Nostradamus and the battle of Beckham's foot

· Yet another new book about Nostradamus lands on my desk. This one, The Final Prophecies, by an Italian scholar and dingbat called Luciano Sampietro, makes even more astounding claims than usual for the great man's gifts of prophecy. For example, in quatrain 57 of his second "century" of gobbledygook, he forecast the fall of the Berlin Wall thus: "Auant conflict le grand tombera". This might not seem to mean anything apart from "Before [a] conflict the great will fall" but as Sgr Sampietro notes, it doesn't scan. Insert the word "mur" after "grand" and bingo, "before a conflict a great wall will fall". Which conflict he meant is not clear, but you can't have everything - not unless you're a Nostradamus scholar, that is.

Since we can apparently insert words willy-nilly on the grounds that they scan, let's add "pomme", meaning "the Big Apple will fall" - an amazingly prescient prediction of September 11. Or "pied", which can now be easily interpreted to mean: "Before the battle [the World Cup] a great foot [David Beckham's] will collapse". As you can see, Nostradamus foresaw everything.

The difficulty is that all his predictions can only be interpreted after the event. It's as if a racing tipster never told you who he thought would win, but was brilliant at pointing out how, if you had studied his writings very carefully, "there shall come a beast bearing thunder on its brow" would have told you that Black Labrador would win the 2.45 at Chepstow.

· To the Cabinet War Rooms underneath Whitehall for Julia Hobsbawm's party. Julia was half of Hobsbawm Macauley, the archetypal New Labour PR agency. Sarah Macauley married Gordon Brown, and there was a parting of the ways, not altogether amicable, shortly before the birth and tragically short life of her baby. So the party was to declare that Julia was still there, alone now, but otherwise in business as usual. It was full of famous people, such as John Birt, who had broken off from his blue-skies thinking to a little dark basement drinking.

The rooms are where the government operated during air raids in the last war, and include Churchill's bedroom plus the little cubicle where he used to talk to Roosevelt on the phone. There are stacks of memorabilia too, including the menu, signed by all the guests, for the dinner Churchill gave at Potsdam, with Stalin on his left, Roosevelt on his right, and Molotov facing him. Wouldn't it have been fun to ask would you like a cocktail Mr Molotov?

The curator, Phil Reed, showed us round the soon to be opened extension to the rooms, including a vast Churchill museum, all under the Treasury. It all looks slightly like one of those 1950s British caper movies; you imagine a gang, led by Dickie Attenborough, boring its way up into the Treasury only to discover that nothing so vulgar as actual money is kept there.

· I suppose I feel regret for all those people who are going off to the World Cup in the next week or so and who haven't yet received their match tickets. On the other hand, how sorry can you feel for anyone who goes to all the expense of visiting a country as amazing and strange and wonderful as Japan, then spends their time watching football (or not, as the case may be)? We have to remember, amid all the hoopla of the coming few weeks, that football is a small minority interest. A week ago, fewer than a tenth of the population could be bothered to watch what was once the game's great showcase, the FA cup final (in which the foreigners who play in north London beat the foreigners who play in west London). More people were watching the snooker final at midnight the following night on BBC2.

If England do well next month, I'll get carried away, like everyone else. But let's not imagine that shows that more than a handful of people actually care about football the rest of the time.

· Reader Peter Mitchell, of Wigan, sends in what may be the ultimate jargon-infested - and certainly ungrammatical - want ad, for deputy chief executive of Bury council. They are looking for "a visionary with significant director level experience in Best Value, performance management, and organisational change within a multi-disciplinary environment, you will be free of operational responsibilities thereby providing a unique opportunity to shape strategic and cross cutting projects across the council.

"You will bring a politically sensitive understanding to this strategic management role and lead the development of specific initiatives whilst facilitating a more cohesive approach to cross cutting issues and the delivery of improved services, joined up working and resource utilisation ..."

I doubt if any normal human being could understand a word of that, though I might translate "you will be free of operational responsibilities" as "you will have no work to do, but can stick your nose into everyone else's business". For this they are offering up to £79,000pa. Bury is not a wealthy town; I wonder if its citizens are aware how their money is being spent?

· I read in the papers that Tony Blair and his inner circle love to watch West Wing, the Channel 4 drama about the White House. This puzzled me, because the last time I was involved in a conversation with the prime minister, on his plane during the last election campaign, he was repeatedly asked by my colleagues if he watched the show. Not only did he say he didn't have time to watch TV, but seemed to have scarcely heard of West Wing. Maybe he's picked up on it now.

There is much talk of a British version, set in Downing Street. But that wouldn't work, for two reasons: one, top level talks about funding allocations for regional assemblies aren't interesting, except to a few freaks and anoraks. Secondly, as the American writer Dave Barry points out, all they do in West Wing is stride. Every character spends his or her time striding purposefully. As they stride they throw off hilarious one-liners, bark out orders, and have papers thrust into their hands by anxious aides. Stride, stride, stride, they go, all day. But Downing Street is just a small house-cum-office block. Start striding purposefully there and you'll be on the floor with a bloody nose in five seconds. It can't possibly work.

· Apologies: I made a complete idiot of myself last week. The story I quoted about the Darwin award given to the Arizona man who managed to attach a Jet-assisted take-off rocket to his car and consequently crashed into a cliff at over 400mph is an urban myth which has been around for at least seven years. It never happened.

Apparently the Arizona highway patrol are sick to death of answering phone inquiries about it. The Darwin awards people have apologised on their website for putting it out. As one reader pointed out, it would be a miracle of engineering even to fix a "Jato" to your car; if it were on the roof, it would simply shoot off, possibly taking the roof with it.

So, I'm sorry. But I suppose it's a useful reminder always to be incredibly sceptical of anything you read on the internet.