GEORGE Orwell must have been a fairly gloomy man. Certainly his books weren't the sort you could curl up with in front of a nice fire and get stuck into the world of romance or happy endings. From The Road to Wigan Pier (which incidentally my mother once bought because Wigan was her home town and she thought the book was a travel guide) to Down and Out in London and Paris to the allegorical Animal Farm and on to the nightmare futuristic 1984, old George wasn't a whole bundle of laughs, but then he never set out to be. In his social documentary of deprivation in pre-war Lancashire and elsewhere he sought to inform those who probably didn't want to know. In 1984, he portrayed a vision of life under a government where every citizen's life was documented and monitored by the bureaucrats in charge; which led us to to the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'. I think old George might be having a bit of a last laugh though when you look at the antics of various Government departments who are bringing Big Brother to life, or at least Big Aunty. Take this week, with soaring temperatures, they have issued a 'how to cope with the heat wave' instructions. Nothing wrong in that I suppose, because people do suffer, especially stupid people who sit out in the midday sun wearing unfortunate shorts and little else and whose unclothed portions are as white as the driven snow one minute and resembling an overcooked lobster thermidor the next. But I don't really think that it needs a whole Government department to tell us to drink more water and stay in the shade. I'd have done that for a fiver and a free bus pass. Nor do we need all warnings on things like irons telling us that they get hot when heated and might burn you if you should get it into your head to place the flat of your hand against it just before ironing your favourite shirt. Or carry warnings on (my favourite and oft repeated this one) that a jar of peanut butter 'may contain nuts'. A few weeks ago we learned that the Government wants to keep track of all our school age children to see what they eat, what they weigh etc. Already, of course, children are being 'protected' from the terrible dangers of playing conkers, councils are cutting trees down in parks in case children climb them, all play areas have to have safe surfaces, and in some schools children aren't doing woodwork or metalwork because they might hurt themselves with sharp objects. Cotton wool sales have soared. And what would George have thought of our law and order where you can be fined more for parking on a double yellow line than mugging an old lady, although I don't think that however poor the people George met would have mugged old ladies. Or a society where someone who throws a Wotsit out of a car window is fined £70 (she said it was a Wotsit, they said it was a cigarette end). The sort of people who report that sort of dreadful transgression are not, I suspect, to be found round the vicinity of their town centre come pub kicking out time approaching large youths who have chucked the remains of their tandoori and chips into the municipal flower beds. A week or so later, a woman was charged with putting cigarette ash into her garden waste disposal bags, although found not guilty. An elderly man was fined for shaking out a few sandwich crumbs onto a pavement for the birds and spotted by some council jobsworth. I could go on. Are you spinning yet George? And then there's the question of personal safety when confronted with crime, safety for the criminal that is. George might think he was languishing in his own nightmare if he lived in the here and now where you have to gauge any response you might mete out to a would-be thief because you are only allowed to employ 'reasonable force' or you could end up being prosecuted yourself and/or sued successfully by the thief. So, should someone break into your house in the middle of the night you have to work out whether he has theft, rape or murder in mind, or will merely lock you in the bathroom and steal your DVD player. Not easy to gauge your response when you have only a few seconds to decide if you should utilise your son's cricket bat or merely pop out of the bedroom and shout 'boo' and set your Yorkshire Terrier on him. Or her, I suppose these days, to be perfectly politically correct, and you don't want to know about that George. And, finally, George, rather than being watched by Big Brother a lot of us now watch something called Big Brother, and I don't have adequate words, or space, to describe the depths to which this programme can descend. But never mind, George, none of the contestants will have heard of you, or any other author probably, so we won't bother. Suffice to say that Animal Farm would probably be a better title for the programme anyway.

Talking of animals, well birds, I find myself in the ignominious position of having to apologise to a feathered friend this week after last week's article. I upset my friend, who may never invite me to another barbecue, by calling her visiting pheasant Percy, which according to her is a very non-U name among game old birds. His real name, apparently, is Picasso, which, apparently, he answers to. Well, I'm very sorry I didn't notice the resemblance between a large noisy ginger bird and the greatest artist of the 20th century, or, depending on your ideas of art, a man who kept on painting blue ladies. She also claims that her visiting toad is called Tom, not Tony, although I dispute that especially since she only just met him. I, personally, would have called him Mr Toad, or following on the obvious artistic leanings of the garden maybe he could be called Toulouse Lautrec Toad, to be followed by Vincent Van Gogh the Vole, Monet the Mouse, Salvador Dali the snail and Gauguin the grass snake. Stop, we're getting silly. Some people say that it's a wonder I have any friends left if I keep writing about them. Or a family which still speaks to me. It is the problem if you write an entirely personal column, about real people, and don't just make it up. In most cases you couldn't make it up of course, but believe me I have to leave a lot out! I also get a lot of 'don't you dare put that in your column' threats which, for the safety of my own skin, I don't, although these are usually the juicier bits. In Saturday's Telegraph the husband of the paper's restaurant critic got his own back by taking over her column for a week. Jan Moir is the terror of the terrible terrines, the doyenne of dastardly doings by chefs, or on the other hand, the hander out of fulsome praise for good cooking when praise is due. Her husband usually accompanies her on her culinary expeditions and has to suffer a certain amount of snide comments about his eating habits, taste, finicky appetite and, most of all, his whinging when, the reader is expected to think, he should be grateful he's getting a free lunch. He is, in all senses, the silent partner. His revenge was served slightly hot on Saturday when he laid bare some of her habits, such as snoring, and combined this with a list of his favourite restaurants. It was a nice turning the restaurant tables piece and may be followed by the husband of Paddy Burt, the hotel critic on the same paper, who is, according to her, always going on about him moaning because the beds don't have proper blankets and sheets and there isn't a proper bath in the bathroom, only a shower. I may, however, come to think of it, regret admiring the Telegraph's article because I could just as easily become the subject of a similar piece. I could go on holiday and come back to find a combined article from the entire family and friends who will have been seething with resentment for years and are only to glad to trot out some of my bad habits, even if I didn't think I had any. Except snoring. Reading in the loo. Hoarding clothes. Putting ash in the sink in the little loo. Smoking (that's a big one). Leaving my tea bag in the cup when I drink it (my excuse is that nobody makes properly strong tea these days). Swearing (Oh come on now, I damn well don't). Buying out- of-date food and removing the reduced labels so no-one knows). Having a tantrum when someone reads my Saturday paper before I do, and, worse, if anyone starts the crossword. There, I think I've stymied them, unless the cats join in and moan that even though I'm always going on about them I still won't let them sleep on my bed AND I've just found a brand of cheap supermarket cat food which they actually eat because they didn't realise it wasn't Whiskas.