SUDDENLY my Great Uncle Tom makes a lot of sense... And now, when owning even a half decent house can make you a super tax payer when you're dead, he could be a role model.

Uncle Tom left school at 13 to go down the pits and had the coal-filled blue scars to prove it. He worked hard, lived frugally, got on, sent his daughters to college in the days when that was a rare achievement, bought his little terraced house, moved on to a bungalow and by the time he got to his 80s lived a very comfortable life.

But he knew the value of money and was bitterly determined that no government was going to get his hands on anything he had worked so hard for. So after his wife died, he started giving everything away...

He sold his bungalow, gave the money to his daughters and went back to the terraced house he'd rented out. He even gave away his few precious bits of silver and china and gave most of his furniture to his grandchildren to set up home. Visit his house and you'd think he hadn't two pennies to rub together, and he hadn't, any more. To avoid tax he had to live until he was 93.

He made it to 94. Triumphantly.

Maybe we can't all emulate him, but we should think about it. Soaring house prices mean more ordinary people will have the problem of inheritance tax. It also means our children have precious little chance of buying a decent house of their own. By the time they've saved a thousand pounds, prices have shot up by another £20,000...

They will also spend their adult lives still paying off their student loans and working until they're 70 to fund their pensions. They will be hit from all sides at all stages in their lives.

An inheritance might help - but paying a huge chunk of that to the taxman is just the final cruel indignity. And the latest think tank proposals probably won't help much.

So maybe you should be nice to your children and slip them a fiver or two while you can. One thing's sure - they're certainly going to need it.

YES, I watched the badminton. Most odd what the Olympics can do. But then I started noticing the body language of the Chinese who eventually won gold was, well, not very Chinese. Their gestures and their reactions when they won or lost a point were universal, could be seen on any football field in the world.

Even their bodies looked western.

And it's the same with all the other competitors. Yes of course there are racial differences, but they are less obvious than the similarities. All the competitors have the similar sort of athlete's bodies, that same look.

Sports training, nutrition, sponsors and sportswear are all international and interchangeable these days and, give or take a skin tone or two and a few seconds timing here and there, we seem to be producing identikit competitors. Nationality seems almost irrelevant.

It could almost make you nostalgic for the days of those Russian women weightlifters...

WAYNE Rooney might be a great footballer, but his brains are in his boots and he is young and daft. Daft enough to visit prostitutes.

This has understandably upset his fiance, but even more so, it has upset his sponsors who said that such behaviour was "inconsistent with Coca Cola values."

Coca Cola values? We used to try and behave properly because of what our mums said, or because of the standards set by our families, neighbours, church, moral teaching.

Now we are to be ruled by the morals of a tooth-rotting fizzy drink.

It's not just Wayne Rooney who's lost the plot.

Published: ??/??/2004