a spin doctor writes

WELL, like the rest of Britain, I have logged on to the 1901 Census website this week to find out more about my great grandfather, Aloysius Friendly, revered in my family as a distinguished civil servant and private adviser to Edward VII, who would help the Sovereign draft various official memoranda to Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times. The following information came up: "Aloysius Friendly, formerly Aloysius Adalbert Freundlich, currently resident at HMP Pentonville, for fraud."

Sundry other investigations revealed a note that great-grandpapa Aloysius was interned in October 1914 and hanged as a German spy, and his daughter Maisie, my grandmother, so far from being the youngest- ever matron at St Thomas's Hospital, as we had all been led to believe, was in fact a trapeze artist who offered disreputable "extras" to gentleman members of the audience who called on her at her rented rooms in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

How utterly absurd. It is quite intolerable that hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of public money should be spent on this socalled "1901 Census website", and all it contains are grotesque and slanderous inaccuracies about my family.

I have demanded that this site be closed forthwith - with some official explanation about the excessive number of "hits" causing the site to "go down".

Until then, my week had been quite pleasant. My wife, Normandie, and I have just returned from our Christmas and New Year's break on Koh Samui (leaving Tadwina in the care of my mother-in-law), where we ran into Stephen Byers and his partner who were doing their daily aqua-t'ai chi workout in the shallow end of the pool, just by the swim-up bar, where Normandie and I were enjoying an aperitif, before going in for an early lunch.

"Stephen!" I called out genially.

"Tad?" replied Stephen, opening one eye.

Soon we were a jolly foursome at the luncheon table, enjoying some of the crabs that Stephen and his partner had caught that morning while snorkelling.

"How about a trip into Na Thon for shopping this afternoon?" suggested Normandie, brightly. Stephen raised an eyebrow, as Na Thon was many miles away. "We might be able to get a train," she added. At the word "train", Stephen reacted as if Normandie had kicked him in the kidneys under the table.

"I think not," said Stephen, after a long draft of his Bellini, and made a curious hand signal to the tiny Thai manservant who hovered near the table.

The fellow duplicated this signal to someone else, who drove up to the table in an electric golf buggy.

Stephen and his partner climbed onto the back, whereupon they were driven the 30 yards or so to the pool and their sunloungers.

I ambled over. "Do you know, Stephen," I said casually, "this golfbuggy thing of yours might actually be rather a good idea. If they're not needed on the golf course, why not use them here in the hotel complex, for the good of the guests?" Stephen's ministerial brain soon got to work, sketching out some plans on the back

of the massage-and-physiotherapy menu, and soon all the guests were zipping about in the little buggies!

There were guests in buggies driving down the corridors, driving into the lifts, weaving in and out of the restaurant tables and even playing buggy volleyball on the all-purpose indoor sports court.

SADLY, disaster struck. Too many buggies - and, I suspect, a long- term lack of investment in the buggy infrastructure (the hotel's fault, not Stephen's) - meant the system was breaking down; there were delays and jams all over the ruddy shop.

The guests started to complain to Stephen.

Which is when I approached another British guest at the hotel, my old friend John Birt. He took one look at the situation (there was a nasty buggy pileup just outside his suite) and agreed to do some "thinking out of the box". The next day he came back with a brilliant position paper on buggy lanes in the corridors, buggy licensing, and a buggy tax for frequent users.

When I showed this paper to Stephen at the swim-up bar, I'm afraid there was a bit of a froideur.

"My dear Stephen," I assured him, "John is only addressing himself to the 'blue-skies' issue of forward thinking. Day-today issues concerning hotel buggies are entirely your prerogative." "*******," snapped Stephen, "I'm going home." Perhaps his holiday had gone on a bit long.

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