To yield to such psychologising, however, is a counsel of despair. Understanding the danger of such situations should be the first step to guarding against such abuse The same applies to internal discipline. Because fighting units have to be hardened to do the things they have to do, and because they require an unusual degree of team bonding, military discipline ought to be more than usually concerned to avoid bullying of any kind.The most important way of doing that would be for some external constraint on soldiers' conduct. One common theme of both the allegations of sexual harassment within the forces and of abuse of Iraqis is that they have been investigated by the military itself.

Some form of outside scrutiny would be the best way to ensure that the culture of abuse which disfigures the reputation of our armed forces is challenged and overthrown.. The publication of the Michelin guide to the restaurants of Britain and Ireland has produced the usual surge of self-congratulatory culinary introspection. Birmingham has two starred restaurants! Twin it with Lyon! Glutton as I am, I've never quite shared the obsession with Michelin stars. The Michelin grading system seems suspect - spuriously objective, butentirely dependent on the judges' personal judgement of what constitutes a decent dinner. In addition, three stars depend not only on good cooking, but on a changing menu and the restaurant's ambience, presentation and d?r.

Which means the linen, the silver, the tricksy arrangement of the petits fours. A sound eating-out culture rests on a sound eating-in culture. French eating habits may have changed radically, but French chefs such as the Roux brothers or Raymond Blanc have the judgement and instinct that they do because of the food they ate at home. They were reared in a culture that set store by painstaking shopping for good ingredients and the willingness, on the part of women mostly, to put in the effort to do the best by those ingredients. You could say the same for English chefs such as Simon Hopkinson, whose instincts are grounded on what his mum prepared - including toast and dripping and black pudding.The constellation of Michelin stars in Britain gives the lie to what is happening in our kitchens: 80 per cent of our food shopping is in supermarkets and the time we spend preparing a meal has dropped from an hour, on average, in 1980 to 20 minutes By 2010, it could be eight minutes.