By means of an extremely cheap postcard, a correspondent has excitedly drawn my attention to the forthcoming Tour de France next July, warning of the danger of cyclists getting lost on the Cork leg of the race. Why? Because, this fellow tells me, his tears of laughter obviously affecting his writing hand, the Cork signposting will naturally refer to "De Tour de France" and "this will lead unsuspecting foreign cyclists to DETOUR all over the county!"
A postcard stamp costs only 28p, but even so, it is often a complete waste of money.
Right. I read that newly-wed British Tory leader William Hague and his bride Ffion Jenkins have very organised plans for their marriage. According to William, "We are going to have a real marriage - not just one that passes as ships in the night." The agenda William and Ffion have agreed involves spending every Sunday, one other weekday evening and one weekend in four together. They also plan to take two joint holidays annually. The total projected "quality time" together comes to 111 days annually.
More experienced couples than William and Ffion will wonder if the marriage can bear the strain of such intimacy. The seriously experienced may feel that an agenda based on agreed time apart, separate holidays and at least one Sunday a month spent in spouse-free seclusion would be much more likely to succeed.
Even more romantically-minded people, however they delight in young love and its dreams, will be inclined to see something dreary and depressing in the Hague Convention. They will talk of there being something sterile in the notion of carefully carving up one's time in exact, agreed proportions, in order to create glorious, mutual, shared delight. In these talks, the words "spontaneity" and "surprise" will be notable by their absence.
There is something gloomy, too, in the thought of William and Ffion checking their diaries together on Sunday morning, calculating "together-times" adhered to, missed or overdue, agreeing the compensations to be made before the end of the calendar month, and realising they have only 17 minutes left to get through the morning papers (together) before separately checking their separate answerphones and then regrouping for a 28-minute lunch.
Personally, I am more concerned by William's choice of metaphor in his assertion that he and Ffion will have " a real marriage - not just one that passes as ships in the night."
This old-fashioned metaphor refers back to a time when the shipping lanes were a lot less bright and crowded than they are today, when ships passed each other unseen and unheard during the hours of darkness. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to travel on the high seas at night-time without regularly encountering old friends on cruise ships passing right alongside, with half the ocean lit up by giant on-board arc-lights, and flirtatious ship-to-ship banter enlivening the small hours on all sides. Where has William been?
He may in fact have been attending James Cameron's new film, Titanic. Certainly, William's recent ship-related soundbites suggest as much. Defending the Tory policy that Britain should not consider joining the European single currency for another 10 years, last week he said: "It was inevitable the Titanic was going to set sail, but that does not mean it was a good idea to be on it."
This is the sort of remark that gives hindsight a bad name. It was a perfectly good idea at the time to be on the Titanic, particularly if one were travelling first-class. No one could have predicted the iceberg.
Meanwhile, as the newly-wed William Hague obsesses with ships, the Labour Party's soon-to-be-unwed Robin Cook appears to be more involved with aeroplanes, or at least airports. Last August he ended his 28-year-old marriage to his wife Margaret in a VIP room at Heathrow Airport (as they were about to go on holiday together). And on Sunday he announced to the press waiting at Edinburgh Airport that he intended to divorce his wife and marry his mistress, Gaynor Regan.
It may be that Robin Cook is merely hoping to alleviate Britain's unemployment problem, guided by the late Sir James Goldsmith's assertion that when a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy. Or perhaps, through the airport tactics, he just wants to draw attention to the fact that it is Ms Regan, and not Mrs Cook, who is now recognised by the Foreign Office as having the rights of travel (and access and residence) usually reserved for the Foreign Secretary's spouse. Still, many would say that Robin Cook's airport diplomacy skills are not what they should be.
