Rosetta – is it worth it?

JUST a week to go then it'll be only a month until the days start getting longer. Positive thinking.

A READER, aware of my North Country roots, suggests the latest Volkwagen UP, an electric car which costs virtually nothing to run, should appeal to Yorkshire folk. He adds: "Its full name is E-UP. See? It even speaks Yorkshire."

WHILE we're at it, my thanks to the reader who sent me the new song he has written for England rugby supporters. Sadly, his chorus: "We're playing for England and the English red rose" means fans from England's biggest county would not join in. Yorkshire is solid white-rose territory and it's bad enough for a Yorkshireman to see England players wearing a red rose without expecting him to sing a song about it.

NO-ONE denies that landing a European spacecraft on a comet far, far away is a brilliant technical achievement. However, the Rosetta project has gobbled up more than £1,000 million of our money and we have no choice in such matters. We EU taxpayers are committed by various Euro- treaties to spend colossal amounts of money on space research. Given a democratic choice, how many of us would have voted to send a spaceshot to a comet rather than spending the money on something more pressing? Today our EU bosses may be thrilled to have put a probe on Comet 67P. But if we had invested that £1,000 million in medical research we might have have found a cure for cancer.

THE phrase "perfectably legible" crept into this column a couple of days ago. Unforgivabably careless.

CHANNEL 4's toe-curlingly lowbrow explanation of economics, How Rich Are You? kept harking back to the 1970s. It was claimed that back then, because the rich owned less of the national wealth than now, we were a more equal society. What it didn't explain was how poor we all were. If you doubt that, go to your local library and look at a newspaper from 1975 when the average wage was about £2,200 a year and see how much household items, electronic goods and clothes cost. When I was earning £60 a week our first washing machine was £130.Today, the rich own a bigger slice of the cake but the whole cake is much bigger. The Office for National Statistics reckons that, at 2013 values, the median wage has risen from £6.17 in 1975 to £11.56 per hour today. The system is unfair and too few people control too much money. The revolution must go on. But we peasants are wearing a better class of clogs and life today, with all its unfairness, is more of a golden age than 1975 ever was.

INTERESTING to see How Rich Are You? was fronted by Richard Bacon, clearly casting himself as the proletariat's friend. The son of a lawyer, Bacon was educated privately at prep and boarding school. His London home is reckoned to be worth more than £3 million. In a recent interview with Radio Times, Bacon lamented: "My house has gone up in value by an absolutely ridiculous amount. I am relatively wealthy and I've had a lot of luck. But that troubles me and it always has." Oh, to be so troubled, comrades.

A READER says he has already been overwhelmed by Christmas spirit. He rushed out and bought his wife a new coal shovel, even though her battered and splintered old shovel would probably last until the January sales. Sir, she does not deserve you.