Diary

Last week I read of a 95-year-old woman in Serbia who, with her son's pistol, killed a 15-year-old who had hit her. She then walked 12 miles to surrender and was jailed for five years, which in the circumstances seems a pretty condign punishment. Perhaps the judge was a Spectator reader, alarmed by a recent article by Tabitha Troughton about how six of her twenty-something friends had been beaten up by violent oldies. Or had he caught sight on satellite TV of crinkly animals-rights protesters with "Sod off" taped across their mouths? At any rate, I fear that my west London village is showing yet again its intrinsic inability to swim with the tide of fashion, for our oldies continue to maunder along peaceably. In a spirit of inquiry I intrepidly took some parcels to the post office on Thursday - pension day - which Miss Troughton had warned would be an unpleasant experience. Unaccountably, there was no swearing, no cursing and not a single blow was exchanged. Indeed three OAPs I didn't know smiled at me. What's wrong with my neighbours? Why have they no get-up and go? Is it something in the water?

Something in the water may also be the answer to the oddity of my graveyard companions. At least, it's the only answer I'm likely to get: none of you managed to offer any explanation whatever in response to my query last week as to why a duck and a drake, 500 yards from a large lake, should establish themselves beside a 2ft x 1ft water container in an enormous and otherwise dry graveyard. Anyway, the following day I found the drake wandering about alone, quacking miserably. I concluded that the duck had taken off and that he must be injured, so I hastened home and returned with bread and a large baking tin. No drake. Having filled the tin with water I stood beside it quacking foolishly. From behind a tombstone emerged the duck, who fell happily upon the bread and then retired back to rest. Suddenly the drake came flying powerfully in from the west, landed and proceeded to resume searching and quacking. No response from duck. I assumed they must have had a tiff, for why else would she respond to my quacking and not to his? After 10 minutes searching he found her, she rose and the two of them ambled around for a bit, eating what I had provided. She then flew into the water container and he settled down beside it. No one paid any attention to my baking tin. That's the last time I try to find rational explanations for bird behaviour.

Apropos a recent item about tombstones, John Meacock offered this from Boot Hill: "Here lies Lester Moore/Four slugs from a forty-four/No Les/No more." For no good reason this has reminded me of this epitaph on Queen Victoria: "Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes:/Into the tomb the Great Queen dashes."

Quest, the journal of the austere Queen's English Society, this quarter - tightlipped - provides Ten Black Commandments from the African American Family Press's The Black Bible Chronicles:

I am the Almighty, your God who brought you outta Egypt when things were tough. Don't put anyone else before Me.

Don't make any carved objects or things that look like what is heaven or below. And don't bow down to these things like they are anything heavy. Not ever!

You shouldn't diss the Almighty's name, using it in cuss words or rapping with one another. It ain't cool, and payback's a monster.

After you've worked six days, give the seventh to the Almighty.

Give honour to your mom and dad, and you'll live a long time.

Don't waste nobody.

Don't mess around with someone else's ol' man or ol' lady.

You shouldn't be takin' nothing from our homeboys.

Don't go tellin' lies on your homebuddies.

Don't want what you can't have or what your homebuddy has. It ain't cool.

Now for further news of the lady from Bantry/who kept her false teeth in the pantry: "They got baked by mistake/In a cake for a wake; /Then chewed up by a chump in the chantry" (David Blake); "She'd gurn and she'd cluck/A dhudeen she would suck/As she carried her hod up the gantry" (Patrick Linehan); "One day while getting 'em/She started blinding and effing 'em /So her neighbours called in the In-fantry" (Anthony Roland). Though scarcely relevant to teeth I can't resist: "She counted points scored/For the men she adored/Mel Gibson got one but Hugh Grant three!"(Anon).

Reading Jonathan Fenby's account in last Wednesday's Independent of the single-mindedness of the French peasant voter, I was moved to look up Walter Bagehot for a timeless view. "The peasantry of France are ignorant, and narrow-minded," he wrote in 1871. "They have not the knowledge to guide the country, and they do not hear - they would not heed or regard - any sort of discussion which will fit them to guide the country. They love their property - their scrap of land and their money savings - so passionately that in politics they almost think of nothing else. Their one inquiry as to a ruler is - Will he save society? That is, will he save my terre and my money for me and my children?" Bagehot never lets me down.

Finally, to cats. Following my recent linkage of kitten-loving with blood- thirstiness about punishment, an anonymous cat-lover wrote that "kittens are fun, beautiful and rarely attack people". This does not explain why so many people seem to find it impossible both to like animals and hate cruel punishment. Robin Tutty sent a prize quote from Christine Harland, describing her similarity to the mother with whom she has been reunited after 53 years: "Our views are identical on politics: we support hanging, flogging and are against cruelty to animals. We are straight-down-the- line Tories." It's no wonder that nice Mr Major is regarded in the Home Counties as a wimp.