HOW our planet works. A reader asks: “The icy and snowy weather over the past four weeks makes me ask, has the Gulf Stream run out of oil?”

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PHRASES we don’t want to hear in 2011:

• South Korean military exercises
• Cumbrians going on and on about their earthquake.
• Revised costs of the 2012 Olympics.

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NO, there is absolutely no truth in the rumour that Jonathan Ross has been nicked for shoplifting a kitchen utensil and told the police it seemed a whisk worth taking. Thanks for the email but this one has been doing the rounds for years.

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IT is virtually forbidden to mention the C-word after Christmas – dammit, I’ve gone and done it – but this Black Country tale deserves telling. It follows my recent piece on how we used to have real candles on Xmas trees and do we worry too much about the fire risks?
In the early 1960s Pete Wilson’s family kept a little greengrocer’s shop by the Royal Exchange in Bloxwich. He was eight and, with the curiosity of youth, wondered how the pine-cone candle holder he had made at school would look under the tree. He takes up the story:
“Mom was serving in the shop which was basically our front room, when I rushed through the door to tell her to come quick and help. The now-blazing tree had set fire to the curtains and resembled the start of a forest fire in our living room.
She grabbed the base and carried it to the back door, flung it outside, looked at me with a mixture of disgust and despair and calmly went back to serving in the shop. Trees and real candles may be fine, but not with an eight-year-old boy nearby.”

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I LOVE this. A reader, fed up with “prize draw” scams, gets even by returning the claim – without a stamp. He signs himself “Mickey Mouse,” and gives a bogus credit-card number. To his delight, one scammer has gone to the expense of writing back to point out that his credit card expiry date is incorrect. This is hardly surprising as he gave the date of September 2035, his 100th birthday. Such fun.

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YESTERDAY’S item on whether accepting a slice of German fruit cake with marzipan in the centre is receiving stollen goods reminds me of the hot-metal days when we hacks used typewriters and our brilliant prose was turned into metal type by the printers. Sometimes the printers made mistakes.
The frequency of certain mistakes – including the In Memory notices where “lonely” appeared as “lovely” made you wonder whether they were not mistakes at all:
“The angels came and took you
They simply called your name.
It’s lovely here without you.
Life can never be the same.”
And so on.
But the real nightmare was the friendly printer who genuinely wanted to help.
You would create some brilliantly witty column in which the entire joke hinged in a changed letter or a spoonerism. And your heart would sink when, just before the paper went to press, Mr Helpful would pop over and say with a wink: “We sorted out that misprint for you, Pete”
In hot-metal days, “stollen goods” would have appeared as “stolen goods” and the next few days would have been spent dealing with readers complaining that they didn’t get the joke or accusing me of racism for implying that Germans steal cakes. Hot metal was all very impressive but it’s lonely here without it. Sorry, lovely.

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FOLLOWING damage by mooring chains, the authorities in Studland Bay, Dorset, want sailors to observe a “no anchor zone.” Careful how you say that.