UNCORKED

A particular nastiness has crept into the sybaritic world of wining and dining. I refer, of course, to the screw-top wine bottle. This seemed at first sight a trivial matter, but subsequent experience has shown that there's more to it than this. With the increasing use of this penny-pinching device are disappearing a whole range of minor traditional pleasures. We are assured that this glib new trend will ensure that our wine will never be corked.

So there is no need now for the happy ritual, is there? The display of the label. The careful cutting of the capsule with the wine waiter's knife. The swift realigning of the tool to expose the corkscrew. The skilled turn of the wrist as the screw is driven home. The flick which exposes the fulcrum on which the cork is withdrawn. And then - oh, happy moment! - the plop of the release. The assumption that one will want to check the state of the wine; a little poured into the bottom of the glass. A quick check of the nose, a swirl around one's tongue, and the word of acceptance. Only then can the pouring begin.

And to replace this? The bottle plonked down, a muscular twist of the wrist, and there you are, mate. What next? Crown corks, I shouldn't wonder. All this, of course, is seized upon by the colonials, for whom hygiene is all and mystery nothing. All these bottles of wine ruined because it is corked! After a long life-time of happy bibbing I can recall only two occasions on which the wine had in fact deteriorated: surely a small loss for the vintner to cover.

How to avoid this grossness? Stick to the great wines of France, Germany, and Italy - which is far the best advice, anyway - and search the upper shelves. Presumably the good wines will always be traditionally presented, but I have an uneasy feeling that that the ordinary drinker will find his choice gradually more and more restricted.

And how about spin-off, in this global age? The little cork-oak plantations of Portugal where a whole way of life is threatened by the drying-up of demand for the crop of these strange trees? Well - tough.

ASTONISHING COALITION!

So - we are all settling down to this dangerous new idea in British politics. What tense negotations brought it about! How loud were the forecasts of disaster! And what an unheard of thing it is!

Why? Even our present mediaeval system of elections brought about a pretty accurate reflection of the will of the electorate. A large proportion of the population is interested only in football. So only a little over half of the electors voted at all. No-one believes that any one party has solutions to all our problems. So voting was pretty evenly divided between Conservative and Labour, with a bit of a tilt to the Tories. A sizeable proportion of the population thought that neither of the main parties knew what was best. So there was a block of votes for the Lib Dems and other minorities.

The country as a whole operates only as a compromise between a great variety of interests. So what more natural than that we should have a government that goes some way at least to representing this kind of mixture? It would be ridiculous to have a government that presented a picture of Britain as a monolithic Tory stronghold, or as exclusively Labour. As it is, some of the dafter policies of the extreme wings of the parties have had to be dropped or modified, and a good thing too.

'But a coalition government won't work!' Then how about all the countries where it works very well, and people have long ago stopped getting all pink and excited about it?

Even the out-dated electoral system we have inherited has presented us with a more rational mix of political opinions in power. The presence of the Lib Dems will ensure that a new electoral system will approach even nearer to ideals of a just representation of a highly diverse population. All that then remains is to get rid of the yah-boo arrangement of seating imposed on the re-built House by Churchill after the war, and there is a real hope that debates may begin to sound like serious discussions of real problems, and less like witty point-scoring in the Oxford Union.

May coalition government have come to stay, is what Tiresias says.