RADIO

In the early 1950s Derek Tangye and his wife Jeannie were walking along the cliffs near Lamorna, above Mount's Bay in Cornwall, when they saw a buzzard drifting overhead.

Jack Barker avoids the crowds in Egypt - and meets a Casanova

The writers of `Drop the Dead Donkey' are separate people. Honestly. But they can't seem to disentangle themselves. Jasper Rees met them at their Hat Trick HQ

North Country Fair: Travels Among Racing Pigs and Giant Marrows by Harry Pearson Little, Brown, pounds 14.99; Pete Davies finds himself in stitches over the eccentricities of rural England

At Imilchil in the Atlas Mountains, they do a brisk trade in camels and wives. By Jack Barker

Lake Orta in northern Italy is a hidden treasure. Valerie James found it a perfect spot for watching the world go by

About 600 miles east of Istanbul and just about dead centre of Turkey is the extraordinary region of Cappadocia. It has an arid, lunar landscape pock-marked with strange rock formations where, from what my guide book told me, people live today as they did thousands of years ago in caves built into the rock. It sounded so intriguing that my beach companion and I roused ourselves from our sunbeds and, leaving our seaside resort, headed for the bus station.

Born to run: A cross between a horse and a zebra may revolutionise equine pursuits

The Hour of the Pig

DAVID Bowen's article "Terminal Failures" (Business, 3 December) presents a dismal catalogue of errors in Britain's attempts to grapple with information technology.

As I think back, it strikes me that much of the time I have spent at table with my family has been spent not on high-minded conversations such as, what is the capital of Bolivia? (when they were young), or, why hasn't one of you got the guts to rid us of the Wilsons, the Greenaways, the Charauds of this world? but on such mundanities as: Will you please get your elbows off the table? Don't speak with your mouth full (darling). Cut your meat properly. The napkin is made to sit on your lap. And (most frequent), What would your grandmother say if she saw you eating like a pig? The grandmothers have shifted, but not the message. And oddly enough, autocrat of the dinner table that I may be, it is not my voice I hear wearily mouthing these imprecations, but that of their mothers: begging, cajoling, insisting; furious, resigned, despondent. So I take it that mothers feel that part of their nurturing duty is that of imposing something called "manners".

So our Tony wants to have a yack with Paddy about policies. Well, he certainly needs to chat to someone, but do they speak the same language? Tony's empty shtick pick'n'mix of the words agenda, community, sensible and forwards - has earned him the epithet "gobshite" in many quarters, while Paddy continues to utter homely words such as "poppycock" (from the Dutch pappekak, meaning soft shit), while staring into the middle distance like Lords Raglan and Cardigan at Balaclava, surely the only military debacle to be commemorated in knitting patterns.

Clever or conventional? Paul Pickering explores the sick sentimentality of Gordon Burn's second novel; Fullalove, by Gordon Burn, Secker & Warburg, pounds 14.99