Week gone by

SEXUAL EQUALITY

THE big news of the week is that council workers in London are testing the first female urinal with a view to letting it loose on the streets. It allows women to do their business standing up, just like men. The creator of the Whiz toilet said: "It is cleaner than the conventional toilet because there is no physical contact with the porcelain and it is quicker so it cuts queuing time." But will women be able to perfect the art that men have been practising for decades of chasing those disinfectant cubes up and down the trough?

PERFORMANCE-RELATED PAY

MORE than 197,000 teachers have applied to join the Government's performance-related pay scheme and they are now expected to win pay rises of £2,000 - if they perform. This would take a classroom teacher without managerial responsibilities to £25,958-a-year. Returning home this week having performed especially poorly were Alan Shearer, Phil Neville and their England team-mates. Shearer earns £42,000 and Neville is on £20,000. That is a week. Indeed, with commercial endorsements, Neville is expected to earn £1.2m this year no matter how many penalties he gives away.

A BAD WEEK FOR...

THUGS AND HOOLIGANS

THE abysmal scenes which have accompanied the England football team around Belgium and Holland would have disgraced even the original thugs and hooligans.

The word 'hooligan' first entered the English language in the summer of 1898 when a number of members of Hooley's gang were up in court for various drink-related acts of violence in London. The Daily Telegraph of August 6 said: "William Lineker, described as a Hooligan, set upon an inoffensive man." The Daily News of August 8 said: "The prisoner belonged to a gang of roughs calling themselves 'Hooligans'." The leader of the gang seems to have been an Irishman called Houlihan but nicknamed Hooley.

The Thugs were a vicious gang of professional robbers who lived in the western provinces of India. They assaulted travellers whom they usually finished off by strangulation. From 1831, the British Government set out to ruthlessly track down all Thugs. It succeeded in India within a couple of decades - the great shame is that contemporary governments haven't employed the same vigour against homegrown thugs in recent decades.

EGG-COLLECTING

THIS week's niggling little question is what do you call a collector of bird's eggs - other than, of course, a criminal. The question was raised following Keith Hartburn of Hartlepool pleading guilty to stealing four rare golden eagle eggs from a nest in the Outer Hebrides. He also possessed 558 common wild birds' eggs. After scouring dictionaries and the Internet, we've learnt that a collector of eggs is an oologist - from the Greek meaning to study eggs - and Hartburn should properly have been accused of oologizing - taking eggs from a nest. We, of course, will not be eulogizing him.

THE NORTH-EAST

THE Guardian this week had a learnd analysis of the Barnett Formula which dictates how much money central government gives to the regions and the provinces. Scotland gets much more than the North-East, even though the North-East's GDP per head was 13 per cent less than in Scotland:

l Scotland spends 24 per cent more per head on health than the North-East;

l Scotland spends 18 per cent more per head on agriculture than the North-East;

l Scotland spends ten per cent more per head on jobs than the North-East;

l Scotland spends 24 per cent more per head on education than the North-East.

The absurdity of this is encapsulated in another statistic: in Glasgow, pupil/teacher ratios are about a fifth lower than in Middlesbrough.

GOZZA THE GOSLING

REGULAR readers will no doubt be agog at the prospect of learning how the goslings at the bottom of the column's garden are getting on. Three goslings are being reared by the column's pet chicken, Clarissa. She went broody earlier this year and the only fertilised eggs we could find in the neighbourhood belonged to a goose. The other pet chicken, Ronaldo, had her beak put firmly out of joint by the arrival of the goslings and has taken vicious retribution. This week, she managed to peck a large hole in Gozza's back and so the three-week-old squeaker had to go to the vet for a stitch. The vet also installed a lampshade-type device, more normally associated with a dog, around Gozza's neck to stop her de-stitching herself. Sadly, the gosling now spends all of her time trying to reverse out of the lampshade. Meanwhile, the other two goslings have managed to elude Ronaldo's evil clutches and are happily turning our small garden into a guano factory.