The naked truth of Blunkett's prudery

· Last week I pondered how, as home secretary, David Blunkett would cope with censoring mucky films. I wondered if there would have to be a civil servant who would have the embarrassing task of describing to him what was on the screen. Apparently there is no need. It turns out that Mr Blunkett may be the only blind man in the world who makes a habit of complaining about nudity without any help at all.

A friend in the theatre emailed to describe how, while leader of Sheffield council in 1983, Mr Blunkett went to the Crucible to see A Passion In Six Days, a play by Howard Barker about the decline of the Labour party. He walked out, not at the theme, but at a nude scene.

Then another friend called my attention to his autobiography in which he describes being with his mother in 1967 while she was watching a current affairs programme about the ill treatment of naked bodies in a morgue.

He wrote to the BBC protesting again about the nakedness, and the loss of dignity for the dead and the bereaved. The BBC invited him to appear on a programme about viewers' concerns, chaired by David Coleman. He didn't mention that he was blind.

When he arrived at the BBC, "I did not need to see their faces - I could feel the sheer bewilderment, nay horror, as they greeted me."

Alexander Walker points out that the censorship job has now passed to the culture department, so Mr Blunkett's unique form of prudery will no longer be necessary.

· There was a middle-aged woman on my train the other day whose voice was so crisp, so commanding and so upper class that she caused many passengers to make amused eye contact - no easy feat. She was using her mobile phone to give orders, apparently connected with a gas leak in a property she owned, and either let out or had lent to friends. She was evidently arranging for a neighbour to let the gas men in.

"Now you know the address, don't you?" she barked. "It's number [then she gave the address]. Now, the tenants leave the house at about half past eight, and the gas people said they can't be there before 10 o'clock at the earliest. So I'm going to leave the keys in the coal bunker at the back, just under the lid, there's a sort of hook there on the left. All right?" Her voice filled the whole carriage.

I wondered if she was wonderfully naive, or confident that nobody who rode on South West Trains would ever be dishonest. Or perhaps it's a Met sting against burglars, who would have been scooped up the moment they opened the coal bunker...

· My attempts to spit at wine tastings have not yet brought success. I find that if you swill the wine round your mouth, then send it in a graceful arc towards the bucket, you get only a limited notion of what the stuff tastes like, and a rather sour taste left on your palate. So to avoid complete, staggering, hog-whimpering inebriation at big tastings I just take tiny sips - and a second if the first seems promising.

I was doing this the other day in London when nice Jancis Robinson came up. "You really must learn to spit!" she said. "I will teach you myself." I said I thought it wouldn't just make a course, but a whole TV series, Learn To Spit With Jancis. "Yes, expectorations are high here in the Lay and Wheeler cellars. Simon Hoggart, who wants to be named the new Sultan of Splat, is up against Tim Atkin who is hoping to beat his own 2.23 metre record tonight, with a particularly forward 1999 Viognier..."

She didn't think it was a good idea at all.

· There was a curious mystery when we lived in the United States some years ago. Dan Rather, the star newscaster on CBS, one of the big three networks, was set upon near his home in New York by two smartly-dressed men who kicked and punched him, while repeatedly demanding: "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" The men were chased off, and Rather recovered after a short visit to hospital. The enigmatic nature of the attack, and especially the inexplicable question, resonated for a long time with Americans, not least because Rather is generally thought to be one commercial short of a natural break.

The attack (nothing was stolen) has never been explained. Until this month, perhaps. The new issue of Harper's Magazine has an article by Paul Limbert Allman, in which he describes reading the work of Donald Barthelme, an obscure but highly regarded writer of fantastical stories. Barthelme had a running character called Kenneth - not an especially common name in the States - and in one story a man describes to his psychiatrist an erotic fantasy. The shrink then asks him: "What is the frequency?"

Just a coincidence perhaps, except that Allman went on to discover that both Rather and Barthelme started media careers in Houston, Texas, at the same time. It is almost inevitable they knew each other, and indeed one Barthelme story includes the character of an arrogant and confused journalist called Lather.

So a man who had made an enemy, or at least a rival, of a moderately known novelist is attacked by people apparently quoting from the man's work. But who? Barthelme is now dead, and in any case, if he knew Rather well enough to detest him, one assumes Rather would have recognised him. Perhaps the mystery is not solved, but has turned in a different direction.