quentin Letts. But then he was only an awkward newspaper columnist and Sir Jimmy was a national treasure.

WE celebrated our ruby wedding at the weekend with cakes, bubbly and lots of friends on the scab of moss and thistles that I am proud to call my lawn. We selected some vintage music from the days of real melodies and real lyrics. Mind you, if Simon & Garfunkel would rather have been a forest than a street, why didn't they spend more time in the woods?