l A NUMBER of young men have adopted a new ring tone to coincide with the World Cup. It's the theme music from that 1962 classic The Great Escape.

Now here's a funny thing. I have a number of acquaintances who rib me mercilessly about my battlefield trips. This is done to my face and behind my back in equal measure.

Yet these are the same people who snigger about "two world wars and one world cup", as if our brave boys were once again going over the top to give Fritz a damn good thrashing.

To trivialise the suffering of the 20th Century is appalling. But to equate sport with war - and put the whole caboodle to music - is at best crass, at worst an obscenity.

l I MET a man this week who told me he had been robbed twice and tapped for money by an aggressive beggar.

I suspect he may have been a homosexual. From what he was saying, I sussed that he had been out cruising but instead ended up with a bruising.

This man vowed nothing like that would ever happen again. Any attacker would get a swift boot in a certain area, next time. I said that was an excellent course of action, but warned him that in such an eventuality, the police would arrest him and charge him with injuring a criminal acting in the line of booty.