At the weekends it was pretty much me watching movies on Ian’s TV, but in the weekdays there was a steady flow of traffic.Some nights it was the Johns, a bearded warlock and his friend the crop-circle expert, who came to format pamphlets on bizarre phenomena. They were ably assisted by Celia, the silver-voiced lady who ran the Eye’s lonely hearts column. Occasionally the office took on a night-club atmosphere as the Grovel columnist, Christopher Silvester, perfected his role as the poor man’s Sinatra at the office piano. Then there was the City journalist who only ever appeared as darkness fell and locked himself away in an office on the fourth floor. Around midnight the Kiwi hack Paul Halloran would lurch in with some giggling lovely in tow.
More often than not, it was Antonia de Sancha (whom Paul subsequently introduced to David Mellor). Then, later still, the performance poet Michael Horovitz would materialise. I was once sound asleep when Michael appeared at 4am in a string vest and floral boxers, dragging a tartan shopping trolley stuffed to the gills with poetry books he wanted to photocopy. As fast as David Cash, the Eye’s MD, confiscated Horovitz’s keys, an international poetry terrorist would slip him another set.Until today, Horovitz’s vest was the rudest awakening I had ever experienced – but the blanket silence that hung over my office this morning was more disturbing yet. I crawled from beneath the coats and stuck my head round the door: nothing I walked down two flights of stairs Total quiet. I reached the front door and, bracing myself, opened it a couple of inches.
Instead of a 12ft reptile launching itself at my jugular, there was a WPC staring at me crossly. The entire area was cordoned off owing to a double shooting on Hanover Street at 3am They’ve only just reopened it. For the first and, I dare say, the last time in my life, I’m the only person in my office to have done a full day’s work.. It’s been a good week for the food barons, but not necessarily a good week for food. The inquiry into foot and mouth disease is to be held in secret.
It’s been a good week for the food barons, but not necessarily a good week for food. The inquiry into foot and mouth disease is to be held in secret. Lord Haskins, chairman of Northern Foods, a major dairy and processed food supplier, is to be the Government’s new rural policy fixer, charged with sorting out the rural blight left by foot and mouth disease. Sir Don Curry, former head of the Meat and Livestock Commission, is to head the Food and Farming Commission. Sir Peter Davis, head of Sainsbury’s, is alongside.
Fine chaps all of them, but appointing a former Meat and Livestock Commission chairman to head the Food and Farming Commission is grossly insensitive. It has already raised suspicions that these bodies will find ways and statistics to defend the status quo. The meat industry has been associated with the worst UK food scandals in living memory – BSE and foot and mouth disease.
