A few weeks ago I received a computer generated demand threatening to knee-cap me if I didn’t cough up £142. The alledged reason was money owing to British Telecommunications by William Franklin & Sons Limited. As the demand had been sent to the company’s registered address at Landgate Chambers in Rye…a neat trick this…I dealt with it straight away. But I had a problem. The last time ME & BT were in business was two years ago and the only contact since then was six months after I closed down my Rye office when I asked BT to make sure they had switched off all the phones as I had been told that a BT answering machine was accepting calls on the old numbers.

So I wrote to BT…not to Sue, Grabbit & Run…explained all this and settled down for a twelve month siege. Imagine my amazement when today I received a letter letting me know the debt was cancelled and the rottweilers chained. I will frame the letter…up on the wall in my next office. But after the euphoria faded I wondered whether my version of events was actually correct…which got me thinking of Tony Blair...not something I do too often.

I used to believe that at the moment of saying anything our Prime Minister thought what he said was true. But my favourite journalist Matthew Parris has moved a step ahead of me. He now believes that Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is ‘an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged.’ It gets worse - Matthew Parris again. ‘I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he ever believes what he says he is delusioned. To the extent that he does not he is an actor whose first invention - himself - has been his only interesting role.’ Tony Blair’s minders try to avoid encounters with searching interviewers…preferring the photo opportunities… but that wily old Yorkshireman Michael Parkinson got him.

Here is Blair’s God exchange about sending our boys to death in Iraq: ‘That decision had to be taken and has to be lived with and in the end there is a judgement that well I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other people’…’by other people if you believe in God its made by God as well and that judgement in the end has to be you know you have to do the right thing according to your conscience.’ God help us all! I think I’ll send Our Great Leader a copy of Shaw’s St Joan and suggest he read the Grand Inquisitor’s speech.

I got to know Dr Aidan Rankin quite well a few years back when he was lecturing on Government at the London School of Economics. I reviewed favourably his book on political correctness and worked with him on the committee of the London Academic Inn for a few years. One of my many unnoticed little internet pieces is a questionnaire on political correctness on the cesc website. The Spectator should have offered Aidan and I a pot of gold for the rights to publish it but now they have lost their chance and it will go out to the world hidden away in the corner of an obscure little thousand word a day weblog by the unknown political commentator William Shepherd.

My PC Questionnaire is based on a hundred one-liners in Aidan’s Politics of The Forked Tongue and asks the reader to rate them. After spending a few days putting the thing together I decided I was an expert on the subject. Hence my curiosity when the tabloids recycled the Baa Baa Black Sheep story last week. They all had the story...the Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Mirror and the Times. It was the same story as twenty years ago. It was wrong then...and I suspected it was wrong now. So I checked it out. I was right. It was humbug...but it made a good story, the gist of it being that a politically correct administrator had commanded the removal of all racist references from Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Our intrepid Fourth Estate clearly never stepped outside the pub. Had they gone to the bother of talking to the teachers at the centre of this PC outbreak they might have come away with a different point of view because it turns out that we are talking about an Action Rhyme. To turn a nursery rhyme into an action rhyme the children replace the word black with a variety of other descriptive words dancing around the room singing about happy sheep and sad sheep, bouncing, hopping and jumping sheep...as well as black, white, blue and even pink sheep. Children love this sort of wordplay which encourages them to extend their vocabulary and enjoy words.

The wind went round to the west during the night so it was much warmer. Often this means rain but not today. A beautiful day. Blue sky. Sun shining. I returned to the boat in early afternoon by way of Rye Harbour along the old tramway through fields of sheep and past Castle Waters. Today there were only ducks and swans on display...normally there are rather more exotic species. I picked a few daffodils and put them in a vase on my cabin table. Next time I walk to Castle Waters I expect it to be a blaze of colour.

Ryesingers practice in the evening. After last week’s rehearsal I was a little disappointed as the pieces that Lesley Brownbill had chosen for our Mozart Magic Concert on 17th June seemed rather lightweight. Flanders & Swann’s Ill Wind is fine in its place but I prefer the Mozart Requiem and his Magic Flute. So today was good news as we spent the two-hour rehearsal note-bashing Lachrymosa…and Dies Irae.