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John MacGregor, the Secretary of State for Transport, is best known
for his illogical desire to privatise the railways and his boast that motorways
are good for the environment (see Feedback, 7 November). Lately he has been
at it again.

Launching The Good Roads Guide last month, MacGregor said: ‘Our national
road building programme itself benefits the environment . . . making towns
and villages more attractive places for their residents and visitors to
live in and enjoy. The verges and other land alongside our national road
network occupy an area the size of the Isle of Wight. Much of it is undisturbed
by humans and has become a nature reserve inhabited by insects, butterflies,
birds and small mammals.

‘Environmental considerations must play a full part in the design of
new roads. The Good Roads Guide shows how this can be done.’

Doesn’t it just. The front cover has a picture of a cutting on the M40,
which is described in the guide as ‘well sited’. The picture, as Friends
of the Earth points out, actually shows the M40 smashing its way through
the remains of the Aston Rowant National Nature Reserve – a Grade 1 site
of special scientific interest.

The guide also features the A30 Okehampton bypass, which it describes
as ‘well placed’. This one smashes its way through Dartmoor National Park.

* * *

Amid the bombing of Iraq, the atrocities in Croatia, the repression
in Haiti and the freezing Palestinians on Israel’s border, how welcome it
has been to have a simple, straightforward, old-fashioned good deed in the
news. The stories of the (mostly American) UN troops squelching warlords
and distributing food in Somalia have warmed the hearts of even the most
cynical journalists.

Which must be why so few of these journalists have mentioned that the
US’s biggest petroleum giants, Amoco, Conoco, Chevron and Phillips, were
granted oil rights to some two-thirds of Somalia by the dictator Mohamed
Siad Barre, who was toppled in 1991. Or that the World Bank, among others,
thinks Somalia could hold a lot of oil. Or that the anarchy that followed
Barre’s overthrow prevents the companies from getting on with the drilling.
Or that unless Somalia’s next ruler owes the US some favours, he may not
honour Barre’s promises. Or that Conoco, holder of some of the most promising
concessions, helped the US marines establish their humani-tarian beachhead
in Somalia. Or that former US president George Bush, who ordered the marines
in, is an oilman . . .

After all, everybody loves a good deed – and there’s nothing journalists
hate more than being called cynical.

* * *

Russia’s nuclear shipbuilding centre at Severodvinsk on the White Sea
has a special laboratory that breeds pets and pot-plants for the crews of
nuclear submarines, a local paper, the Sevenyy Komsomolets, has revealed.
Every year, it supplies the submariners with 105 potted plants, a dozen
birds and several aquaria. Their presence, the paper explained, helps the
crew deal with stress-related problems.

But care has to be taken in selecting livestock. Bullfinches, siskins
and goldfinches can live happily on a submarine, the paper says. Parrots,
however, fare extremely badly. Long John Silver, of course, never travelled
by submarine.

* * *

Those alchemists were barking up the wrong tree. Instead of trying to
convert things into gold, which has so far proved extremely difficult, they
should have tried to convert things into mineral water. This, The Observer
would have us believe, is much easier.

According to the 31 January issue of the newspaper, a ‘wonder machine’
invented by researchers at the Dounreay nuclear plant in Caithness ‘turns
toxic chemicals and Semtex into mineral water’. How is it done? The Observer
is shy about providing a full explanation. It only goes so far as to say
that the machine ‘converts all substances into water and carbon dioxide’.
A wonder machine indeed.

* * *

Most people associate voodoo with macabre rituals, headless chickens
and crazed people scampering around in a trance. What a surprise, then,
to find that Voodoo is really an acronym for a government research project
to evaluate new types of grease for the machinery on offshore oil rigs.
The idea is to try out ordinary vegetable oils such as rapeseed oil in the
hope that when they leak off rigs, they cause less harm to marine life than
mineral oils.

So Voodoo stands for ‘Vegetable Oils for Offshore Drilling Operations’.
If you want to know where the final ‘O’ comes from, you had best ring the
SOAFD (sorry, the Scottish Office Agriculture and Fisheries Department),
which has just given Voodoo the go-ahead. Feedback hopes that, despite its
name, the project remains jinx-free.

* * *

University press officers are getting excited about the hunt for the
top quark. The other day Feedback received a letter from an American university
(which, out of our renowned kindness, we will not name), breathlessly proclaiming,
‘You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, but the top quark is coming.’ No,
the university hasn’t found it, but its publicity-hungry press office is
offering one of its quark-hunting scientists to sound off on the possibility
that it might. Why this university rather than any other? Well, as the letter
boasts, ‘there are more scientists on our experiment than there are quarks
in the atom’.

Eh? Which atom is that, we wonder.

* * *

Reaction to Feedback’s item on the plight of staff at the Advisory Board
for the Research Councils (23 January) has been swift. A mole informs us
that it has caused mutterings at the Office of Science and Technology to
the effect of: ‘Keep the staff, sack the board.’ For those who do not know,
board members who would face the heave-ho include: the heads of Britain’s
five research councils, a couple of independent worthies and, as assessors,
representatives of the government departments who are fighting with the
OST over who runs Britain’s science.