Blowing it

Obama's extravagant date

I don't begrudge Barack Obama making good on his campaign promise to take his wife Michelle on a Saturday night date in New York, but is it churlish to wonder why he had to do it so expensively?

The couple opted to fly to Washington in a Gulfstream jet, requiring, according to newspaper reports, two other small planes to follow, "carrying staff and the media retinue". Helicopters then had to whisk them to a helipad in Manhattan so they could dine at a West Village restaurant and take in a show (Joe Turner's Come And Gone, a suitable-sounding play about the children of newly freed slaves, no doubt carefully chosen by Obama's image makers).

The New York Post estimated the cost of the trip at $24,000 per aircraft.

Well, at least the Obamas paid for the dinner and show themselves. (Perhaps they'd been reading The Daily Telegraph.) But why can't our leaders do things like this quietly? After all, this was supposed to be a date, not a jamboree for the press.

Republicans, of course, have made much of the Obamas' extravagance at a time when GM is preparing to file for bankruptcy, although given their own profligacy while in power, this doesn't count for much.

What we can learn from the women of the resistance

Fashion-conscious women feeling the pinch should visit Paris. In a timely exhibition, the museum to resistance hero Jean Moulin is displaying what women wore during the years of the Nazi occupation.

The collection is made up of more than 400 accessories, says The Guardian – from hats made from scraps of cellophane to cosmetics that made bare legs look like stockings. Parisiennes "from all social backgrounds" used their ingenuity to create elegant looks out of old sofa covers, home-butchered rabbits, paper, even sheaths of wheat.

Perhaps their modern equivalents will now have to do the same. "Women knew how to sew, and in that dark period they still took ideas from magazines and the street but they made the pieces themselves," says fashion historian Fabienne Falluel. "Today people don't necessarily know how to sew – we're still in a culture of consumption where the instinct is to buy, not make. But you'll see, people will soon start learning."

During the war in Paris shoes got higher, skirts shorter and hats taller. I wonder if the same will happen now.

A legacy of goodwill

There may be no such thing as society, as Mrs Thatcher said, but I'm cheered by the story of Margaret Allan, who left £150,000 to her village in her will. She moved to Solva in Pembrokeshire when her husband retired and the couple, says the Daily Mail, "were enriched by the welcome they received".

Now Mrs Allan has made bequests to about 120 people who were kind to the couple, leaving money to local charities, churches and the village memorial hall. The Solva Luncheon Club received £5,000, the Pembrokeshire Conservative Association £2,000 (she had her priorities right). We keep reading of the death of village life in England, but it seems it's still alive in parts of Wales.

Tabloid money… Peaches' £50,000 freebies

• "Peaches Geldof has run up a £50,000 bill at London's Mayfair Hotel, which she will never have to pay because apparently she is an 'ambassador' for it," says Carole Malone in the News of the World. "That means that as long as she's regularly photographed outside the hotel, she and her friends get free drinks, free meals and a free room. Don't know about you, but any hotel where Peaches sleeps, eats, drinks or is spotted within 500 yards of – I would avoid like the plague."

• Tourism chiefs in Bournemouth think dodgy weather forecasting is costing the town millions, says Jeremy Clarkson in The Sun. The Met Office predicted storms for Bank Holiday Monday, so up to 25,000 people stayed at home. "In fact, the skies were blue." The Met Office should stop worrying about "what the weather will be like in 100 years and use their shiny new computer – that we paid for – to try to predict what it will be like in the bloody morning."

• A billboard advertisement for Marks & Spencer has caused "many a swerve by flustered male drivers", says The Sun. Even the star, 23-year-old model Natalie Suliman, "did a double take when she first saw her 32E chest looming large from one of the giant posters". But while it may not have done much for road safety, it's been good for M&S, helping "to triple the firm's underwear sales in the past year, with two bras being snapped up every second".