IT was a great moment in sport. So rare, so wonderful, it deserves to be shown again and again. A lesson to us all. Tennis star Venus Williams lost her Wimbledon match against the younger Karolina Sprem. Amazingly, when the second set had gone to a tie break, the umpire got the score wrong. Instead of awarding the point to Venus, he gave it to Karolina, who went on to win the set and the match.

Could that wrong point have tipped the match? Maybe. Maybe not.

But no one picked up on it - not the linesmen, not the players. So the decision stood. And afterwards, a dejected Venus Williams refused to blame anyone but herself.

Can you imagine that? She didn't throw chairs, blame the umpire or call into question his parentage, eyesight or masculinity. She didn't shout or cry, or fling her racket to the ground. Neither did she demand a replay or an inquest, nor blame the grass, the ground, or the crowd. She didn't attack the umpire's family or fellow countrymen, pick fights with them or wreck their pub. She accepted the decision, accepted it was her mistake, too.

"The umpire made a mistake but he didn't do it deliberately," she said. "I don't think one call makes a match." It was a classic - and classy - example of a gracious loser.

Of course, it all got a bit lost in the fuss, furore and failure of the England/Portugal football match later that day. And it's precisely because of that fuss and some of the disgraceful events that followed, that it deserves to be re-told.

This tennis star could teach footballers, and their fans, how to behave.

Winning's easy - it's coping with losing that's hard. Though you'd think, by now, England fans would have had plenty of practice.

FOR years in the dim and distant past, when the boys were at school, I would get up and make their sandwiches for lunch. Then they would come bursting through the door at 4pm, starving and wondering what was for tea. Those days, of course, are long gone. Or so I thought.

Now they're both home for the summer, with temporary jobs in the same place. They go out at 7.30am with sandwiches, and at 4pm, they come bursting through the door, starving and wondering what's for tea.

Empty nest? What empty nest?

WAS it me missing something, or in Coronation Street this week, was David dumping Sally's unwanted leaflets in the bin when actually he was still on a fishing holiday with Martin?

CAROL Vorderman, the 43-year-old maths brain, has just been announced as the woman every man in Britain fancies by the editor of GQ magazine, after sales went up by 23 per cent when she was on the cover. She tries to tell us she's saggy bellied, wrinkled and has a "huge backside". But that's false modesty. She's dieted, exercised and worked hard to achieve a new body in her 40s and has the exercise video to prove it. So she's entitled to gloat. But would she wear fishnets and corset on Countdown - or would the effect on Richard Whiteley be too awful to contemplate?

Sobering implications

of science

THE video pictures of the development of an unborn baby are amazing. At barely 12 weeks and not much more than two inches long, it's clearly having a wonderful time trampolining in its mother's womb. We really are seeing the miracle of life. Wonderful ammunition for the anti-abortionists, of course. For after seeing that, even the most fervent pro-choicers would have to stop and think long and hard about what they are supporting. If that's a foetus at 12 weeks, how can we still have a legal abortion limit of 24 weeks? That's not just a blob of cells, a minor inconvenience, a slightly queasy feeling, it's clearly a baby.

Meanwhile, Natalie Evans has lost her chance of ever becoming a mother. She had cancer in her 20s and before her ovaries were removed, she had IVF treatment that resulted in frozen embryos. Now she wants to have the embryos implanted - her only chance of ever having her own children.

But her fiance of the time - now her ex fiance - has refused. He doesn't want the responsibility of a child, doesn't think it would be good for a child to start off with just a single mother, and so has refused his consent. The embryos are, after all, half his. It's a desperately sad and messy situation and almost any decision would be equally right and wrong. And over in America, the child who was conceived with sperm from an anonymous donor has managed to track down her father with incredibly complicated and emotional results. As a student, the man gave over 200 sperm donations. About half of them apparently resulted in a successful pregnancy. So somewhere, there are 100 children waiting to call him Daddy.

And we still have to consider the problems of stem cells, cloning, selection... We have entered the world of science fiction. Scientific achievements are breathtaking. But the trouble is that the science has soared way ahead of our emotional and moral ability to cope with the problems it raises. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act had a brave attempt but raises as many questions as it answers.

We can't stop the science but we need to think more clearly about what we should let it achieve. Because once it becomes personal, none of us can think straight.

SUCH is the pressure on exam marking that many GCSE papers this year will apparently be marked abroad. I can't see any problem with the idea. Far better that than the person I once saw marking GCSE papers on a crowded train, being joggled by passers by and distracted by squalling babies and Walkmans. Maybe it doesn't require much concentration to mark a pile of GCSE scripts but examiners could at least look the part. So farming the scripts out abroad seems a reasonable idea. Unless, of course, they end up being marked on foreign trains.

AT its annual conference, the British Medical Association has said that, despite the Government's promise, it will take too long to introduce the ideas of choice in the NHS because the plans need a lot more doctors. And doctors - and nurses - take years to train. But it doesn't take years to train a cleaner. What's more, you get a lot more cleaners than surgeons for your money. Cleaners are vital. A dirty hospital is an unsafe hospital. Germs and infections spread. What's the point of the latest high-tech equipment and expertise if the patient goes back to a filthy ward? So while we're waiting for all these doctors, let's at least get our hospitals shining, sparkling, clinically clean. Choice might be a nice option one day. Cleanliness isn't.

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