It was a time when nostalgia was becoming an increasingly valuable currency in regional newspapers. Harrison edited the Bristol Evening Post's hugely popular weekly nostalgia supplement, Bristol Times, and packed it with titbits and tales from the city's past.Harrison suffered increasing bouts of ill-health in the last 20 years of his life, but always returned to his desk and was on hand to help younger colleagues when they needed authoritative information about Bristol.Few of today's Evening Post journalists would have recognised the younger, music-mad David Harrison. Like the night in 1966 when a burly steward unceremoniously dragged him off the seat on which he'd been dancing like a dervish at the Colston Hall in Bristol. David's excuse? His idol Otis Redding was in full, magnificent flight on stage.James Belsey. Should the BBC's Panorama team want to return to the subject of asylum and immigration after their botched job, perhaps they should head for Italy.

But there is a shortage of people to pick the grapes, because Silvio Berlusconi, the populist Italian Prime Minister, has taken such a hard line on immigration Acqua minerale all round!. We are approaching London Heathrow, the weather is unsettled and the local time is 1978. So commented one observer drily at the sudden outbreak of industrial action, which comes complete with footage of hordes of inconvenienced passengers and retro reporting of late-night sessions at Acas fuelled by fish-and-chip suppers. Wildcat strikes are usually symptoms of two things, both of which seem to apply here: poor management and weak unions.The most plausible explanation of the trouble at Terminal One is that neither British Airways managers nor the union bosses had much idea about the working practices of check-in staff, and were both caught out by the law of unintended consequences.It seemed an obvious efficiency gain to replace pen-and-paper records with a computerised swipe-card system, but this took no account of how BA staff at Heathrow actually used the system. Paper records gave staff some degree of control over their working hours, allowing them to arrange informal swaps of time on and off with their colleagues, while electronic records - intentionally or not - gave more power to managers.This is, then, a dispute of our times, not a replay of mid-Seventies unrest. It is about the balance of power between managers and staff in a flexible workforce, in which that flexibility has been to the benefit of both sides.

The check-in staff like working flexible but predictable hours because many of them are part-timers with young families; as a result BA gets - or used to get - cheap, flexible and reasonably well-motivated labour.Yesterday, Rod Eddington, BA's chief executive, said the company had "no God-given right to survive", though he hastened to add he was confident it would. We imagine his employees are well aware that they no longer work for a nationalised industry. But it is his managers' blunderings that have given the unions the chance to make themselves useful again, and that have threatened the company's reputation, and hence its competitiveness The company has only itself to blame.. Spin is a charge that is almost impossible to shake off. Once a prime minister acquires a reputation for distorting the truth or trying to distract people from it, any attempt to mend his ways is seen as a ploy Spin is a charge that is almost impossible to shake off. People have long since ceased to accept Mr Blair at his own estimation, as a pretty straight sort of guy, surrounded - by implication - by devious spin doctors practising their sinister arts without his knowledge.So there is a logic to Clare Short's argument, in her interview in today's Independent, that, if Mr Campbell is guilty of the abuse of power, then Mr Blair is also implicated. She is right that if people feel that the Government has spun the case for war too far, then it is not only Mr Campbell who must go, but Mr Blair, too.