✒Remember the John Major government? I thought at the time that seeing them at work was like watching Edward Scissorhands trying to make balloon animals. Now the Cameroons resemble Carl Fabergé decorating one of his famous eggs while wearing mittens.
Last November Theresa May sacked Brodie Clark, then head of the UK Border Force, for using more targeted risk-based controls. He had this crazy idea that it was a waste of manpower to treat every member of every school party as if they were potential terrorists. This week, as the situation gets worse by the day, Mr Clark looks like a visionary genius. Whose bright idea was Jeremy Hunt? And there can be very few Tory MPs who don't secretly think that Alistair Darling would make a better chancellor than George Osborne. Actually we might do even better by contacting JM Keynes via a ouija board.
✒The latest wheeze is a "John Lewis" pension scheme for some civil servants, a sort of pensions co-op. John Lewis is a resonant name for the British middle classes: good value, excellent service, reliable, driven by the fact that the employees have a stake in the firm's success. We thought so too, till this week. I won't bore you with the details: my wife waiting from 7am till 2pm for a washing machine that wasn't delivered, the promised explanation and apology that never came, the endless chasing round different phone numbers, then finally the woman in customer service who was snippy-verging-on-rude, blamed us, and through gritted teeth offered a goodwill gesture – they would waive the £19 charge for a two-hour delivery window, which after they'd missed a seven-hour delivery window did not seem generous.
When they finally turned up the fitters were pleasant and efficient. But we probably won't use John Lewis again for anything important, and I do feel for the poor sods ending up with a "John Lewis" pension.
✒Steve Pound, the nation's funniest MP, has been bombarding me with Tim Vine-type one-liners, many of which are unrepeatable. But some aren't: "I had a very happy childhood. Dad loved to put me inside a tyre and roll me downhill. Those were the good years"; "Roy Hodgson went shoplifting in a kitchenware store. I warned him he could be arrested. 'That's a whisk I'm prepared to take.'"
"The Canadian government has set up a lottery, only for people in the north. You have to be Inuit to win it." "I love eBay – I've sold my homing pigeon eight times." "I phoned Seaworld the other day. They told me, 'your call may be monitored for training porpoises.'" "I told my travel agent I wanted a trip to Paris. He said 'Eurostar?' 'Well, I've been on TV a couple of times.'"
"I've got a brilliant new guard dog. He won't let anyone in. He's a UK border collie." "'You won't like me when I'm angry. I back up my rage with documented facts and sources' – The Credible Hulk."
✒Last week we went to see a revival of Here by Michael Frayn at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, Surrey. This week we saw a revival of Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon at Richmond, Surrey. They're both about young couples in their first, cramped apartments, struggling to come to terms with deep personal differences and lack of closet space.
Both feature interfering older women; in Frayn's play, it's the landlady, in Simon's the bride's mother, played by Maureen Lipman. The pieces are very similar yet totally different. Frayn's is teasing, gentle, skating around what we mean by the words we use. Simon's is also about the nature of relationships, and is full of belly laughs. Frayn's, I thought, was like Wittgenstein trying his hand at comedy, Simon's as if the Marx Brothers had taken up philosophy.
We were with good friends of Maureen Lipman, so we popped round to her pleasantly furnished but tiny dressing room. Aptly, it was like the cabin scene in A Night at the Opera, without the two boiled eggs. Friends were jammed in sideways, up against the window, sitting on the floor, perched on the dressing table, or out in the corridor, as other members of the cast gave up trying to force their way in to say goodnight. Someone had a bottle of champagne, so we each got half an inch in a plastic cup. It must be a warm, cosseting way to end a day's work – I might try it at the Guardian's Westminster office.
✒Apologies for saying last week that there were too few books and songs about British roads. You have amply corrected me. Indeed, Pieter and Rita Boogaart's book A272, Portrait of a Road, is just now in its fourth edition and I'm not surprised. It's a lovely book, beautifully illustrated. Pieter is a Dutch Anglophile, who found the road – it runs from near Heathfield in Sussex to Winchester – a source of unending interest and discovery. There are a few other books about roads: Around the M60 by Peter Portland, for example, and The Bath Road by Charles Harper. And I may be the last person in Britain who doesn't know Billy Bragg's jokey adaptation of Route 66, called A13 Trunk Road to the Sea.
✒Labels: Avis Jenkins saw a sign in a Bedford shop window, "Piercing and Tattoos, while you wait". Martyn Partridge bought Waitrose spaghetti and meatballs, "two of your five a day". What would the other five be, he asks: "Brandy, chocolate eclairs, a cigar?"
Miles Fraser bought some Tesco orangeade, helpfully labelled, "allergy advice – no nuts". David Helton found this on a new Maytag fridge: "Leave the refrigerator door open while removing or installing filters." How could he not? The light would go out if he closed the door behind him.
