Care.data? Bring it on.

A READER enquires: "Does the chairman of a fishing club have the casting vote?"

A RAPPER high-fives Prince William at the Baftas and one excitable young Tweeter, believing he has witnessed an epoch-changing event, declares: "That's when the monarchy ended. Right there." Settle down, dear boy. Over the years the kings and queens of England have shaken hands with a succession of tyrants, mass murderers, religious fanatics and the occasional cannibal. Pressing the flesh with an entertainer is hardly going to bring the House of Windsor crashing down.

WE tend to think of the human body as an intelligent and predictable machine. In real life, it often reacts oddly and unpredictably. This is why so many medicines, despite rigorous testing, produce strange effects. Pain-killing tablets miraculously strengthen the heart, blood-pressure tablets restore thinning hair and an HIV drug seems to be useful in treating cervical cancer. All of this persuades me that, despite the fears over privacy, the NHS's controversial new Care.data Scheme is a good thing. It has been put on hold for six months but, in principle and with the right safeguards, we should welcome it. For the first time, it would allow data from all 26 million UK households to be gathered and analysed to see exactly how those billions of pills we pop every year actually work. It is only when you examine results on such a massive scale that you begin to see patterns that doctors and hospitals miss. You may discover, for example, that people using a particular drug have an unexplained resistance to certain diseases. For all we know, a cure for cancer may already have been discovered, but we're using it to treat something else. Unlikely? Only a few days ago a doctor told me that a daily eye drop, designed to prevent glaucoma, appears to have a most unexpected "Viagra-type effect" on some of his patients. As Mae West almost said, is that an eye-dropper in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

INCIDENTALLY, why do we assume the human body is some sort of machine? I blame Edd, Brainy, Radar, Snitch, Blinky and Cruncher, the cartoon characters collectively known as the Numskulls in the Beano and Dandy comics. If you can remember them it's because a little chap in your head has just opened a filing cabinet and found the image. That's how memory works.

BABIES are already being aborted in Britain for the crime of being female. Now comes research in Chicago suggesting certain genes may make males slightly more likely to be gay. So how long before the first suspected gay foetus is aborted? The Government, alarmed at the scale of "wrong-sex" abortions, announced last week that abortion clinics are to be issued with new guidance making it "abundantly clear that gender selection is illegal." If gender-selection is illegal, then sexuality-selection must also be illegal. There is no difference between a woman telling her doctor: "I want an abortion because I don't want a baby girl" and "I want an abortion because I don't want a gay baby." For 50 years we have been told that a woman's right to choose is sacrosanct. But if that choice is based on ignorance, cultural prejudice or pure wickedness, it is time to think again.

THERE was a wonderful little documentary on BBC World Service about how the locals looted (or "saved," as they put it) the cargo of whisky from SS Politician, a cargo ship which sank in 1941 off the Scottish island of Eriskay. The plundering of thousands of cases of single malt was the basis of the book and film Whisky Galore! and has been told many times. But the radio documentary reveals that some islanders were so "under the influence," as one old chap put it, that they forgot where they had buried it. It's still up there . . .