THE first volume of Lydia Chukovskaya's Akhmatova Journals is out at last in English, and is well translated by Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova along with 54 Akhmatova poems ('Those without which my entries would be hard to understand'). Lydia Chukovskaya chose her friend Peter Norman to do these translations of Akhmatova's poems: they are faithful and dignified.

Like the awkward friendships of teenage years, the cultural enthusiasms of lost adolescence can be a bit of a ticklish matter for those heaving into middle age. Should you try to keep faith with your callow, narrow-waisted self by preserving them in the amber glow of nostalgia, droning on about the fretwork of Clapton and Hendrix as if you were still in the back row of Divinity class? Take rueful but forgiving leave of them and crank up the volume on your new Hildegard of Bingen CD? Or imitate Stalin by expunging them ruthlessly from the official version of your life?

BOSNIA continues to live up to its reputation as a graveyard of Western politicians' careers: the latest controversy about the role of Yasushi Akashi, the UN Secretary- General's special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, mirrors the diplomatic scandals that accompanied both his military and civilian predecessors.

A BABY that would not stop crying was put in a plastic bag which was knotted and dumped in a dustbin by her young single mother who wanted peace and quiet, a court was told yesterday.

IN THE audience tonight is the ex-England footballer and Crystal Palace manager, Steve Coppell. He arrives early and sits in the bar with a beer. A friend has warned him that this is going to be deep. 'But, I thought, how deep can deep be?' Coppell finishes his drink and heads in to BAC Studio Theatre One. On stage, sheets cover the set. A light picks up a bearded actor, in woollen vest and braces, staring into the middle of nowhere. Coppell takes one look and thinks: 'This is deep. Before it starts, it's deep.'

I really thought I was losing my mind in the course of reading this book. The blurb prepares us for 'a monologue in the guise of a dialogue between a Loner and a Lover, a Fat Man and a Beggar, out to climb a mountain on a wintry night after a party . . .' Doesn't sound very interesting, but Thomas Bernhard's novels never do . . . Anyway, I kept plugging away, often becoming tangled in the dense undergrowth of the narrator's consciousness, waiting to encounter a Loner, a Lover, a Fat Man or a Beggar but, for the life of me, I couldn't find any sign of them. By the last page they still hadn't shown up, so I turned for assistance to the Afterword (so what if the cover calls it an 'Introduction'?) in which Sophie Wilkins points out how this early work of Bernhard's can be seen in the same light as the young Kafka's Description of a Struggle, in which a Loner, a Lover, a Fat Man and a Beggar . . .

YOUR front-page report 'Heseltine to scrap safety laws' (14 November) on the apparent intention to scrap a range of health and safety regulations at work is cause for the most serious concern.

A 2 pounds stamp with a printing error bought two years ago has been estimated to fetch pounds 300 at auction, writes Dalya Alberge.

NEXT TIME I will think twice before getting involved in any incident, however minor.

Nell: What is it my pet? (Pause) Time for love? Nagg: Were you asleep? Nell: Oh no] Nagg: Kiss me. Nell: We can't. Nagg: Try. (Their heads strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall apart again.) Nell: Why this farce, day after day? (Pause.) Nagg: I've lost me tooth. (From Samuel Beckett's Endgame)

A DECISION on whether British Nuclear Fuels' controversial new pounds 2.8bn thermal oxide reprocessing plant (Thorp) at Sellafield can start work is to be delayed - probably until November - for further public consultations to see whether it is really needed, the Government announced yesterday.

FROM the back of the chapel it could have been a scene from a pantomime: a castle frieze with characters on it; an audience of booing, hissing heads. But a closer look showed an audience of men dressed in blue, smoking, and nudging each other. They were the burglars, the armed robbers, the rapists. On stage was Jimmy Young, the Radio 2 broadcaster. 'Live from Dartmoor prison,' he said yesterday, 'we have another two prisoners on the show with us'.

THE AVERAGE British household throws slightly more than half a tonne of rubbish into its bin bags each year, but the statistics do not record any expression of guilt about the fact that at least half that weight deserves a nobler fate than the landfill tip. It could instead be turned into compost, raw material for industry or fuel for generating electricity and heat.

I ENJOY it, but like any other job it gets a bit of a routine after a while. Still I wake up in the morning and say: 'OK, you know it's a good job this, really.' Then I get up on the hills and it looks gorgeous, especially in the summer.