Did you notice that some PC-powered bright spark has decided to change the name of the splendid Spotted Dick pud to the somewhat fatuous Spotted Richard in the Flintshire County Council canteen.

The excuse that it was because people have been making rude remarks in the dinner queue does make you wonder what sort of miserable, funless place Flintshire County Council is. Spotted Dick has been the spark for schoolboy humour since before custard was called creme Anglaise - the smut is tradition, all part of its appeal.

I do hope the person responsible was called Richard because I am sure all of the council staff and indeed most of the country would be happy to return the compliment by changing his name to one more suitable.

For any of you who remember the series of articles I wrote in The Birmingham Post at the end of the 1970s when my twins, Christian and Theo, were born 10 weeks premature - they are 30 today.

Probably despite, rather than becase, of me they have turned out to be a fine pair of lads so happy birthday sons.

THEN - with Theo (L)and Christian in the editor's chair back in those black & white days

AND NOW - at Theo's wedding last year with Theo on the right

Click for full size if you want.

The release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi seems to be coming down to who said what, when and where and claims that Gordon Brown, Mandelson and the rest are lying through their teeth.

Of course they are! They are politicians, lying is what they do. They know the flak will die down eventually when the public lose interest - remember MP's expenses - meanwhile Britain and the US, as well as the Scottish judiciary, have avoided what could have been a very embarrassing appeal which is a much more important story than politicians telling porkies.

The authorities have done everything they can to ensure documents and information about the case were kept secret - on the all-purpose excuse of security grounds - with Megrahi's lawyers having to chisel every word from a rockface of obstruction.

Once Megrahi had terminal cancer it looked as if the determined appeal stonewalling would outlast the appellant but after the courts ordered papers should be furnished to the defence then there was a chance that he might just survive long enough for the appeal to go ahead.

How convenient then that Megrahi should withdraw his appeal and surely it was mere coincidence he was released two days later.

The result is that we will now probably never be any nearer to knowing what happened to Pan Am flight 103 - which is what the authorities wanted all along.

The US have jumped up and down with hard line posturing about the release of a man who, until proved otherwise, killed 270 people. They forget that had the USS Vincennes not shot down Iran Air flight 655 in the Strait of Hormuz six months earlier, killing 290, then Lockerbie might well never have happened.

No one was ever prosecuted and 20 years on the USA has still to appologise.

Whether Megrahi was guilty or not the bombing was not a one man rogue operation. Someone or some country organised it, ordered it, planned it and carried it out The evidence against Megrahi never really stacked up but it looks as if that will now become the official version.

The release of Megrahi has virtually ensured that we will probably never get any nearer to the truth of what really happened and the relatives of the 270 who died deserved at least that.

There is a new recordholder at Sainsbury's Mere Green for the 10 items or fewer aisle - a woman with 27 items who also got bonus points for telling the woman waiting stone faced with her two items next in the queue that she only had a couple of things over.

I really should get out more.

I see our bankers (not a misprint) are threatening that if we stop allowing them to pay themselves whatever fabulous figure comes into their heads they will all leave the country in a fit of pique.

Bye!

Anyone else despair about the state of the poor old Royal Mail? There seems to be a concerted Government and management policy of destroying it and flogging off the carcass to German or Dutch carpetbaggers.

Someone sent me a tiny brass tube by post, the weight was negligible, it was in a standard DL envelope and had a first class stamp but was fractionally - and we are talking 2mm here, too wide.

So despite being well within the length, width and weight it was reclassified as second class and classed as a large letter - remember we are talking 2mm here - which meant it was still 8p light on postage.

Now if you are going to lumber the public with a system which seems to have been designed to confuse pensioners by an accountant with no friends you would have thought someone with a working brain might have worked out that if the first class small letter postage cost was the same as the minmum second class large letter postage cost - and so on up the scale, first the same as second on the next level up - it would save a lot of problems.

It would just mean a marginal oversize item would drop from first to second class but no that is far too simple. So I am charged 8p but not only that, because the Royal Mail management will not insure postmen to carry money, they cannot collect the 8p so they have to pop a card through your letterbox to tell you they can't deliver an item because you owe postage.

So you have to collect from the sorting office where you are also fined £1 - they call it an admin charge - for collecting a letter someone had actually paid to have delivered.

The people taking the flak for that at the sorting office of course are the postmen , who are also blamed for all the other ills of the creaking service. No wonder they are also going on strike at regular intervals which rather than militant posties in this case tends to point to incompetent management with an agenda to sell the whole shooting match off. Tradition and history mean nothing when there is a few bob to be made and a few palms to be greased.

I am old enough to remember a postcard posted in the morning being delivered in the afternoon in the days when there was no first and second class post just a pride in delivering as fast as possible.

The current management, who decided people don't want an early morning delivery, hardly seemed worried whether mail is delivered at all just as long as their political masters are happy and the seven figure salaries keep rolling in.

Regular readers will know that one of my missions in life is to find bacon as it used to be, bacon which gives us a fry-up in its own fat rather than a boil-up in the watery white plegm inflicted on us by supermarkets.

I complained once to one of our leading supermarkets and was told that that they had regular surveys and that was how customers preferred it. They hadn't surveyed me or anyone with taste buds mind.

The real clue, I suspect, is not customer surveys but the cost of water and the amount supermarkets can squeeze into bacon and sell at £3-£4 a pound.

Bacon was part of our history, the great British fry-up, start with the bacon, then fry the egg in the bacon fat, then tomatoes followed by a slice of bread - oh and don't forget the sausages, which is what today's missive is really all about.

