Simon Hoggart's week

Hotel's fare in love and war

As Tony Blair flies back from Chateau Bee Gees to supervise the Northern Ireland talks, I bring news from the province which may say more about what is going on than any politics. Next month you will be able to buy a St Valentine's Day package, including a room, champagne, a red rose, a "sumptuous" dinner, plus full Irish breakfast (or "heart attack platter" as it is known in those parts) for only £100 per person at the Europa hotel, Belfast.

The Europa, proudly boasting that it is the most bombed hotel in the world, attacked even more often than the Commodore in Beirut! Maybe the adoring couple will look into each other's eyes over the celebrated Royal Barge Feast, a pleasure so often in the past interrupted by explosions and mayhem. Then they can retire to their room, clinking glasses before the fine view of west Belfast, which once offered the constant blaze of rifle fire. Mr Blair should take pride in this, and I am sure he will.

Last Tuesday's Today programme was noticed for the truculent interview given by John Prescott. Listeners may have been taken aback by Mr Prescott's implication that they weren't much interested in Saddam's execution; instead they wanted to hear about Labour's innumerable achievements.

What depressed me much more was an interview later with Sir Philip Green, the retail entrepreneur. He spluttered that he was fed up with having to train graduates from scratch. Some recruits had read subjects such as "ancient history" and "Russian art," he said incredulously. "What did you get from a subject that has got nothing to do with what you are doing?" he asked. Young people should start work for him at the age of 16 or 17, when they could be trained in PR, marketing, finance and working in-store, "without learning bad habits" - whether this meant sleeping in late, or thinking for themselves, he didn't say.

Sarah Montague wondered if they might want to study these subjects for their own sake, and for their personal development. She was batted aside. "You're one of those people who say, 'if you don't turn up with a piece of paper saying you're a genius [ he meant a degree, I suppose] you can't get a job'."

What a terrible picture he painted, of a country in which nobody studies Russian art, or ancient history, or Sanskrit, or modern English, mediaeval shipbuilding, or anything that doesn't improve the plumbing, rewire a house, or sell yet more cheap clothes in order to make Sir Philip Green even richer than he is.

We can all agree that the hanging of Saddam was appallingly botched, and the fact that his thousands of victims died in even more unspeakable circumstances is no excuse. (I was reminded of an Observer colleague, Farzad Bazoft, hanged on Saddam's orders almost 17 years ago. No one was on hand to film his departure from the world, dignified or otherwise, or to record any humiliations inflicted by his guards and executioners. But we hold ourselves to higher standards.)

It's just that I can't join in the general nose-holding, lip-pursing, sanctimonious disapproval of the people who watched the full film on the internet. Death is the one great experience that all of us , without exception, will share. To say we should show no interest in it is as ludicrous as saying we shouldn't be curious about what we will find at the end of any long journey.

It is a little like the tailback on a motorway where we find, when we reach the point, that the dreadful accident was on the other carriageway and the delay is caused by people slowing down to look. It's inconvenient, to be sure, but the spectators are not the "ghouls" routinely denounced; they are showing what is perhaps the most natural human interest of all.

Tasteless joke sent to me by a very anti-Bush American friend: there's a traffic jam in Baghdad. Someone dashes up to a driver's window: "Insurgents have captured George Bush and Dick Cheney, and if they don't get $10m in an hour they going to douse them in gasoline and set them alight!"

"Of course I'll help," says the driver, "how much are other people giving?"

"Oh, around a gallon, if you can spare it."

Compilations of old magazines are suddenly popular, and I was delighted to get The Best of Charles Buchan's Football Monthly in my stocking this year. I hadn't realised, but back in the early 1950s it was largely a middle-class organ, often read by boys who went to rugby-playing schools but wanted to keep in touch with their real love, Soccer (the word always had an honorific capital letter).

There are lots of pictures of lads in baggy shorts (they earned £10 a week, so few of them went on to own Ferraris and country estates, though John Barnwell of Nottingham Forest was part-owner of a laundrette, where he talked football to the customers, readers learned). There was a regular column by John Macadam, "Britain's leading sportswriter", who has a Leslie Phillips moustache and is wearing a silk dressing gown and cravat, not the image most modern football correspondents aim for.

There are ads: "Spurs star Eddie Baily smokes Craven A. 'I couldn't afford to smoke a cigarette that irritated my throat'." There's even a letter from a schoolboy called John Motson - the John Motson - suggesting matches between teams in different league divisions. (They do it already, John. It's called the FA Cup, and it's on today).

Your round robins are beginning to pour in, and I am grateful. This is from Yorkshire, it quotes more than 100 names (virtually none known to the couple who sent it on to me) and comes, I feel sure, from Guardian readers: "Our never completely successful composting toilet has been crushed, and now we have a bidet which serves as a unisex urinal. I continue to be concerned at the plight of the Palestinians and feel guilty about doing so little." I shall do a full rundown in a week or so. Keep them coming!

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