Some people always look on the blight side of life The potato people say that if you grow potatoes they'll only develop blight and infect the whole allotment and then the farm down the road. It is true that this has been a good year for Phytophthora infestans, the potato blight. But the blight's cousin, sudden oak death, Phytophthora ramorum, is booming too, so should we saw down our saplings and burn them by the light of a gibbous moon? There's ash die-back, which, like The Killing, has come from Denmark and proved very catching. Horse chestnuts are succumbing to bleeding canker, if you'll excuse the expression. Soon the wolds and wealds will be as bare of trees as Sutherland, and only Japanese knotweed will nod on the banks of streams infested with American signal crayfish. Is it wrong of me, then, to live in vegetable hope? I know a very nice bar halfway between the railway station and the town square of Osuna, an old-fashioned place in Andalusia. It is called the Bar Phylloxera, a strange name, since phylloxera is a disease that almost drove European grapevines to extinction in the 1860s. The cliff-edge struggle to save our claret and champagne is best told in the book by my friend Christy Campbell, who likes to get to the roots of things. No cure for phylloxera was ever found, but vines are now grafted on to resistant American rootstocks. The little creatures that cause the disease never bothered to go as far as Australia. I can see their point of view, but the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia has become very concerned in recent months about diseased vines accidentally introduced. They also lie awake worrying about locusts. I expect swarms will soon start to descend on the Home Counties too. Until yesterday, Harrington in Northamptonshire was most famous for its vamping horn. Now, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, the former site of the 1.44-megaton nuclear missiles chillingly called Thor has been made a Grade II listed building by English Heritage. The horn and the missile site are connected, in a way. The 5ft Harrington vamping horn, looking like something sounded by postillions on Christmas cards, might have been used to lead psalm-singing at the church of St Peter and Paul, where it sits in a glass case, but similar horns served warlike purposes. In the 1660s the inventor Sir Samuel Morland demonstrated his Tuba Stentor-Phonica, a sort of giant vuvuzela, to Charles II in St James's Park. A megaphone, it was ordered to be used to speak between ships, with mixed results. More profitable was the reverse: listening horns. Morland's Otacousticon was the forerunner of acoustic locators, developed in the 20th century to warn of approaching aircraft. That was before radar, but perhaps a well-placed vamping horn might have detected an incoming response to a Thor missile. Not that anything could have been done about it. I wonder if Angela Merkel isn't right about Britain being the Statler and Waldorf, the two old gents heckling from the balcony, at the EU Muppet Show. We're the ones who see through the whole sorry performance of Miss Piggy Merkel and Kermit "Hollande" the Frog. Anyone would think they'd auditioned for the parts.