The great British banger is another casualty of modern life. There used to be a few award winning butchers, one in Knowle I recall, and there are still specialists, such as The Sausage Shop in Bath - do call in if you are ever down that way - but they are few and far between and the sausages not readily available. Click here for The Sausage Shop in Bath by the way.
If you are on a PC right click and open new tab or new window so you don't lose this page.

Meanwhile many of the sausages on offer in supermarkets, often quite expensive ones, can have an insipid filling or don't have the taste or texture you expect with the amount of meat they claim and often produce vast amounts of fat as they cook.

All right, for the health conscious, it is better the fat comes out rather than you end up eating it but it would be better still if it were not in there in the first place - which brings me to Debbie & Andrew's sausages. you can find their website by clicking here. Right click again to open a new window or page.

I bought a pack of their Harrogate 97 per cent pork jobs and they are bril - like sausages we remember as kids. They are probably nothing like the sausages we had as kids mind but they are what we like to remember we think we had. Real meaty bangers.

There is very little shrinkage in cooking and hardly any fat comes out because there is very little in there. The sausages are starting to appear in supermarkets - I found mine in Sainsbury's and according to Debbie & Andrew's website Morrison's also stock them - or they are available over the internet.

If you see them then give them a try.They are the best I have tried for a while so I reckon they are up around the top two or three of the supermarket sausages which is enough to give you half the great British breakfast.

Anyone spot that the Citizens' Advice Service has banned the word blacklist because it might be seen as offensive. Offensive to who they don't say but I suspect that someone with more time on their hands than is good for them is sticking their politically correct oar in to defend the sensibilities of people who have never wasted time thinking about blacklist, or Blackpool, or blackcurrant or blackberry or anything else containing the dreaded B word.

I suspect the number of complaints must have been running well into zero figures but that hardly matters to the politically correct.

Its rather like adolescent boys sniggering in class whenever something such as Cockfosters or Blue Tit comes up except its not juvenile sexual innuendo but a much more sinister manipulation and perversion of language by not just the Citizens' Advice branch of the thought police but just about every other half-baked official and semi-official bunch who seem to think they are the keepers of the Queen's English.

On second thoughts think of the offence that could cause! That had better be changed to Reigning Monarch's English - can't be too careful.

Meanwhile in the Citizens' Advice Service HQ - nearest bridge over the Thames Blackfriars so that will have to be changed - I suspect that whichever soul came up with the idea to blacklist blacklist didn't bother to discover the origins of the word which have nothing to do with race or colour but are part of our history whatever colour you happen to be.

It seems Charles II had his own version of a little black book with a list of those responsible or implicated in the death of his father - the black list. If you were on it then you were out of favour in a big way.

So as a bit of advice to the advisors stick to what you are good at, helping people who need it, and leave language to its own devices. There are enough wrongs in the world without finding imaginary and rather fatuous ones to champion.

Well done Alan Duncan for telling it how it is. Not that MPs live on rations of course or that they are treated like the old proverbial, its not that how it is we ought to thank him for but giving us some indication of the way many MPs still think about being caught with their snouts deep in the trough.

The only thing many of them think they did wrong was getting caught. We can guarantee that the next list the Government publishes of MP's expenses will have more black lines than a herd of zebras with the only coherent information in many cases being the name and constituency of the member concerned.

We have already seen their reaction to expenses without receipts. New speaker John Bercow has proved himself not only more articulate than Michael Martin but just as adept at sleight of hand and picking the public pocket.

Under Martin MPs could wangle £4,800 a year, and many did, without receipts. Under new broom Bercow the rules have been changed to stamp out such unsavoury practices so that now they can only claim a mere £9,120 a year - almost double.

You might also remember that only last year it was revealed that the refurbishment of Speaker's House, Michael Martin's then official pile, had cost the taxpayer £1.7m over seven years. That is a lot of refurbishment.

So why, you might ask, does Bercow, the new improved Martin, need another £20,000 refurb. OK, with three young children you might need some child security but the place is rent free and they are his kids. No one else expects the state to pay to keep their kids alive in their own home.

You might just be able to argue for assistance, no more than that, towards the cost of child security in a listed building but claiming nearly seven grand on a sofa suite? And £760 for cushions? Don't these people ever put their hands in their pockets to buy anything? They probably even claim for the pen, paper and postage to send their expenses in.

I have met a fair number of MPs over the years and, with a few notable exceptions, serving their fellow man and making the world a more decent and better place did not come on the first page of their why I want to be an MP list.

Alan Duncan has apologised but it really was not necessary, in fact it is quite refreshing to hear an MP telling us what he really thinks without following the party line or adding the obligatory spin. MPs, who are well versed in making noises they think the public want to hear, will condemn and tut-tut but secretly many will agree with the sentiments and are just waiting for the public to lose interest so that the Westminster gravy train can start running again.

I had to pick up a prescription for my wife yesterday - £7.20 - which would not be so bad if it were not for the fact she is one of the remarkable small number who actually pay prescription charges.

According to the Government's own figures 88 per cent of prescriptions in England are free which means just 12 per cent are paid for and as those poor saps who make up the 12 per cent are no doubt paying a national insurance contribution as well it seems they are having to cough up twice.

The charge is expected to raise £435 million a year. That might seem a lot but in 2008 the NHS in England dispenesed 842.5 million items at a cost of £8,325.5 million which makes the pathetic £435 million it is screwing out of people who are actually working and paying tax and national insurance look pretty sick itself. It is almost a fine for working, as much a tax as PAYE.