The psychology of cars

ONE report this week shows Britain has fewer hospital beds than most European countries. Another report reveals that one patient in 16 picks up an infection in hospital. So even if we had more NHS beds, who'd want to stay in them?

HAPPY birthday, Formica. It is 100 years since the stuff was invented as a substitute for mica (hence the name). Those of us who grew up in an age when pine furniture was fashionable tend to be sniffy about ye olde plastic laminate. And yet Formica was hailed as a great step forward. It arrived in the gritty days of open fires when houses were so mucky that half the weight of the average carpet was reckoned to be dirt. Suddenly, here was a surface you could get spotlessly clean simply by wiping it. As for durability, it is almost 60 years since my father made a table top big enough for the entire Rhodes clan and gave it a Formica surface. We haul it out of the garden shed for every Christmas dinner. We humans get wrinklier with every passing year but that Formica top gleams on and on, and will probably be around long after we have gone.

THE Daily Mirror used a poignant front-page picture of a sobbing child to illustrate the desperation of families using food banks. It now emerges that the picture was taken years ago. The child is an American kid, the daughter of a photographer, who had been upset by losing an earthworm. There was absolutely no connection between this anguished child and food banks. Does it matter? I hope not. Newspapers and magazines tend to use generic, unidentified images when it would be wrong to identify an individual. I once worked on a paper whose photo library included an image of an old lady reading by the light of a candle. We used that image time after time to illustrate features on everything from loneliness in old age to burglary, adult literacy, dementia and power cuts.

THE snag is that images, once stored, can pop up anywhere. We had friends who were thrilled to be photographed as the ideal family (Mum, Dad, two kids, cute dog) for the front cover of a building-society report. They were less thrilled some years later when that same photo appeared in the Daily Express illustrating a report on families who couldn't pay their mortgages.

THE BBC has been tut-tutting over the Catholic Church's refusal to publish its research into churchgoers' attitudes to sex, contraception and other issues. This is rich, considering that the BBC is still sitting on the Balen Report into alleged bias over the Beeb's reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Ten years after it was written and despite Freedom of Information requests, the Balen Report remains under lock and key. Pot and kettle, Auntie.

AND let's not forget that other great secret of our time, the correspondence between Tony Blair and President Bush before the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. We are assured all will be revealed. This year, next year, some time, never . . . ?

A FRIEND'S car wouldn't start. We left it a while and tried again, with the accelerator fully depressed. It started first time. Conclusion: the engine was flooded. Later, the car wouldn't start again. We removed the filler cap. It started first time. Conclusion: it was starved of petrol by a vacuum in the fuel tank. A few hours later the car broke down and even the AA couldn't fix it. Conclusion: It's a car. Cars have minds of their own. Especially if there's a bank holiday coming.