Diary

A CUT ABOVE OTHER MEDICAL AWARDS

HEALTH service managers who reduce waiting lists impressively are getting something very special for their efforts: a Golden Scalpel. Anthony McKeever, the civil servant spearheading the Department of Health's campaign to reduce waiting lists, wanted to give some 'small token' to those who had worked so hard to tackle the problem. Some 25 surgical scalpels, donated by a medical instruments firm and subsequently mounted in plastic frames, have been awarded. One went to a surgeon in Salisbury, Wiltshire, whose list previously outdid all other doctors for the number of patients waiting more than two years. 'He cleared them all through hard work and a bit of cash,' McKeever told the medical newspaper Hospital Doctor. But Harry Keen, Professor of Human Metabolism at Guy's Hospital, is not impressed. 'Unfortunately this is the age of gimmicks,' he says. 'If it works, fine. But I rather suspect that it will be used as a way of disguising problems like shortening one waiting list but lengthening another. I can't see that a gold scalpel is going to be much of a draw to doctors. What is needed is more money spent on patients.' The scalpels, it should be said, are not real gold, just suitably coloured. But then how real, you ask (cuttingly), are the reduced waiting lists?

THERE ARE Tories who miss her, there are those who want her back and there are those who cannot accept she ever left. One of the latter appears to be David Atkinson, MP for Bournemouth East, who last week at Prime Minister's Questions asked, 'if she will make a statement on the forthcoming CSCE summit in Helsinki'. According to Hansard, anyway.

I KNOW THAT GRUNT

The song of Monica Seles will not be heard in this land for another year, and now the mystery of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra grunter has been solved. It was the critic David Gutman, writing in Gramophone magazine, who first detected a snort just before the principal viola opens in the orchestra's recording of Mahler's Tenth symphony. He assumed the culprit was the conductor, Simon Rattle. But now Andrew Green, director of Music at the King's School, Macclesfield, has unearthed the snort's source. 'I happen to know that this addition to the score emanates not from the conductor, but from the BSO's principal viola, superbly recorded by EMI, who must have had a microphone under his nose,' he writes. His proof? 'He is my brother and I would recognise that snort anywhere.'

AND NOW (UNNGH]) ANOTHER STORY . . .

Marooned in Rio RIO de Janeiro is more or less back to normal, the Earth Summit over and best forgotten, and most of the delegates gone home. But not all. The Tucan Indians, who normally inhabit a remote part of the Amazonian jungle near the Colombian border, are still languishing in the replica of their village that they built in the city for the summit. The organisers who invited the Tucans to do this, as representatives of the indigenous peoples of South America, have failed to come up with the air tickets to get them home.

(OOOF]) Two French people and a baguette cycled slowly down a Gallic-looking lane on the front of Sunday's Observer magazine. This was for a travel special: 'Connoisseur's France - a four-week journey to our pick of motels and restaurants.' Which sounds a pretty realistic estimate, though the magazine's contention that 'slow and discerning' travel in France is better than 'fast and direct' seems somewhat academic in the circs.

LOVE ME, LOVE MY DOG

(AAARGH]) Research published in Dogs Today reveals that women see dogs as an aphrodisiac. A random sample of 77 females were shown three pictures of the same man. Three-quarters said the sexiest pose was the one with him holding a red setter. But an alarming one in four were most turned on by the same man holding back a rottweiler, while none found the man alone most attractive. Only one woman said she didn't like men or dogs. Dogs Today is so excited by these findings that it has commissioned a wider survey.

A DAY LIKE THIS

7 July 1922 Siegfried Sassoon writes in his diary: 'Walking home this evening along the embankment towards Westminster after half-a-bottle of Rhine-wine, I felt that I could write. I was at one with all the Whibleys and crapulous flushed adorers of Elizabethan prose. I bethought me, in that riverside dusk where the rain had ceased and the lamps were not yet lit - what did I actually bethink me? Ah well, I was very wise; and I'd been reading Lamb and Hazlitt (on Hogarth) and my style was rich and racy. And I'd been to the Soane Museum before tea, and had made a prolonged study of The Rake's Progress and The Election. I want to write poems as Hogarth painted humanity. Oh yes, I knew a hell of a lot about life after that half-bottle of Braunberger.'