How good are your WW1 connections?

On the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, there's inevitably a lot of reflection on the 'great' war of 1914 -1918. Virtually every British publication has been preparing its own tribute or analysis. The Richmond Magazine is no exception.

The glossy freebie, already familiar to readers of Washed and Ready to Eat, normally survives on a staple diet of articles from local divorce lawyers and ads for preparatory schools. In the latest edition, however, they have gone to town in commemoration of centenary of the European conflict.

Who better to ponder the implications of WWI than the great-granddaughter of the Archduke whose death kicked the whole shooting match off?

It goes without saying that Her Serene Highness Princess Marie-Therese von Hohenberg is herself a recipient of The Richmond Magazine, living as she does in the upmarket south-west London district of St Margarets. We are introduced to her husband, the 'interfaith campaigner' Anthony Bailey OBE (apparently described by The Observer in 2007 as 'one of the most influential men you've never heard of'), and their son, Maximilian.

In typical style, the prose of the interview is just a little overblown.

"From the soil of calamity darker flowers sprang," writes magazine Editor Richard Nye, when he refers to the seeds of Hitlerism sown in the Treaty of Versailles and ultimately traced back to that 'tumultuous Balkan morn' of the assassination.

There's much talk of the couple's religious beliefs - 'faith is not a fortress to keep the infidel out; it is a bridge to believers on other shores' - as well as their welcome support for the beleaguered EU.

"Vienna may have lost its throne," comments Nye, "but deep within its melancholy ashes the European dream lives on."

Indeed it does. So much so, in fact, that Mr Bailey is pictured wearing what looks like traditional Austrian garb, despite the fact that he was born in London. He's really entered into the spirit of the thing. And the Princess? According to the editor, she brings the 'aroma of a vanished court'.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. If your local rag tries to fob you off with the tale of some anonymous Private Baldrick, point them in the direction of Richmond.

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...

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