M' LEARNED friend Ms Cherie Booth QC might laughably hazard the notion that her human rights allow her to hang on to all the free clothes, gifts and jewellery she's acquired on her worldwide looting jaunts, but we shouldn't use this as a reason to dismiss out of hand a citizen's right to basic freedoms.

Take the right to an education, for instance. Who would deny that to the huddled masses? And then there's the right to freedom of artistic expression. You might not agree that an unmade bed should be in the Tate Gallery, but just because you don't like or understand it, it doesn't mean that it's not art.

Which brings us to the £32,130 of National Lottery money that's been given to an experimental jazz singer so he can teach tramps to growl. Yes, that's right: so he can teach tramps to growl.

Phil Minton, 66, will use the money, so generously donated by the National Endowment For Science Technology And The Arts (NESTA), to create "feral choirs" of tramps keen to "find their inner voices".

In a series of workshops for "socially-repressed groups", Mr Minton will lead the assembled choristers in barking, hissing, laughing and growling. A previous "performance" by a feral choir allegedly sounded like a bizarre mix of "buzzing bees and the wind running through the trees".

(I must apologise for using up this newspaper's entire weekly ration of quotation marks in one short piece, but there really is no other way to tell it.) Now I can think of many ways to make a tramp growl. You could refill empty two-litre White Lightning bottles with plain apple juice - or another undefined liquid - and leave them on the shelf nearest the door in Freshco.

You could respond to their appeals for "half a crown for a cup of tea" by going and making them a cup of tea and then bringing it back to them. Or you could simply superglue pound coins to the pavement. None of these would cost £32,130.

But NESTA has previous for this sort of madness. There was the Welsh poet given grants of £75,000 so he could travel round the world on a yacht; £40,000 to a Brazilian clown so he could investigate "what clowns offer to society" (a bucket of tinsel seems to be the answer); the £74,000 pocketed by a Yorkshire polytechnic lecturer so he could become a sorcerer's apprentice and learn "what magic might have to offer education"; and the £56,650 given to Jamaican performance poet Jean Breeze so she could err go home for a year.

Madness, all of it. Absolute profligate lunacy. But also art, perhaps? With that sort of cash on offer, I shall be out recruiting my own band of tramps next week. There'll be no need for growling or hissing. They'll be quite capable of knocking out a half-decent version of Bryan Adams' Everything I Do I Do For You with two of them playing the spoons backed by a percussion section wielding empty Special Brew cans.

The wind section I'll leave to your imagination.

  • SO WE'VE done the growling tramps; bring on the gay lumberjacks. No, really.

The Forestry Commission is advertising for a £30,000-a-year diversity manager (Turkey Army, B Division) to increase the number of homosexuals and members of ethnic minorities prepared to shin up a Scots Pine wielding an axe.

(And why do ethnic minorities keep getting lumped in with homosexuals when it comes to matters like this? From what I know of their religious beliefs, they can't be too chuffed about it.) I have no idea why this desirable or necessary. Are people from ethnic minorities or homosexuals expected to make superior tree-fellers? Will they look better in those chunky tartan shirts?

Anyway, the Forestry Commission admits to employing at least 3,000 people (it could well be more). How do they know that half of those aren't already homosexual? Have they asked? For all they know, they could already have 1,500 barrel-chested, axe-swinging musclemen going home every night to watch Monty Python videos while dressed as Shirley Temple.

Ain't life grand.