Lost in the muddle of the Middle East His ousting, of course, has already set Egypt alight: the military is not a traditional friend to democratic expression and human rights, and the Muslim Brotherhood - enraged by its effective expulsion from political life - is on the streets in pursuit of revenge and martyrdom. Military muscle and jihadist fury are clashing across the country, and the death toll is mounting. So far, Mr Hague's message to the new Egyptian leadership roughly translates as: "We didn't much like Mr Morsi, but we are desperately hoping for some reason to like you." On Syria, Britain is in an even more convoluted political position. Following the US announcement that it would help to arm Syrian rebels, Mr Cameron reportedly began inching towards a similar policy. Mr Morsi was already there; a few weeks ago, he announced that Egyptians were free to join the anti-Assad rebels. The West's problem is that there are two varieties of Syrian rebel, pragmatically united: the pro-democracy Free Syrian Army (FSA), and the religious jihadist warriors such as the al-Nusra Front, linked to al-Qaeda. Among the most recent efforts of the al-Nusra Front are the kidnapping and murder of a Syrian television news presenter, a series of suicide bombs, and the filmed beheadings of a helpless Christian Syrian priest and his assistants who had sought sanctuary in a convent. While the FSA regards the al-Nusra Front as too radical, it has practical respect for its ruthless fighting abilities, and protested when the US designated it a "terrorist organisation" in December last year. David Cameron is said to support arming the FSA, but if there was a window of time in which to do that before the original Syrian rebels were flooded with well-equipped Islamist fanatics, it has closed. If there is now a way to prevent Western weapons falling into the hands of the al-Nusra Front, I would like to hear it, and I have no doubt many senior British military figures would, too. The increasingly painful irony of the US position has been relished by Vladimir Putin, that deeply cynical connoisseur of Western liberal discomfort; it does not, of course, excuse Putin's backing of the loathsome Assad and his loyal gangs of psychopathic killers. Yet, in Egypt and Syria, nervous local liberals are riding on the backs of tigers: the Egyptian military now in government, and the Syrian rebels in opposition. Among the principles of intervention - whether military or medical - are that one should know one's preferred outcome, and that one should perform the minimum of permanent damage en route to it. In what Robert McNamara, the former US secretary of defence, once called "the fog of war" it is presently difficult to glimpse either principle clearly in the Middle East, aside from a policy of maximum assistance to the swelling ranks of blameless victims. With the clarity of hindsight, no doubt, we will be able to see precisely where we went wrong. Dignity doesn't run in families The family feud that has resumed around the critically ill Nelson Mandela is desperately sad. It seems a bitter irony that the man whose generous vision once brought together the South African nation should face death among rifts in his own family. It is, in some ways, a continuing part of the price exacted from him by his political convictions. Mandela spent 27 years in prison, deprived of his children as they grew up. As his global influence grew, his impact on his family belonged, by necessity, more to the realm of inspiration than a daily presence. The principle agent of discontent appears to be Mandela's grandson, Mandla, who, in 2011, exhumed the bodies of three of Mandela's children and placed them on his own estate in Mvezo, which he plans to make the centre of a Mandela memorial site. Other family members successfully fought to have them returned to his retirement residence of Qunu. Whatever the intricacies of this argument, in which beloved bones are being used for bartering, it is a pity that Mandla seems to have forgotten what his grandfather always instinctively understood: that money might be inherited, but dignity must be claimed by each man for himself. Save our checkout assistants The etiquette of the supermarket checkout is a hot topic among shoppers, ever since an exasperated Sainsbury's employee last week refused to serve one woman who was talking on her mobile phone. The supermarket apologised - presumably since unmannerly customers are today so numerous, it would be economically disastrous to chastise them - but the question of appropriate behaviour remains. The checkout has become a chattier place in recent years, not all of it fun. Once it was easy: one simply drew the checkout worker's attention to the weather, and thereupon you would both pass two or three remarks genially insulting the British climate. Now, there are more businesslike decisions. Would you like a 5p bag? If you have brought your own, it can create a fumbling stand-off on the question of who should then load it (the production of "a bag from home" frequently appears to transfer responsibility to the shopper). At payment, the sales assistant will inevitably ask if you have a reward card. I never have the reward card: I have either mislaid it somewhere in the mayhem of my house, or never got round to applying for one. Still, the question nudges me into a mournful sense of failure, the disturbing feeling that the city is teeming with people more financially prudent than me. The missed reward points symbolise life's other omissions: the lost sock, or the out-of-date cheque found folded in a book. I can almost see why someone might want to stave off the reward-card moment by, say, pretending to talk on a mobile phone, but I don't think it's right to do so without making an apologetic grimace and mouthing the word "sorry." It is not only bad manners, but also poor strategy, to treat checkout staff as if they're not there. Should they truly disappear, we'll be left all alone with the self-service machines, and the vanishing shreds of our sanity.