WASHED AND READY TO EAT

Big conference at the Emirates Stadium in London next week promoting Poland as a good place to invest. The key note speaker is Zhao Jianping, who's Vice President of the China Development Bank. If someone had told me twenty years ago that the Chinese would be coming to London to celebrate the market opportunities in Eastern Europe, I'd have responded politely that they needed a check up from the neck up. How times change.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the story about tube announcer Emma Clarke (who's been sacked for recording spoof messages on her website) is the fact that she's not at all posh in real life. I saw her on the news and she comes from up north somewhere. Her cut-glass accent on the underground - "in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, signal failures hardly ever happen" - is all put on. It's a case of My Fare Lady. They've recently introduced posh announcements on the 281 bus route between Tolworth and Hampton in south-west London, but I think the messages are lost on the people who are travelling. In reality, they need to record stuff like: "Get off da bus now innit cos da feds is checkin ur passes at kingston."

In this life One thing counts In your tum Large amounts Breads like these Are bound to please You gotta Pitta Pocket or two You've Gotta Pitta Pocket or two Ok, I've got it out of my system now. Never to be repeated. Please do give this blog another chance at some point in the future.

My fermented and dry-cured Iberian sausage is not only rather tasty, but it also has a fine pedigree. These Spanish porkers are well fed. (These days, it's not enough to know what food you're eating. You need to know what food your food ate.) "Wild plants, lush pasture and, above all, the acorns that fall from the trees provide the food they need to ensure their meat reaches Penalbo's high quality standards." Above all, the acorns. Note that the acorns weren't industrially collected. No. They fell naturally from the trees. One at a time, presumably. And some pig stood underneath with an open snout. A more idyllic picture of Dehesa in south-east Spain is certainly hard to imagine. And if I take the sausage out of the fridge half an hour before I eat it, I will "appreciate all the taste and aroma of this gastronomic delight." Unfortunately it comes at a gastronomical price.

The news that the whole country's personal data has gone missing is rather disturbing. It seems as if HM Revenue & Customs decided to send a couple of disks in the internal post to the National Audit Office and they ended up going walkies. Which begs a couple of questions. What kind of disks can hold the data of several million families? I presume we're not talking about three-and-a-half-inch floppies. And what envelope did they go in? My bet is that it was one of those orange internal ones where you cross out your name and put the name of the new recipient in the box underneath. Someone scrawled NAO, but their handwriting wasn't too good.

I was intrigued by this poster from South West Trains that warns people about the perils of fare dodging. The idea is to deter would-be criminals with news of a shocking fine. When I first read the message, I assumed £160.70 to be their standard return fare from London to Leatherhead if travelling before 9.30 in the morning. You certainly wouldn't get much change from that kind of figure if you were travelling from Birmingham.

"Oh no, it isn't," I hear my readers cry. But this poster in Wimbledon, south London shows how wrong you are. Ross Kemp is joining Bobby Davro for a short panto season in Snow White . The soap star and comic impressionist will be starring alongside 'Radio 2 Musical Theatre Voice of the Year', Aimee Atkinson. I expect she must be Ron Atkinson's daughter. If you encounter a more bizarre collection of thespians in another UK panto, just send the details to me at the email address above. I'll feature them on Washed and Ready to Eat .

Regular readers may remember my problems with the Reuters News Alerts service. For some reason, all the stories I'm sent involve either Molotov cocktails or train derailments. I'm still waiting for the one where a Molotov cocktail has caused a train derailment, but I'm sure it must come up eventually. Reuters are also scanning readers' correspondence from the letters pages of publications around the world. For their daily alert, they only select the ones that have the most universal interest value. Take today's link, for example: DEAR Editor THERE is no point in upgrading petrol stations into a one-stop centre, if the equipment that delivers petrol is not maintained. I had a bad experience at the Petronas petrol station at Jalan Maarof recently. I stopped at the station for a full tank of petrol. Normally, the petrol pump will stop automatically when the tank is full. But on that day, the petrol started to pour out of the tank. I removed the nozzle and called t...

... they were giving out free packets of dog food. I don't own a pooch, but I took the promotional gift anyway, as I'm a great believer that you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Or should that be a gift dog? Well, anyway, it's in the cupboard at home now. Will come in useful in the event of a terror attack by al-qaeda. Or I'll save it for when I'm an OAP on a reduced income.

I recently received a notification from British Gas that I was £0.03 in credit. Things like this always annoy me, because I guess it costs them the equivalent of £0.30 to tell me about it by mail. Yesterday, the cheque arrived. I'm not joking. They spent another 30p to return the 3p surplus to me. I'm looking forward to paying it in at the bank. I'll get the bus. It only costs £2.

Nothing better than a trip home on the tube in the company of respected freebie The London Paper . It made November 6th pass all the quicker. First of all, we must be looking at the only publication this side of Istanbul to conduct a vox pop survey among young women and find a 2:1 majority in favour of moustaches being sexy. A few pages earlier, the paper poses the question: "Should young women take more care about how much they drink?" Someone called Jude Akpan replies: "The rate young women indulge in alcoholic beverages is becoming embarrassing indeed. They should place a lid on their excesses." The bizarre and archaic sentence construction of supposedly real Londoners is clearly becoming embarrassing indeed. They should also place a lid on their excesses when they speak to journalists. I particularly enjoy the paper's regular Lovestruck column, in which people who've fleetingly flirted on trains and in parks describe their brief encounter. The id...

Comments tonight from government minister Hilary Benn on the likely flood surge expected in Eastern England: "And it's really important, keep away from the sea because as well as the storm surge there will also be waves and this is dangerous and people need to keep away from it."

It's always disappointing when your image of a respected profession is shattered. Picking up a copy of the latest BMA News - the house mag for UK doctors - I find it to be depressingly tabloid. We learn about a recent study by a psychiatrist called Brendan Kelly, who's investigated the pressing subject of romantic fiction. The Dublin-based shrink, who clearly has too much time on his hands, has found that GPs and casualty doctors are the types of medics most likely to feature in the Mills & Boon style novels. Later in the same edition, there's a competition to win a DVD set of the American medical drama House . Next week: canteen food in hospitals. Like it or loathe it? Text Grub to 24384.

... the BBC for this story about priests potentially going over the drink-drive limit on communion wine. How much are they knocking back for crying out loud? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7076134.stm

Mrs W and I purchased a new Dyson today. Because the company shows the new machines being dropped from a great height on their TV commercials, I wanted to check for damage. Unfortunately, it was all boxed up, so I'm just going to have to take my chances.

I may already have mentioned this idea on the blog, but I'm getting so old now, I can't remember. And it's such a good money-spinner that I think it's worth repeating in any case. If you go to Tesco, they have those coin-operated trolleys that are infuriatingly secured to one another with chains that you insert into slots. There's usually two minutes of swearing as you try to disentangle one from another. In fact, people will do anything to avoid battling with the mechanism - particularly when they're returning the trolley after loading up their motor. What often happens is that people do an informal deal. Instead of reinstalling their trolley in the park and retrieving their pound coin, they simply hand the vehicle to another shopper who's just arrived in exchange for a coin. Perhaps you've done this yourself? Anyway, here's the clever bit. Tesco trolleys take both euros and pounds. So here's what you do. You insert a euro in the slot wh...