lKEEP your nose out of Zimbabwe's affairs, president Robert Mugabe tells Britain as attacks on anti-government demonstrators in his country by war veterans wielding axes and steel bars are condemned by us as 'thuggery orchestrated from on high.' Yes, let us keep our nose out -- and our foreign aid that this tinpot dictator squanders.

lTHE cannibalistic lunacy of feeding cows to cows was responsible for the BSE crisis and the devastation of the British beef industry. But now the situation is slowly on the mend, what do we find? Farmers are at it again, feeding cow products to calves because it's cheaper than their mothers' milk which is sold. Madness! And when another mad cow plague ensues, will we have the farmers bleating yet again for us to bail them out instead of them paying the price of their greed and folly themselves? lWhat'll they think of next? Council bosses are using satellite tracking devices to find out where their dustcarts are. But while awed by this state-of-the-art science, some of us would think it more useful if this spy-in-the-sky technology could be used to make the binmen put our wheelies back where they came from -- rather than always leaving them blocking our drives.

lMPs, who can draw as much as £32,000 a year in pension money, have called for a 25 per cent rise in their retirement dosh and millionaire Cabinet minister Lord Falconer has told OAPs, who have just got a weekly rise of 75p, that he could get by on benefits of £93 a week. I think, therefore, the occasion arises for one or two of our fitter senior citizens to take themselves down to Westminster and drop one or two of their free bags of coal on the skulls of these overpaid boneheads who imagine they are poor and the poor are well-off -- even if many of our moaning pensioners are doing all right.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.