FLAT EARTH

Yasser, that's

my baby!

CALAMITIES in the Middle East - where there is an endless store - are greeted by the custom of towealwell, in which you wail, rake your cheeks with your finger-nails and tear out your hair. This unkind cartoon in the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat marked the arrival of Yasser Arafat's first child.

China syndrome

POOR Sir Robin McLaren, formerly our man in China who negotiated with the Chinese over the 1997 Hong Kong handover. He is not enjoying his retirement as much as he might have expected. "What seems to be the problem?" I overhear a concerned friend ask over tea and buns on Buckingham Palace lawn.

"It's the Chinese," laments the distinguished sinologist, unexpectedly. "I keep dreaming that Lu Ping [Peking's negotiator] is giving me more gifts of paintings. And all night I dream that I'm still negotiating with them over Hong Kong."

I have a dark suspicion that this substantiates the theory - was it Jung's? - that all dreams are predictive. Not, of course, that Sir Robin will be sent back to go 12 rounds with Lu Ping again; but that he - indeed all of us - will one day soon have undreamt-of opportunities to regret the deal that was done in 1984.

BEING no great lovers of French bombs, and furthermore always brought up to be polite to women, we were surprised to feel a sharp pang of disappointment on hearing about the 1,000lb high-explosive bomb which the French did not, after all, drop down a young lady's chimney last Sunday morning.

You may remember last week's rather confused reports that the French air force, acting on orders from L'Empereur Chirac himself, bombed the house of a "close associate" of the Serbian warlord Radovan Karadzic in the Bosnian Serb capital of Pale last Sunday.

Then it was put about that the "associate" was none other than Radovan's daughter, the lovely, plump and moustachioed Sonja. You remember Sonja - the First Lady and unquestioned social queen of the Republika Srpska, whose wedding le tout Pale (read le tout beyond the pale) turned out for recently. Acting as her father's major-domo, issuing or denying permits and passes on whim, and surrounded by a court of tittering young musclemen, Sonja has made many enemies.

So what with one thing and another, it came as a bit of a blow to learn that there was no French bomb at all, just some loud sonic booms, by which Paris meant to frighten and overawe the Serbs. We can only hope the French pull their punches in the same way on Mururoa atoll in six weeks.

Wobbly column

WELL, well, well, what's got into William? William Safire, the New York Times's most eminent commentator, poured scorn on John Major last Thursday, comparing him unfavourably to Jacques Chirac and Margaret Thatcher.

"Thatcher happened to be with George Bush at the critical moment of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. She admonished him "not to go all wobbly"... Had John Major been Bush's guest at that fateful moment, 'Go all wobbly!' would have been the advice, and today the world would be threatened by Iraqi weapons tipped with nerves and nukes."

Without pausing for breath, he then praises Chirac for throwing down the gauntlet to the Serbs. "That flushed Mr Clinton out from under his Oval Office desk."

All of which is fine, possibly even true, but it sounds strange coming from a man who himself is refusing to be "flushed out" from under his Times desk. Singapore's Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong has challenged Safire to come to Singapore and personally debate "universal values" with him, after Safire denounced the dreary island shopping paradise as "a dictatorship". Safire won't go, muttering vaguely that "it would be no fun".

"He's chickened out," cried Goh Chok Tong, even his name taking on, to our ears, the sound of a cock crowing on a dungheap.