Private Patients Plan’s ‘ValuePlan’ pays a cash benefit of pounds 50 a night to subscribers who elect to wait more than six weeks for a NHS bed. Novelty records may be nothing new, but a meandering tune about the terrors of childhood? With only one letter in the title? Sung by an unknown Canadian whose voice is so deep, it’s almost off the scale? Still, ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ by the Crash Test Dummies is one of the hits that 1994 will be remembered for

And now there’s the album, God Shuffled His Feet. She cracked under the strain; confused and sick, Tolstoy decided to leave home, and collapsed and died at a remote railway station on the way to nowhere.Jay Parini builds these strange events to their pathetic climax by alternating the ‘diary’ accounts of secretaries, acolytes, Tolstoy’s doctor, the countess and one of their daughters (who sided against her mother). In the daily La Repubblica, Giuseppe Turani calculated that only one third went to the parties, one third to the lower-level people who extracted the money and the rest to relatively few political ’superbosses’. Whether they will buy it depends on their deliberations about moving elsewhere. This was surprising because in the initial free vote the Member for Huntingdon had voted against the Bill. The statement follows a Ministry of Defence review which concluded that there was no need for special measures to boost the shipping industry.The number of UK-registered merchant vessels big enough to be of use in times of war – those of over 500 gross registered tonnes – has fallen from 1,614 in 1975 to 321 at the end of 1991.But replying to one of a series of short debates which kept the Commons sitting through Thursday night, Jonathan Aitken, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, said though the decline was ‘regrettable’ there were good grounds for believing that chartering or requestioning British ships could meet the expected requirements of a crisis or wartime.’We do not believe that the situation is so critical that we could not manage to carry out the type of crisis resupply and reinforcement task that faced us at the time of the recent Gulf war or at the time of the Falklands invasion – tight and more difficult though that task might be.’Mr Aitken, however, told MPs more might need to be done about crewing to ensure an adequate supply of British seafarers.John Reid, a Labour defence spokesman, accused the Government of trying to evade Parliamentary scrutiny by announcing the results of the review late in the evening at the tail end of the session.

The Prince of Wales and his elongated anguishes command all other attention A good week, at last, for John Major. He will succeed Mohamed Sahnoun, an Algerian, who resigned after being rebuked by the Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for saying the UN had been too slow in reacting to the famine. On The Piste is now almost unrecognisable from its original 1990 version, and the publishers of Bouncers are exasperated by regular changes to the script to keep it up to date.Alan Ayckbourn, on the other hand, enters the first rehearsal with an absolutely finished script, and is famous for not countenancing any changes.But isn’t this rigidity exactly what directors are there to guard against?Ayckbourn thinks not. The professor raised his eyes to the moon and said nothing.’But there is no scientific machinery for measuring such a theory That’s what worries me We can evaluate any data-based theory We can prove it, disprove it or put it on hold. The estimated number of people with Aids in the world has risen by 60 per cent in the past year, according to figures released yesterday by the World Health Organisation.

IN these days of electronic transfer of money in the blink of an eye, it might seem to be a simple matter to move a sum nine miles across Yorkshire. When I met him in the bistro, he was talking about the end of the era of selfishness and the dawn of something else, he wasn’t quite sure what. But on a wet and windy Thursday evening last week, there was a certain magic in the air when Gandey’s, Britain’s biggest travelling circus, came to town, or rather to the car park at Tranmere Rovers football ground. There were up to six inmates eating, sleeping and relieving themselves in a 4ft by 6ft cell, which was damp and full of mosquitoes ‘No make for man be that prison,’ Mr Francis said.