A prize winning waste for London

It's no surprise to learn that Ken Livingstone has been cutting deals with Tessa Jowell and other ministers to enhance London's bid to host the 2012 Olympics. This four-yearly festival of meaningless pomp and muscular pumping is all show and no substance, just like the mayoralty itself.

Apparently our Ken is only too happy to put Londoners in hock to the tune of £20 per annum each on our council tax for seven years and a hike in the business rate. He's gambling on the estimated £2.5 billion in capital costs for the games being covered by Euro grants, the private sector and our old friend the Lottery.

Then there's a poll that claims 73 per cent of Britons believe hosting the games would enhance our national prestige, create a feel-good factor and give us improved sporting facilities. I ask you, who are these plonkers?

Not that many of them can be London parents, who've seen their local authorities flog off their children's school playing fields in the past few years so as to have enough money to pay for essential books and repairs to clapped-out buildings.

If the Olympics were going to be staged throughout the capital on 5,000 brand new allweather pitches I might give it my backing, but as things stand there's a sorbet's chance in hell of that £2.5 billion filtering down to the scabby-kneed kid in the asphalt jungle.

I suppose some of those polled must have thought that with the example of all those bronzed Antipodeans and protein-enhanced Americans before us, Britain will be magically transformed from a nation of couch potatoes into a brave new world of, er, what exactly?

People who can run the economy just as well as they run the marathon? Or clear the complex hurdles of foreign policy as easily as they do the steeplechase? Or swim the muddied waters of environmental crisis as swiftly as they part 50m of the chlorinated stuff ?

Sorry, but somehow I doubt it. Gone are the days when gentleman amateurs like Roger Bannister could make sporting history and go on to a distinguished career as a doctor and academic.

Nowadays sportsmen and women are utterly singleminded, and to excel at the one repetitive act of running, jumping or twirling, they have to spend all day every day running jumping or twirling; and that - gasp! - makes them very dull people indeed, not at all the wellrounded citizenry needed for a feel-good Britain.

Still, if the whole capital cost could be covered by the National Lottery there might be a case for hosting the games. After all, there's something rather elegant about a tax on desperation and stupidity being used to fund a great gathering of arrant bores.

But I can't quite see those friends reunited, Ken and New Labour, being the people to do this. No, it would take an even more enervating politician and tedious party to push such a policy through. Step forward Lord Seb Coe and the Conservatives! Your destiny awaits you.

I see that the likeable writer Ben Okri has been getting his proverbial knickers in a twist over what he characterises as Britain's failure to "celebrate its own gold-and-diamond spirit". By this he means that living writers are not honoured here the way they are in America.

According to Okri, rivers, streets and squares should be named after contemporary players of the plastic piano, and not just the quill-swishers of old.

Hmm, I'm not so sure about this. The relationship between culture and society is not, as Okri appears to suggest, one of strict equivalence, as in great society equals great culture. On the contrary, decadent and declining societies often foster the most exciting of cultures - think of fin-de-siËcle Vienna, with Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt all going hell-for-leather.

I've been in the statesubsidised "literature houses" of Germany, and very nice they are, too, with their coffee bars and respectful audiences of well-upholstered burghers, but they don't make for an exciting literary culture.

As for the Americans, yes, they swagger and yes, some of their writers are bloody good, but like most American culture it's an act of magnificently introverted navel-gazing.

With the noble exception of Philip Roth, few of them have been prepared to stick their head above the parapet to denounce the current puritan backlash.

And when it comes to having things named after them, well, none of the British writers I know and admire would dream of accepting such a tin-pot accolade.

I dare say JG Ballard would be tickled by the thought of announcements on incoming London flights of the form: "Would you please fasten your seatbelts, as we will soon be landing at Ballard Airport, newly named after the author of Crash, the most seminal post-war English novel ..."

Men get baby blues too

I'm sorry to hear that Sadie Frost, the pulchritudinous pants designer and partner of Jude Law, is suffering from post-natal depression. It's a miserable malaise, and affects far more women than we're prepared to acknowledge.

After all, with a declining population, no one wants to fess up to the fact that what's meant to be the happiest of events in a woman's life is all too often crowned with thorns.

But there's also another reason why post-natal depression is shunned, and that's because men don't

suffer from it. Oh no, we fathers are affected by quite reverse syndrome, which I have dubbed Pre-Parturition Anxiety.

In my experience, it's the run-up to the new arrival that makes me tense and fearful to the point of gloom. Once sprogs have sprung I'm on the mend again.

Surely this is just another proof of the oft-chanted mantra that men are from Mars (and the past) and women are from Venus (and the future)?

I feel a self-help best seller coming on.