Where do they get their energy from? Well, France

Among the many adverts appearing on the back of the World Cup has been the one for EDF ("Where do they get their energy from?"). The answer to that is France, for EDF stands for Électricité de France.

The company is somewhat coy about its French connection: you have to go to its French website to establish that. Indeed, when British Gas pointed out in a series of counter-advertisements that EDF was a French company, it was reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Authority, which considered the British Gas ads to be "misleading and denigratory and suggested the origin of the product was France" (sic). The point is this: while our government does not want British state companies to run major infrastructure projects, it's happy to allow companies such as EDF, a monopoly in France until 1999 and still 70 per cent state-owned, to run them instead.

Sky News has a review of the next day's newspapers at a time when it assumes most people have gone to bed. At least, I imagine that was the assumption made by its guest reviewer Baroness Billingham. Full of the joys of Wimbledon, the Labour peer announced that whatever else one thought of Vladimir Putin, he had done wonders for Russian tennis. So, that's all right then. Every cloud has a silver Lenin. I'm sure it will come as a great comfort to those languishing in Siberia or holding their tongues in the former Soviet republics that their country is enjoying such success in SW19. As they say in the sports world, they think it's all Ova. It is now.

It was all over last week for two great cricketing names from the 1960s: Fred Trueman and Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie - chalk and cheese, but both larger than life. They were, in their different ways, products of a bygone era, Ingleby-Mackenzie the ebullient bon viveur and Trueman the curmudgeonly but huge-hearted Yorkshireman from central casting. At the memorial service for Ingleby-Mackenzie, Mark Nicholas recounted the tale of the time when Hampshire beat Oxford by lunchtime and Colin took a team­mate off to Ascot ("Come on, we'll get there in time for the first race"). Pausing at Henley to pluck a couple of carnations from a flower stall, they arrived at the races, gambled their way through the card before enjoying champagne and cocktails at some stately pile, dinner at the Compleat Angler in Marlow, back for brandies, then off to Hampshire at four in the morning, arriving at the secretary's house at five. Pushing the car up the drive, so as not to wake their host, they retired to bed at ten to seven, to be woken with tea at seven. Once at the ground, Ingleby-Mackenzie won the toss at eleven, put his side in and slept all day in the dressing room, only to be woken at five and told he had to bat. By five past six he'd scored 100 off 61 balls - the fastest that year.

Trueman's approach was equally idiosyncratic. On the first day of a trip to Australia, a gym instructor told the team to run around the deck. "Listen 'ere, lad," said Fred. "You see these legs? In t'last season, these legs 'ave bowled x hundred overs, with x hundred maidens, and tekken x wickets for x runs. And for the next few weeks, they're on f***ing 'oliday."

Amidst the solemn commemoration of last July's suicide bombings in London, I'm still haunted by the words of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which told Tony Blair on 10 February 2003 that "al-Qaeda and associated groups continue to represent the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq". Blair responded that "there's obviously a danger of provoking the very thing you were trying to avoid, but this is my judgement, it remains my judgement, and I suppose time will tell whether it's true or not true". Indeed.

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