DIARY

Iam writing this in the far' north of Scot- land, the point at which mainland Britain topples into the north Atlantic and the next stop is the Arctic. Up here, they lump together all English people, whether they live in Dorset or Northumberland: we're all from 'down south'. The countryside is all mountains and rivers and, should you decide you'd like to visit the cinema, it will require a round trip of 212 miles to Inver- ness. It is as hard to do justice to the physi- cal beauty of the place as to exaggerate the depth of the crisis on the edge of which the rural community here is teetering. I have long since given up paying the slightest attention to the moanings of farmers about how hard their lives have become: the grotesque subsidies paid to cereal barons make the case absurd. But it takes only a couple of conversations with sheep farmers to appreciate the depth of their genuine despair. Even in rural Oxfordshire, farmers are living on Family Credit. In the Scottish Highlands, where farmers have been driven — literally — to giving away their sheep, you can smell the anxiety in the air. The other day I visited the clearance village of Rosal, home to 100 men, women and chil- dren until the Countess of Sutherland's ghastly agent drove them all off the land and destroyed their village because Cheviot sheep provided a better income than human beings. It is an eerie place. All that remains of the settlement is a few piles of stones, around which the inheritor sheep nibble at the thin grass. Unless something is done urgently to help hill farmers, even the sheep will have gone and the only bene- ficiaries of these new clearances will be the buzzards wheeling and whistling in the sky. With sheep being given away or dumped in mass graves, out of curiosity I called our local Tesco to see whether they had passed on the benefit of falling prices to their cus- tomers. Fat chance. Legs of lamb were priced at anything between £9 and £12. Sin- gle cutlets were on sale for £1, which is as much as some farmers are getting for the entire animal.

The local papers provide a certain cure for metropolitan jaundice. I have come across nothing recently to rival my favourite headline, in the Cork Examiner: `No chaos at Irish airports'. But the hot news in Aberdeen is that the city is to host the Cemetery of the Year competition. Quite how this competition will be organ- ised baffles the imagination. The Stornoway Gazette reports the hot news from Harris that 'Potatoes are being lifted and they are very tasty, especially with the herring we are now getting.' The paper's front page reveals the reality of the government's vaunted New Deal welfare-to-work pro- JEREMY PAXMAN

gramme. A participant who signed up for training had complained that instead of being taught dry-stone dyking, he had been `made to dig holes with an old soup pan'. This stung staff into explaining that 'the old soup pan' was a recognised tool for remov- ing water from fence-post holes. The inves- tigating authority accepted the organisers' version of events, commenting that 'it really is a pity that he [the trainee] had failed to take advantage of the opportunity being offered by the New Deal scheme'. Young people nowadays. . . .

Iexpect there will be much talk of the New Deal next week in Bournemouth. I've nothing against the town itself, beyond the mild puzzlement that a place to which so many people have retired doesn't support a better range of second-hand bookshops. Perhaps Bournemouthians are like Britt Ekland who, when asked on Desert Island Discs which book she would like to accom- pany the Bible and Shakespeare, replied that she'd be happy with a few magazines.

Booker Prize judge No, my real objection to the trip to Bournemouth, and the rest of the media's annual traipse around end-of-season holi- day resorts, is a sense that we have become participants in a fraud on the public. The extensive coverage is built on the belief that the political conferences matter, because they make party policy. This is just not true. There was once a time when at the very least they gave a good sense of the spirit of the party. Labour party conferences in par- ticular, whether it was Bevan calling unilat- eralism 'an emotional spasm', Gaitskell's vow to 'fight and fight again to save the party we love', or Kinnock's fiery denuncia- tion of Militant, brimmed with passion. Now, they just seem gatherings of the Undead. No doubt there will be one or two well-turned phrases in the next fortnight. But they will carry little of the emotional charge of history, because the conferences have become so tightly controlled. I don't blame the party bosses for using gavel-to- gavel coverage as a form of advertising. But I wonder whether there is any need for journalists to collaborate with them. There is a law at work: the grander the set, the less anyone has to say upon it.

And finally, as they used to say before ITV cleared the schedules for schlock, a word in praise of e-mail. Forget all the work ethic stuff about how it allows faster decision-taking, customer response, etc., etc. The real benefit of e-mail is access to jokes. You need only know one or two peo- ple who have a similar sense of humour to be pretty sure of getting a fresh supply of jokes every week, providing each of them knows one or two others, and so on. The following exchange, from transcripts of a real court case in Massachusetts, arrived the other day. The interchange went some- thing like this:

Attorney: Did you check the body for signs of life?

Pathologist: No.

Attorney: Did you check to see whether the body was breathing or not?

Pathologist: I did not.

Attorney: Did you check the pulse? Pathologist: I did not.

Attorney: So how could you be sure the patient was in fact dead?

Pathologist: Because his brain was in a jar on my desk.

Attorney: But he could, possibly, have been alive?

Pathologist: And probably practising law in Massachusetts.

The English by Jeremy Paxman is available through The Spectator Bookshop for £7.99 post free in the UK To order please call 0541 557288 and quote ref SP147.