There I was on Sunday, flying back from Australia on a Korean airline called Asiana (I'd never heard of it before, and it was marvellous) and Outer Mongolia was slipping away 35,000ft beneath me, and the doll-like air-hostess, with a little bow, asked if I'd close the blind so passengers could watch The Incredible Hulk or stare at an on-screen graphic representation of our flight path - rather than the real thing! Witless fools. If you were flying over Mongolia, why wouldn't you want to look?

Out of print

On Monday I was at Westminster to help to launch the Plain English Campaign's efforts in Parliament, where a Nottinghamshire MP, Nick Palmer, hopes to promote a Bill to make the small print of contracts bigger and more noticeable. He'll have an uphill task. For the insurance industry the beauty of small print is that potential policyholders think the big-print synopsis matters more than the small print; while the industry knows it's the other way round.

Obviously nobody's going to insure you, except at a stonking premium, against anything with a serious chance of happening. Obviously if nobody insured, but instead opened a personal savings account and every year placed in it the insurance premiums they would otherwise have paid, the vast majority would be richer. But there's one real benefit the insurance industry does sell at competitive prices: peace of mind. Force people to read the small print, and bang goes the product's greatest merit. You might as well write PLACEBO on a placebo.

Flourish of strumpets

Yesterday's announcement of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's idiotic proposals for criminalising those who pay for sex with “controlled” prostitutes (but not others - as if it will ever be possible to make a clear distinction) reminded me of my efforts as an MP to stop prostitution being an imprisonable offence for women. The English Collective of Prostitutes brought a coachload from the West Midlands to meet my committee. In the Commons Central Lobby whither I went to meet them, I spotted a bunch of nattily dressed women with Brummie accents. “Are you the prostitutes from Birmingham?” I said nervously. They were a Catholic women's guild, lobbying against abortion.

I kid you not

With Christmas coming you will shortly be invited by charities to buy a goat for somebody poor overseas. Don't. Environmentally, goats are a disaster, eating every shoot that pokes through parched earth, breeding unchecked till there is no vegetation left and - endlessly resourceful - roving beyond human control. Agriculturally the goat is a beggar-my- neighbour devil, bringing short-term relief while degrading its habitat; a kind of licensed leaf pirate, wrecking attempts to improve or cultivate land.

The only good goat is a tethered goat, a goat behind a high-security fence or a dead goat. A UN programme to wipe out every free-roaming goat on Earth would bring hardship in the immediate, but ultimately benefit mankind.

A beacon in the dark

The news that two men are to stand trial for the kidnap and murder of Margaret Hassan, the aid worker executed in Iraq, will distress but not surprise her family, who knew her fate. I spent time talking with her sisters after having become involved (by a would-be benefactor) in attempts to offer a ransom for her. Uneasy about co-operating, I would have been equally uneasy about refusing.

The Foreign Office is implacably opposed to rewarding kidnappers. The family or friends of anyone kidnapped should be in no doubt: official policy is driven by a strong argument, but one that may not necessarily coincide with the best interests of the individual concerned. And they will not tell you this.

Mrs Hassan's case never excited the news media as Kenneth Bigley's did. I feel that this luminously good person somehow deserved better: my last word on an awful story.

After Grey's elegy

On my third night home, I looked from a Thames balcony toward the Manhattan-style blaze of light the Isle of Dogs became. But there seemed to be fewer lights burning. The lamps are going out all over Canary Wharf; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

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