Who cares what bankers wear?

Same with schools. School uniform has never been so popular. Whether it's just a sweatshirt embroidered with the school name, or the complete kit and caboodle, parents and head teachers seem to agree that a smart uniform fosters a sense of identity and pride. Dress smartly, think smartly.

Well yes. There's a lot to be said for it.

On the other hand, I seem to remember school staff spending an awful lot of energy policing uniform - checking whether skirts were the right length, tying hair back. Girls were sent home for wearing the wrong colour tights, or the wrong sort of shoes.

Even now, barely a term goes by without some child being suspended for wearing earrings or the wrong hair cut, or dyeing their hair purple or some such irrelevance. We thought girls had won the battle to wear trousers and now a school has made them compulsory, which wasn't what we meant at all. And so the battles go on.

And all that effort and time and trouble in policing uniform could so much more profitably be spent somewhere else in the school.

When I learnt to type, we were meant to dress as though we were already working - all very ladylike in smart suits, matching shoes and our hair pulled back. Then I went to work for the BBC and everyone wore patched jeans and faded T-shirts. As for Barclays and other professional establishments...

Admittedly, it's disconcerting, not to mention occasionally downright unpleasant to try to do business with someone who looks as though they're dressed for a night out clubbing or an afternoon on the beach. And if Barclays have to tell staff that clothes have to be ironed, it makes you wonder what calibre of people they're employing.

On the other hand, most of my banking and insurance these days is done via the Internet or the telephone, where image is fairly secondary.

And frankly, I couldn't care less if the person at the other end of the phone was wearing flip-flops, slippers or a fancy dress outfit, as long as they sorted out my problems properly - without mistakes, excuses or a half hour wait being told my call was very important to them.

Let's get a professional attitude and performance first - and then who cares what bankers wear?

FEWER students than ever are doing languages at university, A-level or even GCSE, which is probably a symptom of how we are so scared of Europe and would rather become a satellite of the US.

Most European children put us to shame. While our children can now give up a foreign language at 14, Europeans learn other languages from a very young age and speak them as well as we do - even better in some cases. Just listen to all those foreign footballers speaking clearly and fluently after matches while our lot, on the whole, tend to do little more than grunt. The Dutch and the Scandinavians are particularly brilliant.

Most of them start in primary school, when they are less inhibited and more eager to learn, while we usually don't start until 11, when that first eagerness has gone and the rot has already set in.

By learning a language you don't just understand the words, but learn something of how a country works, how the people think. Whatever you think about Europeans, they are our nearest neighbours and it does no harm to learn what makes them tick. So it's pitiful that we give up so easily.

So by all means stop learning a language at 14 - as long as we've started learning it at four.

A disappointing Darcy

IT'S the battle of the Darcys. A new film version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is out in a few weeks and after Colin Firth set every red blooded woman's heart a flutter when he emerged dripping from a lake in the television version, Matthew Macfadyen, the new film's Darcy, is apparently struggling to keep up. One professor of English has already said that the new Darcy spends too much of his time sulking. Oh dear. But there again, when Colin Firth first smouldered onto our screens and spent the entire first episode looking disdainful, there are those who said that no-one could replace Laurence Olivier in the role. Or Alan Badel after him.

Darcy as a creation is clearly bigger than all the actors who've played him. Maybe the best Darcy of all exists in the pages of Jane Austen - and in our own imaginations.

THE Dove campaign - all those real women, naturally curvy and not a skinny rib in sight - was a great success in this country. We loved it, smiled at it - and bought a lot more Dove products as we like to see real people in our ads.

Not the Americans. The Dove campaign has just gone big in New York's Time Square and Americans, more used to seeing perfection on their screens and utterly unused to laughing at themselves are said to find it "unsettling". Gosh, it makes you proud to be British.

NEW research - by men - apparently proves that men are more intelligent than women. Or at least have higher IQs. Or at least are better at doing IQ tests - which were, after all, devised by men.

I'm sure the men did well because they concentrated entirely on the task in hand.

The women, meanwhile, were probably doing the test while wondering if they'd be in time to pick up the kids, what to make for supper, whether the dry cleaning had been collected, whether the washing had been done, what to get for the mother-in-law's birthday, when to get the school shoes, check the travel insurance, organise a hen night and a thousand and one other things.

When men do more than one thing at a time, they call it multi-tasking. Women just call it life

Published: ??/??/2004