IT SEEMS cruelly symbolic that a 6ft tall plastic hamster at this week's Millennium Dome contents sale went for £3,800 to the owner of a farm visitor attraction in Kent.

For it gives us a nightmarish glimpse of the sort of countryside of the future many farmers dread - a synthetic, money-spinning rural theme park which townies can visit at weekends.

If we're truthful, most townies have not been very sympathetic to the farmers' plight. We have never understood the nasty, distasteful business of producing meat, our main concern being that we can buy it cheaply at our local supermarket.

When there is a crisis, it has been too easy to blame the "greedy" farmers, whose intensive food production practices have created a climate where disease and sickness thrive. We encouraged them to leap on the efficiency treadmill, yet we are shocked when they try to cut corners.

The farmers' calls for more subsidies have too often been met with a compassionless urban response: "If the industry is uneconomic, can't we import more cheaply from abroad? After all, that's what happened to the miners."

But now, as foot-and-mouth disease continues to spread, our farming industry, already reeling from the effects of BSE and falling food prices, really does appear to be on its knees.

And we all must share the blame. We want our food to be cheap, and now we are paying the true price. Does it really surprise us that it's not such a bargain after all?

We can't afford to remain indifferent to how food gets to our plates. We have to look beyond the plastic shrink-wrapped meats in polystyrene trays stacked up cheaply at the supermarket. For, if we are not prepared to pay a proper price for healthy food, humanely produced in a countryside where animals are reared naturally, fed on local food and butchered locally, farming's long-term future is bleak.

And we could all be destined to live in a land covered in giant plastic hamsters.

BILLY Elliot star Jamie Bell said at the Bafta awards he found it difficult coping with fame. And for a while, the fresh-faced North-East schoolboy did seem ill at ease with his new-found celebrity status. When he was pictured with stars like Tom Hanks, Russell Crowe and Goldie Hawn, he looked overwhelmed. But then he was pictured this week leaving a West End celebrity haunt with a blonde in tow, swearing and making a rude gesture at photographers. The lad's a natural.

businessmen have demanded a refund after TV and radio presenter Nicholas Parsons flopped as guest speaker at their annual dinner. They complained his jokes weren't funny. But what did they expect? Didn't any of them ever watch his wonderfully cheesy Sale of the Century? Haven't they ever listened to the host of Just A Minute playing it typically straight on Radio 4? Leicester Chamber of Commerce paid £4,000 to be entertained by Parsons. It looks like the joke's on them.

HOLLYWOOD actor Keanu Reeves says he believes many women enjoy being hit and that violence can be a sexual turn-on. He was speaking at the premiere of his latest film, which he attended with his mother as he revealed he hasn't had a girlfriend for five years. Now, why doesn't that surprise me?

EVERYONE is, quite rightly, thrilled for actor David Jason, who is, this week, celebrating the birth of his first child. But, although he is 61, all of newspapers seem to have forgotten the scorn they recently heaped on a fifty-something mother expecting twins. How come grey-haired Jason has been described as "top of the pops" while the older mum has been made to feel lowest of the low?

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