Peter Rhodes: Forgotten so soon?

WAS anyone else surprised that a team of four Oxford undergraduates on University Challenge (BBC2) this week could not name the Yorkshire village which was the scene of the most violent confrontation of the 1984 miners' strike? How can any British person claim to be educated if they have never heard of Orgreave?

IF flossing is a waste of time, as an American report suggests, what can you do with an unwanted length of dental floss? Make a new, even skimpier pair of trunks for Tom Daley, perhaps?

THE alleged male conspiracy to get rid of Northumbria Police's first female chief constable, Sue Sim, was reportedly sparked when she tried to ban senior officers from using first-class travel. I can believe that. Of all the perks beloved of elites, none is more precious than that exquisite moment when, as everyone else enters the airliner and turns right, you turn left. On the train, the proles are crammed like abattoir-bound sheep in Standard while you luxuriate in the air-conditioned splendour of First with no sweaty armpits in your face. As Jean-Paul Sartre never quite said: Hell is other people.

IF a leak is to be believed, Scotland's national rugby team were made to kill rabbits with their bare hands in order to "toughen them up" (the players, that is, not the rabbits), An inquiry has been launched into claims that the bunny-battering slaughter occurred at a training camp in France last year. I am reminded of a "survival" lesson organised by a TA regiment before a big exercise in Germany in the 1980s. The woodcraft expert described how to break a rabbit's neck and then handed a live rabbit to the nearest soldier to do the deed. The soldier refused. He handed the rabbit to his mate who handed it to someone else. A class of 30 TA lads all took the view that they now understood how to kill a rabbit and there was no point in taking its life. The creature was eventually taken home by the sergeant-major and lived out its days as a family pet.

A TWITTER account in Walsall says it will "name and shame" men caught urinating on its CCTV camera (Okay, not actually on the camera but in the area covered by the camera). The implication is that offenders, including two suspected bus drivers, have some choice in the matter. I can only assume that those setting the trap have not yet reached middle-age and experienced the eye-watering urgency that can go with blood-pressure tablets or prostate problems. If there were more public loos there would be less public peeing.

THE suggestion that residents might be bribed – sorry, compensated – for fracking brought another crop of TV coverage of anti-fracking demos. The panicky faces and the shouted slogans all seem very familiar. It makes me wonder if some people are genetically conditioned to believe Armageddon is at hand. It would be interesting to research whether the people terrified of fracking are the same people who are terrified of climate change, nuclear power, holes in the ozone layer, carbohydrates and Brexit.

A DAILY Telegraph reader reports that the e-passport gate at Heathrow has instructions which begin with the order to remove your glasses. He can't tell us what the following instructions were.