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More on those infamous remarks of Michael Portillo MP, that in Britain
you get your A level because you work for it, but in any other country you
have it because ‘you bought it or because you were a friend of the minister’.

A contributor who wishes to be nameless points out any foreigner who
wants a British MSc degree can buy one for £14 000 plus the expenses
of living in London for a year. With a government unwilling to fund higher
education adequately, the trend is for universities to advertise degree
courses in non-European Union countries abroad – they can earn much higher
enrolment fees from non-EU students than from British or EU ones. Once the
students have paid that much money, lecturers feel reluctant to fail them
in their exams, and the pass rate is nearly 100 per cent.

Incidentally, our spellchecker appears to be sceptical of Portillo’s
enthusiasm for the ‘back to basics’ campaign. It thinks his name ought to
be changed to ‘bordello’.

* * *

Howls of derision were heard rising in newsrooms last month when science
journalists opened their copies of The Rising Tide. This report, on how
to get women into science, was written by the Committee on Women in Science,
Engineering and Technology for William Waldegrave, the science minister
(see This Week, 5 March). On the first page was a quotation from Shakespeare.
How it came to be included is a mystery to the report’s authors. We reprint
it in full: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the
flood, leads on to fortune.’

* * *

Waldegrave declined to be present at the launch of The Rising Tide,
but he did appear in public elsewhere on the same day, wearing the wrong
clothes. He was at the annual bun fight of the Institution of Electrical
Engineers, at which black tie and decorations are de rigueur. Waldegrave
managed only a lounge suit and muted blue tie. ‘I apologise for being improperly
dressed,’ he said. ‘But in the current climate this is a relatively minor
fault for an MP.’

After he had made his speech and left, Alan Rudge, a director of British
Telecom and this year’s president of the institution, explained that the
minister had been wearing his inappropriate garb because of the customs
of a select group of people who meet in Westminster. ‘It’s no longer acceptable
to be seen in a bow tie on the front benches,’ he said.

* * *

Australian forthrightness can pay dividends. Take the nation’s current
campaign for safer driving. At the roadside there are billboards with complete
car wrecks bolted to them, accompanied by statements like ‘Not even opening
all windows and turning up the radio could keep him awake’ and (near a Snowy
Mountains ski resort) ‘Skied all day, drank all night, killed the next day’.

This direct approach seems to work. The accident toll on the roads over
the recent Christmas period was the lowest for many years.

* * *

The 1994 edition of WRTH, the World Radio TV Handbook (published by
Billboard Books), arrived through the mail recently. At first it looked
useful but dull, with 600 pages of small print listing every radio and TV
station in the world, along with their transmission frequencies and contact
addresses. But before putting it on the bookshelf Feedback had a quick flip
through the adverts. These turned out to be quite an eye-opener.

‘What are you missing?’, asks one from a box number in New Jersey. Its
‘confidential frequency list’ gives the transmission frequencies used by
organisations that prefer to keep their frequencies secret. The list covers
normal spoken broadcasting and the radio transmission of fax and electronic
mail. It promises the chance to listen to the giant USAF Globemaster transport
plane ferrying troops to the world’s hot spots, or coastguards monitoring
daring rescues at sea. Or you can hunt down criminals with Interpol from
your armchair and test your decoding skills on the mysterious numerical
gibberish containing spy messages.

After reading about Bill Clinton’s troubles over phone calls allegedly
made to lady friends, Feedback feels obliged to warn the President of something
else the advert promises for its cover price of just $23: ‘Listen to President
Clinton on Air Force One’.

* * *

The British government still doesn’t understand what Maastricht is all
about, more than two years after John Major signed the treaty that created
the European Union. It is paying two researchers nearly £100 000
to find out.

Kenneth Dyson and Kevin Featherstone of the University of Bradford ‘aim
to identify the major players in the negotiations and the bargains which
they struck’, according to the university’s newsletter. The Economic and
Social Research Council, which is funding the study, has given them two
years to find out.

* * *

Kay Martin, a secretary to a New Zealand MP, got the fright of her life
a few weeks ago. According to the Auckland Sunday Star, she and a friend
were chatting over a drink when they heard a chicken squawking. The bird
sounded in some distress, so they went outside to investigate, thinking
perhaps that it had escaped from one of the neighbours. But there were no
chickens anywhere.

Then Martin realised with horror that the sound was coming from her
own kitchen – coming, in fact, from the oven, where she had put a chicken
in to roast half an hour earlier.’ It was as if it was shrieking at me from
its grave,’ she says. ‘It was so bizarre I just froze.’

As they approached the oven, the squawking reached a crescendo. They
took the tray out, and as the chicken began to cool the squawking died away.
Martin chopped the neck off and threw it in the sink. She noticed that the
vocal chords were intact. ‘Steam was coming up the neck from the stuffing,’
says Martin, and this had caused the dead bird to squawk. She has not cooked
chicken since.