WASHED AND READY TO EAT

In what must surely be the weirdest news since we learnt that the Nazis trained dogs to speak , it’s been revealed that Burmese figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi was sustained through captivity by radio broadcasts from veteran DJ Dave Lee Travis . After his untimely departure from Radio One in the 1920s or sometime soon after, the Hairy Cornflake seemed to make his way back on air – this time for the BBC World Service. His ‘Jolly Good Show’ made Suu Kyi’s world more ‘complete’ according to reports. For all I know, the feisty democracy campaigner was up for playing snooker on the radio with DLT if the Burmese junta had given her an outside line. I am bracing myself for further revelations. Perhaps, in those dark hours when Nelson Mandela was held captive on Robben Island, he was comforted by the sound of Steve Wright in the Afternoon? The south Londoner’s chirpy characters helped him make light of what would otherwise be a grim situation. “It makes me SO ANGRY, I could throw the whole aparth...

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 ...