The title is slightly inaccurate. Boris Johnson described his 250,000 K salary for his second job as a Telegraph columnist as “chickenfeed”, but I thought “chickenshit” had a better ring to it.
To many writers 250,000 K would seem an unattainable sum, and to add insult Boris remarks that he knocks out his work very quickly on a Sunday morning between his cornflakes and kedgeree, while it can take an author several years to write a book for which if he’s lucky he’ll end up with 10 K.
Still, I do love Boris for his renegade attitude, impossibly blond hair, the sheer beariness of him, and the fact that his opinions frequently coincide with mine, as they did on Monday of this week in his Telegraph column on Afghanistan and opium poppies. It’s something I have been saying for some time: why are opium poppies being grown in England, when they are being destroyed in Afghanistan, whose main source of income they are? The pharmaceuticals need opium poppies in order to create the morphine which is used to palliate extreme pain; why are they not buying it from a source that desperately needs the revenue? Where is the logic?
And please, does anybody know where to find the “pound sterling” sign of a French laptop keyboard? 
The universal way is to us the ASCII code by holding down the Alt key whilst pressing the ‘number’ keys 0 1 6 3 (Alt+0163). Trouble is laptop keyboards don’t have a separate numerical pad, so you have to use the FN key in addition. HTH.
By: Linda on July 15, 2009
at 2:04 pm
On mine it is just to the top left of the enter key, so $ plus shift =£.
By: Jon Doust on July 17, 2009
at 1:48 pm
Thank you both for your suggestions. The strangest thing happened. The ASCII code didn’t work. I found the key Jon refers to, next to the ‘Enter’ key. It shares the space with the dollar sign and a little box with ears on each corner (no idea what that is).
Anyway, that key produces only right square brackets in lower case, and right curly brackets in upper case, regardless of which combinations of shift, alt, fn, and ctrl keys I used.
But just now, as I was typing this, I was looking for double quotes and hit the Shift/3 key, and lo and behold, the elusive £ sign appears. I had already tested all the numerical keys with all the aforesaid combinations, to no effect.
Somewhere a small magical creature has been at work. And so far, I am totally happy with Windows Vista. Probably spoken too soon, but up to now it has performed faultlessly.
By: merewoman on July 17, 2009
at 4:27 pm