Yesterday’s awful shooting of five British servicemen by a trainee Afghan policeman took me back to a dusty yard in a Dutch-controlled southern province there, earlier this year, and a rag-tag army of Afghan police “trainees” assembled for us journalists: I’ve seen more orderly crews in hostels for the homeless.

Reading about yesterday’s incident, it strikes me that the Taleban must be pretty slow off the mark to have left it so long.

Fits the bill

I last week submitted to this newspaper my expenses claims for the three annual party conferences. For nearly a month I got to stay in three expensive hotels, with restaurant and bar bills all reimbursable by my employers — reimbursements being allowable free of income tax on the ground that the costs were incurred “solely and necessarily in the performance of [my] duties”. The verbal formula (applied to most media employees working away from the office) is virtually identical to that governing MPs’ claims for the additional costs of living and working away from home.

I’ve enjoyed the heated swimming pools this autumn, benefited from the domestic servants, the waiter service (and in one case the pergola), missing only the duck house — all of these tax-free benefits, of course, concealed, un-itemised, in the hotel bills. Renting is obviously the way forward. Commons Fees Office, please note.

I’m sorry to be a pedantic fusspot, and sorrier still to admit to even a smidgin of sympathy for MPs, but I just thought that worth pointing out.

Likes a scrap

Is Peter Mandelson now the only substantial figure left in the Labour Party? All right, who else?

You hesitated, didn’t you? Through gritted teeth I admit that Lord Mandelson’s car scrappage scheme seems to have worked. He advanced plans that could have saved the Royal Mail — until the Prime Minister overruled him. And this week (if, as I surmise, he has been talking to General Motors) he seems to have helped to scupper Angela Merkel’s Germanocentric “rescue” of her bits of GM.

Perhaps, like the Marquis of Carabas, Lord M is a part-mythical figure, credited by the credulous with all that the eye can see — but such an image, too, is his achievement; and becomes self-validating. The way things are going, Lord Mandelson’s only big decision after the next general election will be whether to rescue a governing or an opposition party.

Oom-pah-pah

On Tuesday night I joined a group of Times+ readers for a performance of the musical Oliver! at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. It was a super evening and a barnstorming, bouncy show, but far from the new experience I had expected. I’d seen Oliver! once (I thought to myself) but the film version, with Oliver Reed and Harry Secombe, and that was years ago. Just how many years became dismayingly clear when I did the arithmetic: 40. So I wouldn’t remember much of it (I thought) — perhaps just a few snatches of some of the songs I’ve caught since on the radio. That my mother had read Dickens’s whole book to us children, doing all the different voices, one chapter a night for what seemed like ages (such happy ages) wouldn’t obtrude much, I supposed. Not after 50 years.

But I remembered everything. All the characters, all the scenes, all the famous lines (some from Dickens, others from the film script) and almost every line of the music and lyrics. I could have sung and talked along, almost, with the show from start to finish.

Isn’t the human brain extraordinary? Somewhere up there in my skull, in what must be an infinitesimally small corner, and tucked alongside all the hymns and biblical passages and poems and whole children’s stories I’d learnt by heart; and then buried beneath layer upon layer of so much else that has entered my memory since — a man’s entire life ... somewhere was waiting, in case I should ever have need of its recall, virtually the entire score of Oliver!.

Mass production

Ash trees in the autumn usually drop their leaves in blackened bundles, almost overnight, after a sharp frost. But this year in Derbyshire there has been little frost so far, and none at all severe. So it is one of those autumns when the ashes turn the most delicate lemony-limey-yellow: a fragile and rather special colour. Last weekend the Peak District looked like Massachusetts.

Times Recommends

• Never believe Demjanjuk is a ‘victim’
• A strong City is not just good for Britain
• Class warrior ready for one last battle