A Lord and a Dame

But firstly, a spot of teeth-gnashing at Liverpool, so good for 50 minutes and so much like a crowd of strangers plucked from the streets for the remaining 40. Still, a win's a win, if you ignore the nerve-shredding nail-chewing manner in which it was accomplished.

I have a friend, who we'll call Max, who works in the US Department of Defense. I wonder just what Max is doing at this moment (5.48pm on a Wednesday evening in DC). I wonder this because Max has got to get his head round the intelligence report, which seems to have two obvious corollaries:

1 - if you say that the occupation of Iraq was never going to be easy and a mammoth troop deployment would merely have enraged more people sooner, the straightforward response is 'then why did you invade in the first place, jackass?'

2 - if you say that the plan was right but that mistakes were made, you open yourself up to the justifiable conclusion that you did actually make everything worse for minimal gain, and there seems no good reason why you should be trusted with correcting your own errors.

With the public - certainly in Britain - convinced that (a) the given casus belli, WMD, was a fantasy at best and lie at worst, (b) Iraq is hell on earth and (c) we are now in more danger than previously, the whole war on terror thing looks a little ragged, especially considering victories over Al Q'aeda.

Max could hold onto the undeniable fact that Arab countries tended to hate America anyway, not to mention Israel, and they are not exactly countries known for reasoned argument on the subject. He could also note that realpolitik has a checkered history in the region, and that you can, in fact, quite successfully make war on an ideology. Max has, after all, studied the Cold War.

Max is an intelligent and sharp guy, and if anyone can make the case, he can. But I do not envy Max his job.

And finally to the title of today's blog. Sad news was the death of 'Lord' Byron Nelson, the American golfer who signed his card and passed into the celestial clubhouse at the age of 94. Byron Nelson was a genuine great of the game, not least because he retired to his Texas ranch aged 34. One can only dream how much he could have achieved; but then, he was often physically sick before playing. He was quoted as saying that he knew three things: a little bit about golf, how to make a stew, and how to be a decent man.

I'd be happy with that epitaph.

The Dame is Julie Andrews, whom the Screen Actors' Guild announced would be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2007 ceremony.

I'm slightly surprised. Although Dame Julie has become a much-beloved legend, her contribution to film is arguably less substantial than that of, say, Dame Judi Dench, and certainly less than that of Dame Maggie Smith. I don't for a minute underestimate either Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music, both films I love and in which Julie Andrews is far far better than the casual observer might think; but beyond that she is perhaps remembered for Victor/Victoria and Thoroughly Modern Millie. The latter, which is a hilarious 90 minute comedy lost inside a two-and-a-half hour movie, may even be her best performance and demonstrates just what she could do when allowed the freedom.

We may regret that she wasn't Eliza (although we would then have lost her Mary Poppins); we should certainly regret that she (and perhaps also Richard Burton) didn't transfer from stage to screen in Camelot. We should be grateful for her work - on film and onstage. I just wonder what she could have done as an actress. Ah well.