Bring back the cravat? Not likely

NICHOLAS Parsons declares that he's fed up with scruffy open-necked shirts and says it's time to bring back the cravat. I do hope not. The only person you should trust less than a man wearing a bowtie is a man wearing a cravat.

MICHAEL Mosley presented this week's Horizon: Should I Eat Meat? (BBC2), examining the pros and cons of a high-meat diet and subjecting himself to a month of red-meat blowouts. For some bizarre reason it seemed impossible to investigate this subject without sending Mosley and a camera crew all the way to California. Are there no British scientists with opinions? Do we have no vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists of our own to interview? Is there a sudden shortage of obese people in the UK to talk to? Could Mosley not gorge himself on meat in British burger bars rather than in Hollywood Boulevard? Or is it just easy to reach for the cheque book when the licence payer is footing the bill?

THANKS for your hole-in-bucket lists of those things you are determined to avoid for the rest of your lives. Two examples, one male and the other female, say it all. First the male reader's list: Peanut butter, calabrese, mange-tout, jus, watching soaps or Strictly, hot-air balloons, rap music and queuing behind women at checkouts. And the female list: Eyebrow threading, botox, liposuction, gastric band, carrot juice, Weightwatchers, Zumba and mirrors.

MORE sightings of unusual names of legal firms. In Sligo, Ireland, a reader discovered Argue & Phibbs.

LIFE imitates art. In the notorious Brass Eye special mockumentary on paedophilia screened in 2001, one of the spoof reports concerned a notorious paedophile who had been blasted into space in a one-man prison vessel to spend the rest of his life in isolation. It was later revealed by a shocked newsreader that an eight-year-old boy had been accidentally placed on the vessel and was now "alone with the monster." A spokesman for the space programme said: "This is the one thing we didn't want to happen." Brass Eye was pure satire but was it any more ludicrous than this week's revelation that Peter Righton, a founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange, had been given access to children's homes in the 1970s as he advised the Home Office on its child-care policy? This is the one thing we didn't want to happen.

BEING a dab hand with computers and their little ways, I offered to help a friend of a certain age make her online claim for her state pension. Bear in mind, this application process is intended to be tackled by over-60s. First you have to choose a password. Then you wait two days for an activation code and security number. Then you have to input all those numbers and the code and complete a form which takes an average of 20 minutes. If you make one single mistake you have to ring the helpline the next day and try to put it right. Or you can avoid the internet altogether and do it all by phone, which I thoroughly recommend unless you want to drive yourself bonkers.

WASN'T it a strange story about the man who discovered a hand grenade on an Essex beach and, thinking it was a stone, threw it for his dog to fetch? What sort of owner throws a grenade-sized stone for a dog? At best it will damage its teeth, at worst the dog will swallow it. Are there no sticks in Essex, no balls, no rubber rings, no brains?