We all know of houses that are called Hillcrest or Old School House. They describe the nature of the house.Defendant: They do.Counsel: But not in your case.Defendant: Alas, no. Ever since Dutch elm disease, there have been no elms in our area.Counsel: And therefore your house name is now misleading, inaccurate and, let us not pretend otherwise, dishonest.Defendant: To that extent, yes.Counsel: The present Government is very conscious that unless we can all be honest with ourselves in modern life, the fabric of society is endangered, and therefore has embarked on a campaign to clean up public nomenclature. It no longer wishes advertisements to be misleading, or weights to be inaccurate, or lists of ingredients to be faulty.Defendant: Fair enough.Counsel: Or names to be unrepresentative.Defendant: Hold on a minute! You slipped that one in as if it were equivalent.

Is this a measure that came from Whitehall?Counsel: Yes, I believe…Defendant: Where is the White Hall?Counsel: I am sorry?Defendant: The main avenue of government in London is called Whitehall. If my house is not to be called The Elms, why should Whitehall be called Whitehall? There has been no White Hall there for hundreds of years.Counsel: Yes, but…Defendant: How tall are you?Counsel: I don’t understand.Defendant: It’s a simple question. How tall are you? What exactly don’t you understand?Counsel: What I do not understand, Mrs Smallgrass, is why you should ask the question at all.Defendant: I ask it because your name is Mr Short. It strikes me that you are a good height, nearly six foot, and therefore not short at all.Counsel: I am 5ft 11in.Defendant: What is that in metres?Counsel: I do not know.Defendant: We have officially gone over to metric measures It is now illegal to offer dimensions in Imperial measures. And yet you, a leading barrister, do not know how to measure your own height in metric! You, Mr Short, do not know how short or tall you are in modern measures!Counsel: [To Judge] M’lord, I feel I have to protest against this line of questioning!Judge: And a fat lot of good it will do you. Mrs Smallgrass has got you by the short and curlies, if you ask me Carry on, Mrs Smallgrass We are all enjoying this.More of this tomorrow, I hope
More from Miles Kington. 1992Population
The world population was 5.47bn, of whom 77 per cent were in developing countries.

In the early Nineties, the population was rising by 95m a year, equivalent to the world population in 1000BCWar and refugeesGlobal military spending was $922bn (£606bn) and the number of refugees totalled 17m. Many people were victims of civil strife, with 1m displaced internally within Yugoslavia aloneNuclear powerThere were 428 nuclear reactors in 31 nations. There had been two severe accidents, Three Mile Island in America in 1979 and Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986TransportThe 600m motor vehicles included 480m cars. Western cities had the most, but vehicles caused air problems in many Third World citiesGlobal warming23bn tons of carbon dioxide came mostly from motor vehicles and forest burning.

Concentration was 356 parts per million of the most important greenhouse gasOzone layerBy 1975, the chlorine concentration was 1.4 parts per billion. By 1992 it was nearly 3, the chlorine reacting with chemicals to open a hole in the ozone layer each Antarctic springMega-citiesThirteen cities had 10 million-plus people, making 46 per cent of the population urban. Experts said half would be by 2000RainforestsDeforestation was thought to be roughly 170,000sq km a year. A binding treaty on the preservation of forests was one of the unresolved issues of the Rio summitFisheries90m tons of fish were taken from the world’s oceans each year.