TO York's many proud boasts we can add this: city of chavs.

Chavs, for those adrift from popular culture, are young people with a fondness for designer labels but with minimal apparent interest in anything else. Think baseball caps, think mooching.

And York is teeming with chavs and chavettes, at least according to the website chavtowns.co.uk.

Its unidentified contributor suggests that our fair city is ringed by "huge post-war council estates which are true no-go areas for the buses and the police".

As a result, "small, sunken-eyed, undernourished feral little charver boys with cracked-cornered mouths hunch over spliffs and drink lager in every green space".

And that's just for starters. "With often less than 50 words in their vocabulary, they speak out of one nostril and have permanently knitted brows. Heroin and crack cocaine are rife. Car crime, burglary, drug dealing and mindless violence are the norm."

In the city centre "hooded rat boys move in gangs robbing, destroying and committing acts of random violence against ordinary people going about their business".

The Diary would tentatively suggest that this is a slight exaggeration, but that would place us among the "well-off middle class people in York" who "when out in their Chelsea tractors picking up Tarquin or Tamara from the private school in the city centre... never seem to notice the tribes of deadly tracksuit warriors and assorted skag heads on every corner".

And what can we do about the problem? "To anyone who can, I would say, get out of this country," the author concludes. "The spawn of these children will be totally feral and violent."

THE Diary was fortunate enough to receive a copy of December's issue of News In Depth, "the bi-monthly magazine for City of York Council employees", the other week. My thanks to Mr Mole for sending it in.

Much of it is a triumph of New Labour speak. An article headlined "Transforming York - a vision for change" is a particularly poetic example of this impenetrable language.

"The Performance Improvement team (PIT) has been working alongside directorates to tighten up individual service plans, connect them up and set minimum standards for performance," the article explains.

"We've also started to adopt a 'systems' or 'process improvement' approach to service delivery."

And about time too.

Sadly phase one of Transforming York is over. "Phase two will be led by Management Team, with the support of the Performance Improvement team, Civic and Democratic Services and Human Resources.

"Crucially, their ideas and plans will be reviewed by the newly reformed 'Corporate Operations Group' (COG) to ensure they are practical and achievable."

So the COGs are overseeing the PITs to ensure "a clearer direction for the council". Clear as Municipal Unitary Dialect (MUD).

There is more to be gleaned from this publication, and we might inflict that on you tomorrow.

WE are at one with Julian, above, in being unable to understand the fuss about Jerry Springer - The Opera, which comes to York at the end of the year. The Diary was under the impression that opera plots were supposed to be outrageous.

Those who have condemned the show for its bad language and supposedly sacrilegious imagery have stayed strangely quiet on the storyline of an earlier musical.

It involves the attempted abduction and rape of a girl by a sex-mad aristocrat, who then murders her father. The nobleman goes on to host orgies, untouched by grief or remorse, until his horrible death.

That's the disgusting Don Giovanni by that filthy-minded Mozart.

Updated: 10:20 Thursday, January 13, 2005