Trident's vanishing act

YOU probably guessed that the names of law firms in Wednesday's column ( Doolittle, Snooze & Scratchbum, etc) were made up. However, some real-life names of legal practices include Wright Hassall, Bickers & Bickers, Payne & Fears and Boring & Leach.

I HAVE a friend who whenever he passes a certain direction sign on the M6 in Lancashire, announces: "Look - my solicitors." The sign says Parbold, Standish & Chorley.

YOU have just qualified as a heart surgeon. You may owe £100,000 in college fees but you have a glittering career ahead, saving lives and earning a fortune. Then you pick up the paper this week and learn that Imperial College London is developing a new gene therapy which may cure heart failure with a simple injection. When good news is bad news.

THE Tories' latest brainwave is to knock on the doors of terraced houses, ascertain that the occupants are hard-working folk and then spit in their faces. That's not strictly true. What the Tories are actually doing is inviting White Dee of Benefits Street to be a guest speaker at their conference. But it amounts to the same thing.

AND off to yet another 1914-2014 commemoration where the re-enactors are out in force. They're the ones who aren't soldiers but dress up as soldiers and drive around in old army vehicles. This bunch were playing at Paras, complete with sten guns and Jeep, looking just like the heroes of Arnhem, only greyer and plumper. An old sergeant-major with many years of service took one look and whispered to me: "Funny, isn't it, how the re-enactors never re-enact the Catering Corps?"

I AM taken to task by a reader for questioning the RAF response of sending up a Typhoon to escort an airliner into Manchester with a bomb-hoax drama in progress. He says if things had gone wrong I would be the first asking: "Where was the air force and why didn't they shoot it down?" Not so. I can see very few circumstances in which zapping an airliner is the best thing to do. This is not the United States with cities surrounded by millions of acres of prairie. Britain is a crowded island with few safe places to shoot down an airliner. Even if we knew the target of a hijacked airliner on a 9/11-style mission (and we probably wouldn't), who would explain to the people of Telford, Wolverhampton or Chester that they were sacrificed in order to save Manchester?

STILL on mayhem, in Scotland Votes (BBC2) Andrew Neil wasted far too much time agonising about what would happen to Trident and the UK nuclear deterrent if an independent Scotland ordered all nuclear warheads off its territory. The filing cabinets of Whitehall are stuffed full of contingency plans for everything from the Russians landing in Oban to France annexing Dover. If Alex Salmond's government declared a nuclear-free Scotland, the contingency plans would be dusted off and the Trident submarines would slip silently under the Clyde, reappearing a few days later in the mothballed pens which have been ready for them for the past 50 years. I'm guessing somewhere on the east coast of the United States but this is all Top Secret so you mustn't tell anyone.

A BIBLE basher refers me to the Book of Zechariah which predicts the end of the world shortly after Israel is invaded by "a power from the north" which he says could be Russia, Iran or Isis. That's the great thing about prophecies. You write them in 500 BC and 2,514 years later they finally come right (or more likely, wrong).