PC savages and savage TVs

It makes you look with renewed interest on our current bestseller `How to Cook Delia Smith'

WHAT'S BROWN and sounds like a bell? Dung. It is not, perhaps, the most attractive subject with which to grapple over your toast and marmalade, but dung has lately become fantastically interesting. The most unprepossessing, yet most ubiquitous, substance in human creation is having a remarkable image makeover.

I once listened to Dr David Starkey, the exquisite gadfly of The Moral Maze, describing his own spiky contribution to intellectual debate as being similar to the tiny lumps of horse manure that are apparently introduced into French peasant casseroles to make them more luxuriously textured. (I've bought lumps of chocolate in the Camargue that were off-puttingly called "Crottins de Cheval" so I'm sure what he said was true, though I'm not exactly going to rush out and buy The David Starkey Cookbook when it appears).

It seems the good doctor was onto something. On Tuesday, unless my contacts in the art world have been telling shocking fibs, Mr Chris Ofili will be handed the glamorous Turner Prize for his dense, pointillist art works in which elephant dung plays a key role. They sit on his paintings in haggis-sized lumps, or support his canvases at floor level like fat black caryatids.

According to the Tate Gallery brochure, "For him the introduction of elephant dung is a means by which to establish a dynamic between the increasingly beautiful paint surfaces of his paintings and the perceived ugliness of dung... his use of the dung is not intended as an assault on painting, rather a friendly challenge and embellishment" - and I think we're all jolly glad to hear it.

But of more immediate concern is the role dung plays in defining one of the essences of our human nature. As I write, controversy is raging in America about the sainted Hopi Indians and the possibility that they were cannibals - and whether, by extension, cannibalism was once a perfectly routine practice in developed societies, from Spain to New Guinea.

Next month, Prof Christy Turner will publish Man Corn, a book that suggests American Indians happily dined off their less fortunate neighbours in Arizona at the end of the 16th century, about the time Walter Raleigh was discovering the potato and the after-dinner fag. This is a fantastically non-PC challenge to the received view of the Noble Indians - all mild, herbivorous, peace-loving proto-hippies - that has been popular since the Sixties. But the crucial evidence has been found in an excavation site called Cowboy Wash in Western Colorado: seven "coprolites" - that's petrified human dung to you and me - which contain samples of human heart muscle.

Dr Richard Marlar, the chap who discovered this alarming proof that sophisticated Indian tribes munched with relish on human aorta, has been so bothered by accusations of racist colonialism, he has so far refused to publish his findings.

But we know they exist. They're currently being leaked to the American press, 400 years after the last Amerindian gourmet wiped the last traces of sauteed brains and fricasseed spleen from his greasy lips. The implications are enormous. Has human society always been secretly keen on eating its fellow men, not from the extremities of starvation but from idle choice? Goodness, can The Human Cookbook be far away, with its Swiftian recipes for "Roast Leg of Pauper Child" or "Devilled Liver of Former Tory Backbencher"?

It makes you look with renewed interest on the two volumes of gastronomic brilliance that currently head the bestseller lists, with their tantalising front covers How to Cook Delia Smith and How to Eat Nigella Lawson.

I SPENT far too long on Saturday night carousing with fellow hacks at the Press Ball in the Commonwealth Institute. It was flagged among the inky trade as "the first-ever classy journalist banquet", which seems a little hard on all those award ceremonies that have celebrated the Best (Still Living) Foreign Correspondent and Best (Not Banging On About Her Divorce) Feature Writer.

A huge throng of tuxedoed desperadoes and women in spider-design frocks crammed the Institute, munched prawn-and-mangetout canapes, marvelled at the young lady got up as a Peter Greenaway pineapple, blinking attractively in the middle of the fruit display, and ate the boneless guinea fowl and lime tart pudding while Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen auctioned a lithographed watercolour by the Prince of Wales (for pounds 10,000) and Mystic Meg's Lucky Jacket (for rather less) and Richard Littlejohn, the well- known Irritating Columnist, gave out awards: Tony Blair got a prize for ubiquity, having recently published 40 self-exculpatory articles in a record 17 newspapers.

