Diary

MEAT-FREE BUT STILL SWALLOWING MONEY

One feature of the Needy Nineties is the abrupt decline of some of the liberal pressure groups that thrived during the last decade. After the troubles of the Green Party and the anti-fur campaigners Lynx, now the venerable Vegetarian Society is looking rocky. After much rumbling, the society has just lost its director of 18 months' standing, Chris Cottom. This comes as the charity predicts its deficit may be more than pounds 100,000 this year - and although it insists there's no decline in the 20,000 membership, rates have been reduced from pounds 20 to pounds 14 a year. The financial trouble seems to be connected with the society's glossy magazine, The Vegetarian, whose losses mean that it will be withdrawn from public sale and will now appear, quarterly, to members only. One estimate suggests the magazine has been losing as much as pounds 10,000 an issue. Yesterday Phillip Lloyd, the society's new co-director, said it was facing 'a quite serious financial deficit', though some funds remain in the bank. Alan Long, a former member, accused the society's council of being 'spendthrift and secretive' and of squandering 'about pounds 100,000 in charity money in 1992 on (the magazine's) ruinous launch into this market'. 'They couldn't,' he snorted, 'run a samosa stall in an Indian bazaar.'

AIRLINE - a tale of everyday aviation folk. Chapter One: a world-famous balloonist wins pounds 600,000 in a British Airways 'Spot the Dirty Tricks' competition. Tonight's episode, live from the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, is titled 'Reconciliation?' Both Lord King and Richard Branson are due to appear to see who wins the 'best transatlantic carrier' prize at the Executive Travel Airline of the Year awards. Let's hope the judges have the wit to make them share it.

SHORT CHECK-UP

Nigel Short's advantage in the world chess eliminator against Jan Timman, being played in Spain, is, of course, due in some measure to his exhaustive research into Timman's technique. All his techniques. Short has obtained a copy of Secret Love, by the Dutch feminist Laurie Langenbach. This autobiographical novel is an account of the author's passionate affair many years ago with a chess player, clearly identifiable as Timman. In a recent interview in the Dutch edition of Playboy Timman confesses: 'It's all true. She didn't make anything up.' Short has had some of the book translated for his purposes, but he regrets that the English version runs out at the point where the Timman character invites the Langenbach character back to his pad, to mate a number of other people simultaneously.

EAGER as ever to draw your attention to the totally unacceptable in modern art, we're grateful to the reader who rings to tell us of Jason Brooks's painting

in the new Paton Gallery in Hackney, east London, of a sausage wearing a helmet. Its title? 'Painting for Veggies and Dykes.'

BOOKIES' BOOK BET

When the going gets tough, the tough sometimes turn to bingo. Following the example of newspapers as illustrious as the Times and the Sun, next month the august publishing house Faber and Faber will launch the 'Millionaire Book Tower'. It's a simple attempt to flog 30 titles from the back catalogue, involving an easy competition whose winner gets to select a book from the aforesaid tower of 100 volumes. If the chosen book doesn't contain a cheque for pounds 10,000, it will have one for pounds 1m. The most intriguing aspect of the plan is that if the pounds 1m book (a one-in-a-hundred chance) is picked, it will be Ladbroke's, not Faber, that coughs up. Faber has placed pounds 18,000 with the bookmakers, at odds of 68 to 1, on someone winning the big prize. The books you have to buy are mainly familiar classics, including the cat poems of Faber's most eminent former employee, T S Eliot (who probably wouldn't turn in his grave), and just two by women: Wendy Cope and Sylvia Plath.

CALIFORNIA news, courtesy of the New Scientist: a biotechnologist, Kary Mullis, has founded a company called StarGene, which hopes to make use of the polymerase chain technique of gene duplication to enable people to buy bits of rock stars. The star need merely give a couple of hairs: one of the applications so far discussed is the Mick Jagger Lips Bracelet.

A DAY LIKE THIS

27 January 1895 Max Beerbohm writes to Robert Ross from New York: 'This is one page to hope that you are happy and well, and to implore you not to look after Reggie Turner while I am away. He is very weak and you, if I remember rightly, are very wicked. Also you are a delightful person to be with and just calculated to lead poor Reg astray without intention. Do not see too much of him. I wish he could get into a good ecclesiastical set and become good again, as I am sure he very soon would. Also keep Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) away from him. Bosie is more fatal to Reg than you - if anything. All this is quite serious. I really think Reg is at a rather a crucial point of his career - and should hate to see him fall an entire victim to the love that dare not tell its name.'