In the same period the Americans have turned it into ketchup.*All these quotations taken from the Great Book of Albanian Proverbs, 1998 edition.CorrectionYesterday I wrote that "The Seekers' films represent one of the peaks of twentieth-century art." This should have been, of course, "De Sica's films represent one of the peaks of twentieth-century art".. AS REGULAR readers will know, I have always had a weakness for Albanian proverbs, which have a paradoxical nature typical of a country which managed to be an atheist state for so many years despite the majority of the population being Muslim. Our British proverbs tend to be sensible- sounding without having much to teach us. Albanian proverbs are quite the opposite: opaque at first sight, but nutritious after much chewing. Anyway, judge for yourself in this latest cropping from the Great Book of Albanian Proverbs *No great comedy hit ever had a comic title.*Prayer-time: the only time when a Christian comes out in the open and tells God what to do.In the country of the blind, the optician starves.*A tennis ball is used for many different activities, but a cricket ball is used only for cricket.*Never stand between a dog and a tree.*Show me a king or queen who can hum their national anthem backwards, and I'll show you a man or woman who is too smart to be a monarch.*A boomerang that returns is a reproach to its owner, for it is a boomerang that has missed its target.*There are many more people who use the word "Kafkaesque" than ever read Kafka.*Three things that are a waste of money: theatre programmes, wine in a pub and a National Lottery ticket.*A roof rack is mildly useful for carrying luggage, but it is extremely useful for identifying your car in a large car park.*The person most dependent on road transport is a hitch-hiker, yet he is the one person who is never mentioned in traffic surveys.*Which came first: the pencil or the pencil sharpener ?*The most successful and yet most unobtrusive lobby group of all time is the movement dedicated to keeping angling out of the Olympic Games.*What question would you pay Martin Bell to ask in Parliament?Whatever the commonest tree is in your country, it is not as common as ivy.*When a hostage is released, nobody ever asks the captor to write a book about the experience.*There is nothing more talked about by men than sex, or less practised.*Who ever heard of a man being trained to lead a blind dog around ?*Soft, pliable, easily moulded - all the definitions for "plastic" given in the dictionary, and all the things that plastic is not.*Cuba must be an awful place.

And another on Earl Spencer's divorce case in South Africa, when his wife accused him of having had 12 mistresses and threatened to call them all to give evidence That should put them off.. He complained that her insatiable appetite for plastic surgery "submitted us to public ridicule". That's it: ridicule. Jack Straw could compile a fact pack on the couple's embarrassment and humiliatione for his parenting classes. All the Government has to do is to draw the moral from the divorce of Alec and Jocelyne Wildenstein. Alec W, from a family worth billions of dollars, claims to earn $175,000 a year, although New York court depositions show he and his wife spent $16m in 1995 and $11m the next year. She claimed she needed $2.4m a year, partly because she did not know how to make toast or boil water. There are alternative regimes for track and passenger service which could ensure more investment and better performance.

His saddest inheritance from the Tories is a culture of under-performance among the franchisees and the arrogant way certain companies ignore complaints and, still, prefer excess profit to providing the public with fast and safe trains.. WE KNOW the Prime Minister approves of marriage and wants to promote it - without in any way casting aspersions on those of his colleagues who are less fortunate than he on the conjugal front The question is, how to get the message across. He and Cherie appeared on the step of No 10 Downing Street for a photocall the other day, holding a single red rose to advertise National Marriage Week. Is that going to stop people hurrying into unsuitable matches, or suing for divorce the first time the top is left off the toothpaste tube? Hardly Now we have the solution The Wildenstein Solution. How could FirstGroup, or anyone else, have been allowed to pay a price for Great Western which is inflated by its failure to perform according to contract? The regulator surely must revalue the company at its performance price - a damn sight lower.

And the new franchisee has to be told in no uncertain terms that fines and public obloquy will fall swift and fast if service does not improve.Mr Prescott has two further tasks, one backward-looking and one developmental. The National Audit Office has laid a heavy set of charges at the door both of the Tory Transport Secretary Sir George Young and his officials, none of whom even dreamt of blowing a whistle in the hearing of the Comptroller and Auditor-General. We have, in Britain, a no-fault culture in Whitehall, but can Mr Prescott afford not to ask some searching questions about his civil servants' handling of rail privatisation? As for Sir George Young, if the Public Accounts Committee does not subject him to the fiercest interrogation it will be failing in its duty. The least the Blair government can do is order an immediate moratorium on all those Foreign Office sponsored trips by gurus (and former civil servants) to eastern Europe preaching to them on how to privatise.But for the future, Mr Prescott has a railway to run and a network to expand. Why are there separate regulators for track and passenger franchises? Rail regulation ought to be unified, expert, omniscient and passionately devoted to the development of rail transport. Instead it is fragmented, amateur and all too prone to have the wool pulled over its eyes.Having blocked the sale of Great Western, Mr Prescott must now lean on John Swift, the track regulator and John O'Brien, the man responsible for the passenger franchises They have to sharpen up.