Michael White hears what the Chinese are keen to learn from British history and wonders if they will help us out on the defence side. He reads a new book and recalls an Alan Coren joke about Richard Branson.
Hampshire borders, mid-morning, Sunday:
I have been meaning to write this down all week. Britain is in danger of building two new aircraft carriers without having any aircraft to put on them.
At least, that's what I heard at the Private Eye party the other evening when the investigative wing of our trade was showing off to Ian Hislop.
A man who should know what he's talking about mildly calls it a flaw in the government's long-term defence plans. The dear old Harrier jump-jets of Falklands War fame are already long in the tooth. The Tornadoes will be too when - if - the carriers get built.
But the vastly expensive Euro-fighter to which we have all contributed our pocket money won't be suitable. As for the US joint strike aircraft (JSA), it won't be ready. Even Lockheed, which is making the plane, is said to harbour doubts about its costs, says Top Source.
Perhaps the Chinese will sell us their spare planes? They are expanding (correction: re-expanding) so fast as a world power it is all hard to take in. In the pub the other day someone told me that the deal behind the British Museum's winter exhibition of Chinese terracotta warriors is a two-way one.
The BM will help furnish Beijing with a series of major exhibitions. The first that China wants to mount apparently seeks to address the question that has puzzled ancient Asian empires for two centuries: how was it that a second-ranking European offshore island in 1660 became the dominant global superpower by 1800?
That's us, by the way and, after last night's 15-6 result in Paris, we're obviously not talking rugby here. Will the French papers spend the next week telling their readers what a crushing blow defeat will be to our national morale and GNP - as we did them last week? Even the FT ran a piece.
Admittedly Nicolas Sarkozy had a much worse week than Gordon Brown: sporting defeat, pummelling public transport strikes and trouble with his own party for taking lefties into the big tent. Does that sound familiar? Oh yes, and his wife left him. I sense that will not happen to GB. Shy Sarah Brown is said to be much tougher than she lets on.
In Saturday night's post-match line-up to shake hands with the teams Brown, in trade mark black overcoat, usefully stood between Sarko and President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa so we couldn't work out which of the other two is shortest. But Mbeki was later lifted high with the World Cup in his hands.
That may come in handy in his own troubles at home, as he fights to retain the general secretaryship of the ANC from the rising challenge of Jacob Zuma, the former populist and Robben Island inmate who was acquitted of rape last year and who wants to be president after him. GB doesn't have that problem either. Scary times for the republic: let us hope that winning helps ease the national mood. That is surely logical, if losing deflates it?
Getting the TV rights to the World Cup was also a rare boost for embattled ITV which has had an even worse week than Sarko, what with the cops finally checking out the premium phone scam. ''The BBC didn't want it enough, they couldn't be bothered,'' a top ITV man told me mid-week. Mind you, at the start of the contest it looked a smart call, he gracefully added.
We have been staying for the weekend with friends who live in the country, walking in autumnal lanes in bright sunshine. Our friend tells a good story of a banker in another village who has lost serious money during the recent financial troubles on world markets.
So stressed was the banker that when the automatic gates at the end of his drive failed to work properly, he summoned help, then drove right through them without waiting. 'Nuff said.
Last month it was The Brothers Karamazov. This month my book club is reading Sea Room by Adam Nicholson which I had not previously heard of and is very un-Dostoyevsky being about a tiny clump of Hebridean islands in the Minch. No one murders anyone, though there are a lot of drownings.
Nicholson is both a good writer and rather grand in an under-stated way. That is hardly surprising since he comes from a distinguished line of rather grand writers: two of his grand-parents were Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West about whose extraordinary marriage their son, Nigel, wrote a famous book, later televised for the usual wrong reasons.
If I tell you that young Adam inherited the three Shiant Islands from his father when he was 21 and gave them to his own son when he reached the same age, I fear it may annoy you. But the author is aware of all the issues which leap to mind, clearly loves this remote corner of NW Europe and is telling me a good deal I didn't know. Which is the point of other people's book choices.
Would it help, if I added that the Nicholsons are of Viking stock and that their clan is known to have held the islands in the Dark Ages until relieved of them by violence, murder, treachery etc some centuries ago? No, I thought not.
Adam's grandfather bought them back for £1,400 in 1948 from another writer, Sir Compton McKenzie, who was short of cash at the time. The same money invested in a Sussex farm or Tudor pile at the time, would now be worth....well, no, don't go there. But the Shiants have been uninhabited since 1901 and the solitude has been worth what economists call the opportunity cost.
Sea Room has incidentally taught me the difference between flotsam and jetsam, both subject to the laws of the sea as regards to finding them. Flotsam is what reaches the shore after falling overboard, jetsam is thrown overboard to lighten a vessel in bad weather.
I plan to use the distinction when I next write about a cabinet reshuffle, it will come in handy. But imagine, getting to the age of 62 - as I did this morning - without knowing the difference between flotsam and jetsam ! I have not felt so ashamed since I realised that I was over 40 and only just discovered Venice.
You haven't been there? Drop everything and go. I'm off to my birthday lunch with the family. We hope that Isabella will sleep under the restaurant table. She is five weeks old.
Footnote: Saturday's FT contained a complex account of the corporate structure of Richard Branson's Virgin empire, as if he really does stand a chance of getting hold of Northern Rock. Amazing! It reminded me of the late Alan Coren's joke, which i did not see in the obits this weekend.
Years ago before The News Quiz was professionalised as the domain of serious comedians, many journos appeared regularly - including me. Alan was fantastically competitive and walked off the stage quite fast if his side lost. But he was kind and, as Simon Hoggart wrote in the Guardian, generous with his jokes.
During the weekly recording of the programme panel members would push their luck - knowing the ruder offerings would be edited out. When the Branson hot air balloon deflated and crashed somewhere during a round-world trip Alan smuggled this on-liner on air. ''It just shows what happens when you put a prick in a balloon.'' We will indeed miss him.
