Imagine my surprise

To roast pig: first, catch the right sort of pig

The week's hit-and-miss tendencies sent me scurrying for Charles Lamb's Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, which describes the discovery of crackling. A Chinese swineherd accidentally burned down his house with his pigs in it and, as he inspected their incinerated carcasses, tasted them. When word of their exquisite flavour spread, people all over the district locked pigs in their houses and burned them down. Among those with question marks over their house-burning this week were the CIA, BAA and Madonna.

Unhappily for the residents of Damadola, a village in north-west Pakistan near the Afghanistan border, the CIA actually razed the houses of jewellery dealers and among the 18 killed, none was Ayman al-Zawahiri. They'd been hoping Osama's deputy was in one of them, talking eternity rings or whatever. But he wasn't.

The US Republican senator John McCain went on CBS to say, "We have to go where these people are, and we have to take them out."

There's a £14m tag on the head of Zawahiri, a fair price, I suppose, for one with the evil brain of al-Qaida in it. But stating the obvious here, £14m would come in very handy for just about everyone. What hard-up informer without information could resist giving any plausible story a whirl, given the desperation of those paying for it? Since everyone is now in the process of saving face, we'll never know how good the tip-off was. A senior Pakistani government official says it was rubbish. An intelligence officer insists Zawahiri had been in the village but the Americans were too slow off the mark to catch him.

Forget compassion. The issue Senator McCain appears not to have raised with himself, given his country's problems with intelligence, is prudence. If a critical US strategy in the war on terror is going where you think the people might be and taking out whoever happens to be there, what can we think except, are they mad? The problem isn't the size of the prize compared to the size of the sacrifice, but whether the sacrifice needed to be made in the first place.

It's precisely the question being asked by the village of Sipson, which BAA wants to raze to make way for Heathrow's third runway. Sipson is 855 years old. It has 700 homes as well as shops, pubs and a school, but it has to go, according to those who support R3, because, without a new runway, the consequences for the west London region are too awful to contemplate.

The Sipson residents' association argues that if the runway does get the go-ahead, not only will their village be wiped off the face of the earth, but they will end up on some scrapheap somewhere, forced from their homes but without the wherewithal to buy new ones. They've been guaranteed the market value of their houses as it stood in 2002, but 2002 was 10 years after publicity first caused their value to slump. "It's ethnic cleansing without the guns," says the association's chairman, Bryan Sobey.

He's summoning support from around the country to target the folly of increased air travel, given its cost to the nation's quality of life. But who's in charge of the nation's quality of life? BAA, not wanting to appear ugly, says it's a matter for the government and the government reckons the third runway will reap net benefits of more than £6bn. So which will get the thumbs-up? An ancient community wanting only to be allowed to survive, or a runway without which Heathrow will die? Well, if we call the airport roast pig, can we imagine a government not sacrificing a village full of houses for it? Why, I can even hear them summoning Senator McCain to take the people out.

Madonna, on the other hand, given a far simpler choice, really should not have sacrificed her cheeks for her husband. Not when she's the oldest person ever to have been nominated for a best pop act Brit award. An older woman needs a cheek. But we were shown photos of her at Nobu and there she was, cheekless, and good Lord, there she also was in Elle, saying she'd rather be fuller but her husband likes her gaunt. She exercises three hours a day to be the carved-out woman he craves. Imagine my surprise. A woman like her burning her house down for an old pig who, from memory, is as sculptured as apple sauce.

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