It's been a good week for … celebrity mortuaries

It's been a good week for … celebrity mortuaries

A new mortuary at Dundee University has been named in honour of crime writer Val McDermid following a public vote.

The facility was funded by the Million For A Morgue campaign, during which the public donated money and voted for which of 10 crime authors the facility should be named after. The campaign aimed to raise cash to match a £1 million investment by the university.

The Val McDermid Mortuary is now up and running and it is hoped it will provide breakthroughs in scientific, medical, and dental research and training.

Runner-up Stuart MacBride has had a dissection room at the mortuary named after him, so he wasn't too cut-up at not winning. The other eight authors have had their names put on embalming tanks. So it's a big "tank you" from all of them.

A novel approach (literally) to supporting a cause, one wonders if the concept might not be broadened to match other genres with projects in need. Ancestral piles requiring a makeover might call upon historical writers - the Castle of Philippa Gregory May has a certain aristocratic double-barrelled ring to it.

Or how about a sci-fi theme? Perhaps the troubled Glasgow Tower at the city's science centre might have been up and running again sooner had it been endorsed by the guiding light of Douglas Adams. Celebrity chefs would probably need little encouragement to come out of their kitchen cupboards in support of an ailing restaurant, so long as they got their name on the door.

As for more sensual pursuits, rumour has it there's an ailing Ann Summers shop seeking the backing of EL James.

It's been a bad week for … blue cheese

Campaigners who want blue cheese made in the Cambridgeshire village of Stilton to be officially called Stilton are taking their fight to Westminster.

Resident Richard Landy is seeking to overturn a decision by the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs refusing to recognise the cheese as Stilton - under European Union law, only that produced in Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, where it is thought the cheese originated, can be called Stilton.

Common sense might suggest that, for the people of Stilton, the clue's in the name.

Something stinks.