Peter Rhodes: The golden age of the 1970s

THINGS misheard. A reader recalls her two children returning from a music lesson at primary school singing: "Edelweiss, edelweiss, bless my old man forever."

RESEARCH by an insurance company shows the number of speeding drivers nabbed by police last year was up 20 per cent on the previous year. Good to see one successful growth industry, innit? Kerching!

PRESUMABLY the cops are able to concentrate on hunting down motorists because figures for recorded crime are falling. But then it's no wonder, given that crime figures are shamelessly massaged to leave out anything embarrassing. For example, my computer spam folder shows that between March 13-23 there were 88 attempts to steal personal information and take money from me. There are literally billions of these attempted thefts every year, yet they appear absolutely nowhere in any crime statistics. Mind how you go.

I RECENTLY used the enormously long word antidisestablishmentarianism in this column. It sparked happy memories for a reader who was a teacher in the early 1970s, managing a class of 43 children. She recalls a favourite game the kids played, challenging each other to spell long words. Sure enough, one boy invited another to spell the A-word. The other lad got it right, apart from one letter. Which is pretty good, considering this was a class of 10-year-olds. Their one-time teacher reckons: "I am sure they are running the world somewhere – and none of them are politicians."

FOR this former teacher, the 1970s were a golden age. As a reporter back then, I seem to recall everyone thought the decade was abysmal, the kids were appalling, schools were useless and the world was going to hell in a handcart. Back in the 1970s old folk spoke fondly of the 1930s when times were hard, people were poor but they all helped each other. Choose any time you want in recorded history and you'll find the golden age was about 40 years earlier.

MAYBE I was too flippant in yesterday's item about passing the abdominal aortic aneurysm screening with flying corpuscles. It is a serious business. The mathematics of aneurysms means that a screening team like this, seeing about 30 men a day, finds a small aneurysm every couple of days and a really big, nasty, dangerous one about once a month. Some men refuse to attend screenings, and I can understand why. I took the view that I would rather discover an aneurysm before an aneurysm discovered me.

A GOOD memory is a great asset. A reader has just received his "information pack" from the Britain Safer in Europe movement (which curiously has the same initials as Mad Cow Disease). One "key fact" warns darkly that if Britain leaves the EU, food prices will rise. This is very strange because, as he recalls clearly from the 1975 referendum, a "key fact" against joining the Common Market was that food prices would rise. And they did.

OLD chestnuts die hard. Despite last week's item on urban myths, a number of readers insist that Posh stood for "Port out, starboard home" on ships taking Brits to and from India in the days of the Raj. It is a lovely tale but no shipping company has a record of such practice and no ticket marked "POSH" has ever been found. For further reading go to http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/posh.asp

MORE things misheard. A reader swears he heard someone on Bargain Hunt (BBC1) showing off a haemorrhoid barometer.