What bottles do in the dark

A STUDY in China suggests that babies born from frozen embryos are more sociable than those conceived naturally. Is it mere coincidence that Eskimos are famed for their hospitality?

SCIENTISTS in San Diego did a sneaky thing. They questioned elderly folk about how much booze they consumed in a week – and then checked the answers against the empty bottles in their bins. You will not be surprised to learn that the number of empties was more than the old 'uns admitted to. It is high time another group of scientists examined the phenomenon noticed by so many of us. If you leave empty bottles in a bin for more than a few days, they start breeding.

I SUGGESTED some time ago that the ideal person to chair an inquiry into child abuse by members of the Establishment should not be that ultimate Establishment-figure, the Lord Mayor of London. Now, predictably enough, a legal challenge has been made to the appointment of the Lord Mayor, Fiona Woolf, on the grounds that she is a tad too close to the former Home Secretary Lord Britten. One of her supporters on the radio declared in frustration that it would be almost impossible to find any suitably qualified person in London who did not have such connections. So here is my off-the-wall suggestion, an idea so challenging, radical, revolutionary and utterly scary that you may wish to sit down first. How about appointing someone from outside London?

IF you wanted to make a new Dad's Army movie, no-one could hope for a better cast than Tom Courtney, Michael Gambon, Blake Harrison and the others now assembled on the set at Bridlington. The real question is why anyone would want to make a new Dad's Army movie when the original (1971) is perfect.

TELEVISION, like tourism, changes everything it touches. A Panorama (BBC1) team spent a year charting the progress of Darek Fidyk, a paralysed man in Poland who is now able to walk again after a pioneering therapy that involved transplanting cells from his nasal cavity into his spinal cord. I would like to believe it is a mighty breakthrough which will pave the way for other paralysed folk to regain their mobility. But no television programme is going to invest so much time and money following a case and then announce that it's no more than a tiny advance which offers limited hope to this one patient who happens to have a short, clean break in his spinal column. Time will reveal all but, as a general rule, television documentaries are like John Lewis. They never knowingly undersell anything.

TOLD you so. On May 19 this year I wrote that the figure of 888,246 ceramic poppies planted at the Tower of London, to be sold for service charities, was too small and that "everyone who wants a ceramic poppy should be able to buy one." The alternative, I suggested was " a limited edition creating an artificial shortage and being sold online for obscene profits." Sure enough, all 888,246 poppies - one for every British warrior killed in the First World War - have now been snapped up. Thousands of folk will be disappointed. Watch out for the profiteering to begin.

AFTER this week's contributions from readers on the mystery of belly-button fluff, a reader writes: " It is to my eternal dismay that I'm denied the pleasures of such navel gazing, having no belly button at all as a result of some ancient abdominal surgery. Could I perhaps claim some sort of disability benefit?" Go for it, my friend, for you have been denied one of life's simple – and free – pleasures.