Snickerdoodle dandy

BUNHILL

THE THINGS Bunhills have to do. I am sitting with a paper cup brimming with something called Hazelnut Latte. I have just bought this from the Seattle Coffee Company, a new shop nestling at the foot of Bunhill Towers.

The reason is that I (apparently alone among humanity) have never tasted "flavoured coffee". This has something to do with the fact that I have never seen a television programme called Frasier, in which people do little but drink strange coffees. Nor have I been to an American college campus where students now prefer drinking funny tasting coffee to smoking funny tasting cigarettes.

But duty dictates that I try it so that I can report knowledgeably on a new company called South Beach Cafe, which is setting up shop in Britain and also wants to sell shares on Offex, a sort of mini stock exchange in London. It is run by Thomas Burnham, an anti-trust lawyer from Florida, and it threatens to make the Seattle Coffee Company blush at its own lack of originality. At South Beach you will be able to buy coffees flavoured with, inter alia, vanilla nut, chocolate raspberry, rainforest caramel, butterscotch and snickerdoodle. All of which should broaden not only your palate but also your vocabulary.

I'm afraid I will not be rushing down there, though. Although new to these shores my Hazelnut Latte was frothy and sweet, and altogether not as nice as a gin and tonic.

THE Stock Exchange Dramatic Society's annual production, which starts next week at the Spitalfields Market Opera house, is West Side Story.

Last time I saw this tale of criminal gangs was inside Wandsworth jail, where armed robbers played gangsters with enormous plausibility. But robbers are one thing, merchant bankers another. How many straight faces will there be in the house as they sing Gee, Officer Krupke: "We ain't no delinquents/ We're misunderstood/ Deep down inside us there is good."

If you want to join in the fun, ring 0171-247 2558 for a ticket.

Birthday deprivation

ON THURSDAY Herman Hollerith will be 34 - or he would be if he hadn't died in 1929. On the same day John Philip Holland, who died in 1914, will be 39.

You clever people will already have worked out that these two folk were born on 29 February. But you will also, I hope, be gasping to know who they are. Mr Hollerith was the founder of IBM. Or rather, he was the founder of the Tabulating Machine Company, which later became IBM.

He was a clever if odd bloke whose hobby was finding ways of automating the US census. Eventually he came up with a device that used current to count holes punched in tape - an electric, if not an electronic, computer.

Mr Holland is better known because he designed and built the first practical submarine. His initial effort, the Fenian Ram, was produced to help Irish nationalists attack British ships. But by 1895 his J P Holland Torpedo Boat Company won an order from the US Navy, and 10 years later his "Holland" class was in service, ironically, with our own Royal Navy.

Were these two driven, I wonder, by their lack of birthdays? When I was young I thought it must be the worst thing possible to have been born on 29 February. I would probably have invented a computer or a submarine myself out of anguish at the unfairness of the world.

WE COULDN'T think of a headline for this Reuters news flash: "An earthquake measuring between five and six grades on the 12-point Mercali scale shook Santiago, Chile, on Thursday but no serious damage has been reported..." Any suggestions?

Weak leeks

NEXT Friday, is 1 March, St David's Day. I have sufficient Welsh blood in me to be able to ask an awkward question: why are the Welsh so useless?

I wouldn't go as far as Flanders and Swan's Song of Patriotic Prejudice, although I will take the opportunity to quote it ... "The Welshman's dishonest/ He cheats when he can/ And he's little and dark/ More like monkey than man/ He works underground/ With a lamp in his hat/ And he sings much too loud/ Much too often and flaaaaaat."

But I would ask more prosaically why there are so few Welsh entrepreneurs. Wales produces an abundance of politicians and journalists (I said I was Welsh), but thinking of half-a-dozen self-made Welsh business people is a bit like the "10 famous Belgians" test. As with the Belgians I am sure it can be done, but so far I have come up with Barrie Stephens of Siebe, Alf Gooding, Michael Heseltine (if you stretch a point) and Sir Julian Hodge, the financier. And that's it - or is it? I await your cross letters.

TALK of submarines brings me on to this week's photograph, which follows my item about a Japanese warship that was built in Pembroke Dock. Mike Duggan sent in this postcard showing the battleship Hatsuse passing the Swing Bridge, Newcastle, in 1899. It had just been completed at the yard at Elswick - a reminder that the Japanese fleet that sank the Russians six years later was largely built in the North-east. Clever in those days, weren't we?