The most abiding memory of the night (which was in aid of the National Press Fund, for journalists down on their luck) was the platoon of enormously tall transvestites from Madam Jo-Jo's in the heart of Soho, who greeted startled guests with a bitchiness that's usually confined to discreet interchanges in the hairdressers.

"Disastrous waistcoat," one pompadoured beauty confided to another as I strode in. The wife of the editor of a Major Broadsheet was greeted with "So - we didn't have time to get to the hairdressers, mmmh?".

A friend of the organiser, Leslie Hinton (executive chairman of News International) wore a man's dinner suit. "Ooh, cross-dressing. I must try it some time," sneered a saucebox in glittery lipgloss.

They got ruder when demanding pounds 10 a time for raffle tickets. "It's for your retirement, you tragic old thing," said a voluble, Amazonian minx in fishnet tights to anybody slow in pulling out his wallet.

Perhaps this is the future of charity binges - to be abused by the waiting staff, excoriated by the barmen, trashed by the DJ and made to feel like elephant dung by people who are after your money.

THE NEW telephone directories arrived the other day, safe and sound. Well not quite sound. They were safely delivered near my house, in the sense that, although they weren't quite brought to the actual front doorstep, they were unquestionably more in my front garden than anyone else's. I looked at them as they lay in the mud under the spindly arms of the silver birch. They looked a bit pathetic - two great, thick, butch objects, crammed with helpful information, sprawling ingloriously in the Dulwich dirt. Like the Two Fat Ladies shortly after coming off their motorbike.

So, when I rang British Telecom next day to query a bill, I mentioned it in passing. "The people who deliver your telephone directories," I said, "seem to take their cue from newspaper boys in Fifties American movies. The ones who cycled past the houses and hurled rolled-up copies of the Washington Post or whatever at the recipients' front doors. I could imagine someone getting a nasty blow to the head from a flying Thompson's Local Gazette one of these days".

"You mean you have a complaint about the quality of service in respect to Telephone Book Delivery?" she asked, with a suddenly sharp tone.

"Well, not exactly," I said, "merely a light observation of a domestic- humorous kind..."

"Do you wish to register a Formal Complaint?" she grated, with the air of a Bermondsey minder slipping on a pair of knuckle-dusters.

"No no," I laughed, "but if you happen to be speaking to them in the next few days..."

She rang off. Approximately 10 minutes later - like a Rapid Response Unit in fear of losing its Gold Medal - I got a letter from the Customer Services Manager of the phone-book delivery firm. It grovelled in shame. It snarled at the culprit. It pleaded forgiveness. "This matter will be investigated and severe action taken against the person concerned" it ran.

Visions filled my head of tormented postboys, their scrota encircled in piano wire to which enormous pink E-K volumes are attached, then dropped down a well. "Our contractors are all carefully instructed in the correct methods of delivery, which involve letter-boxing or handing books to customers where possible," the letter assured me. "Our training video and delivery instruction leaflet clearly set out the high standards that we, as a company, expect from our contractors."

Well, gosh. I had no idea such rigorous arrangements existed in the world of phone-book management. Directory Deliverance is one of the things you take for granted. It wouldn't occur to you that there could be a sort of O-level in it (called what? "Telecommunication Tome Logistics"?) or a course of instruction or a training video. What would that be like? 1. Exterior. Day. Man walks along street, holding bookish impedimenta. 2. Ext. Day. Man enters suburban garden. 3. Ext. Day. Man puts two fat volumes on doorstep beside milk and exits, whistling...

Maybe this is the way the world is going. Perhaps as we speak, a new generation of window cleaners' assistants is being trained in the finer points of Ladder Steadying, and being shown the Chamois Leather training video: 1. Ext. Day. Hold leather in hand. 2. Ext. Day. Dip leather in water. 3. Ext. Day. Wipe window...