DIARY
he media have inspired many myths about South Africa. One is that the inde- pendence given to four homeland states is bogus. Earlier this year I visited Bophuthatswana. There are no South Afri- cans in the administration. Cabinet minis- ters told me they longed for international recognition. That would enable them to borrow money from international funds like the World Bank. As it is they have to make up four per cent, but only four per cent, of their budget from South Africa. Since independence Bophuthatswana has done wonders with irrigation, growing rice and other crops on land previously thought Infertile, and I saw no outward signs of serious poverty. Its population of three million is more than the combined popula- tions of the internationally recognised Swaziland and Lesotho, which are far more dependent on South Africa. The British ambassador refuses to visit Bophuthats- wana on the grounds that it is not a genuinely independent state, but if he thinks it is part of South Africa why doesn't he go there? Bophuthatswana has 80 per cent of the world's platinum. If we apply sanctions against South Africa our refusal to recognise the independence of Bophuthatswana will be damaging if South Africa retaliates. Denial of platinum would be a killer for Western industry with the only alternative large supplies available Coining from Russia. I found the Bophuthatswana ministers far from subser- vient to South Africa but engaged in fighting them to get their boundaries ex- tended. They have their own black police force and army, which I saw. The govern- ment was elected in properly conducted elections with a large majority but there is an active parliamentary opposition unlike in those one-party black countries so an- xious to impose sanctions on South Africa. Bophuthatswana does not want sanctions but wants South Africa as a whole to have genuine power-sharing, which it does not see as necessarily coming from a one man, one vote system in a unitary state. If the BBC were to do an honest programme on Bophuthatswana, supposing it is still cap- able of objectivity, it would be an eye- opener, but it would make a dent in the BBC's anti-South African government propaganda; doubtless that is why they won't do it.
Early for lunch in Whitechapel High Street I stopped to look at Nicholas Hawksmoor's glorious Christchurch in Spi- talfields. It was pitiful to see this beautiful b. utlding, badly hacked about by Christians In the 19th century, almost derelict inside where notices pathetically appealed for funds for restoration. My lunch with WOODROW WYATT American-owned Sedgwick International, the second largest insurance brokers in the world, was in somewhat different sur- roundings. Modern is not always bad and the use of glass internally was dramatic. All offices can be seen by the passer-by right through from side to side. This was not, I was assured, so that the workers could be watched all the time and be afraid of being caught slacking. It was to make everyone feel one with another. In the centre of this vast and elegant concourse moving stair- cases ran rapidly from top to bottom with no one on them. When I asked why, I was told by one of my hosts, Mr White-Cooper, that the lifts were easy to get at and many were afraid of vertigo induced by the height and exposed nature of the moving stairs. Rashly, as I am terrified by heights, I asked to go down on them and wished I hadn't, nearly tripping as I stepped on the head of each section. Mr White-Cooper was as patient with me as he had been when- I explained the problems of South Africa to him at lunch, at the end of my dissertation inquiring if he had ever been there. 'I lived there for 27 years.'
Ihad waited decades to see Newbolt's `Ten to make and the match to win — A bumping pitch and a blinding light.' I also got drenched in the rain at Lord's on Satur- day as Kent failed by two runs to equal the Middlesex score, having sportingly not demanded a postponement for bad light. But did Kent really lose? Kent's last stroke produced two runs. Before the fielder could throw the ball back to the wicket an unruly crowd, though repeatedly begged by loudspeaker not to, swarmed all over the ground. If the fielder had not been prevented from throwing the ball back to `Vote early. Vote in triplicate.' the wicket there might have been an overthrow producing in the excitement an extra three runs and victory for Kent. Reading the scoreboard in the gloom, I remembered when I was six my governess took me to the Oval to watch my cousin R.E.S. Wyatt playing for Warwickshire against Surrey. (He is the oldest surviving English Test captain, first captaining Eng- land against Australia in 1930 at the Oval in Jack Hobbs's last Test.) When I got home my governess reported that I had been unable to read the scoreboard, which my father, convinced of my incurable idleness, ascribed to my habit of asking others to do for me what I could do for myself. There was no apology when an oculist said that 1 would never be able to read a scoreboard at a County ground without spectacles. With one serviceable eye left I congratulated myself on reading the scoreboard easily last Saturday despite it being almost impossible to follow the ball along the ground.
0 ne of the most remarkable men in England is Dr Hugh Sinclair, of Magdalen College, Oxford. Now an enthusiastic 76, he has spent his life researching into what human beings eat, thinking there are quite enough organisations studying the best diet for animals. It was he who first established the connection between an excess of satu- rated fats and the rate of deaths from coronary diseases, in which we hold the world record. Fish and chips cooked in animal fats or stale oil are killers. His work was the inspiration of the COMA report, issued by the Ministry of Health last year, recommending a sharp cut in the intake of saturated animal fats and the replacement of them by polyunsaturated fats as found in many margarines, sunflower oil, fish and so forth. Dr Sinclair gave his house and grounds at Sutton Courtenay in Oxford- shire to establish an International Institute of Human Nutrition and I, at sea among the scientists whose qualifications awe me, am on its Council of Management. Dr Sinclair nobly makes up the deficiencies in running the laboratory with his dwindling personal fortune and the grants he can squeeze from interested bodies. The Insti- tute is now researching into the beneficial effects on multiple sclerosis of fish-oil supplements. Dr Sinclair, the brilliance of whose lifetime work is now world- recognised, and his staff could dramatically help the human race if they had a bit more money. About £3 million would do. Failing that, the situation in which those in the United Kingdom reaching 45 years have an average expectation of life only 2.7 years more than those who reached 45 in 1841 will continue.
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