by SIMON ROGERSON

Hard-working firefighters from Stanmore's White Watch love their curry: When the time comes to choose their evening meal, a suitably fiery dish always goes down well. But I gather curry is temporarily off the menu after recent overkill. On Wednesday last week, the lads were called to a van that had burst into flames while driving up the Stanmore stretch of the M1. The vehicle in question was loaded with curry paste, mushrooms and onions destined for a chain of Indian restaurants. The heat turned the van into Britain's biggest curry pot and traffic tailed back as motorists slowed to savour the aroma. But it was dirty work for the men of White Watch, who returned to their station smothered in burned ingredients. Such problems have not been encountered since a major fire two years ago at a Colindale warehouse containing bulk quantities of pasta, olive oil and cream sauce. The ingredients spilled out of the warehouse into neighbouring gardens creating a huge spaghetti carbonara.

Spring showers have been unusually strong this year, resulting in the wettest April of the century. Several homes have been flooded and the fields around Pinner Park Farm have been reduced to swampland. So the good people of Harrow were doubtless mystified last week when they received a newsletter from Three Valleys Water informing its readers that "we are in the grip of a severe drought". Hinting darkly at a summer hosepipe ban, the company's director Jim McGown blamed the situation on "low rainfall", despite frequent drenchings over the past three months. All this is presented in a heroic article entitled "How We're Tackling the Drought". With rubber dinghies and bilge pumps, in the current situation, one presumes. "Er, it was written some time before the recent weather," an embarrassed customer services employee admitted.

Tales of derring-do have come my way from a deputation of Harrow bods dispatched on a beano to the east German town of Erfurt to investigate a proposed twinning. Bemused locals listened politely as Harrow's shy-and-retiring Mayor Councillor Keith Toms took the opportunity to bang on about his days in the Communist Party. He had difficulty coming to terms with the town's silent-running trams, and was very nearly run over during a moment of distraction. But he was soon back in fine capitalist fettle, posing with Herbie Crossman and a bevy of scantily-dressed models who had been hired to perch provocatively on BMW cars. Harrow police's new borough liaison officer, Inspector Ian Cresswell, declared a hitherto unknown love for acoustic music, and asked if anyone had a banjo. There must be something in Erfurt's water.

Lawyers are likely to be the only ones to profit from the case of Peter Jackson, the Harrow School geography teacher accused of stealing cash from a pupils' holiday fund. After a series of hiccups, the case has rumbled on for almost two years, lining m'learned friends' pockets. The prosecution's own waggish barrister, Michael Longsdon, even found the time to have a few laughs while outlining the case for the prosecution. Mentioning that the trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania was priced at a costly £2,000 a person, he added that a party of African bearers had been employed. "These are Harrow schoolboys, so they had a porter each to carry their things up the mountain," he explained drolly.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000.Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.