Where to stick those glowing magnets

I LOVE this email which arrived yesterday: "Received an envelope from the NHS today containing two letters. One confirmed a hospital appointment. The other cancelled it. This is factual. I'm not clever enough to make this stuff up."

I MAY have started something by reporting a couple of cases where house buyers and sellers found themselves under pressure to pay for curious insurance policies. News reaches me of a couple who lent their son £5,000 towards the cost of buying a house. The mother tells me: "He was charged £150 by the solicitor,supposedly to insure against the money being part of a money-laundering scheme. Again it was a last-minute situation and he could not take the risk of losing both the sale of his house and the purchase of the other." So he paid up.

DO cases like this sound familiar? For years the banks and other money lenders insisted that millions of customers took out PPI (payment protection insurance) to cover the debt in the event of illness or other loss of earnings. In thousands of cases this cover was useless. The result was one of the biggest financial scandals of all times. Banks have put aside billions of pounds to cover the cost of compensating PPI customers. So are the insurance policies and other products being sold to house buyers and sellers today any better than the old, discredited PPI policies? If not, as another reader suggests: "Can I see a law firms' version of the bankers' PPI scandal in the next few years?" Watch this space.

IN the film Mr Turner, Tim Spall portrays the painter J M W Turner as an uncouth character who grunts during conversation and, less endearingly, during sex. A reader wonders whether Spall may have based his performance on the Empress of Blandings, from his earlier TV triumph in the BBC adaptation of P G Wodehouse comedies, Blandings. The Empress, you may recall, was a giant, prize-winning sow. Oink.

A NUMBER of you have pointed out a flaw in Western Power Distribution's decision to send glow-in-the-dark fridge magnets to nearly eight million customers. The idea is that, if the lights go out, you will find the power company's phone number on the fridge magnet. And then what? How long will you have to listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons on hold as Western Power works it way through eight million phone calls to pass on the blindingly obvious explanation that the lights have gone out because there is a power cut? Far better to fasten the glow-in-the-dark fridge magnet not to the fridge but to a torch.

I HAVE an explanation for the curious case of the reader whose smartphone suddenly produced a text message from an optician shortly after she walked past the premises. It is something called proximity marketing. But all the descriptions I have seen stress that users have to opt-in to the system in order to receive messages. You don't recall opting-in? I would hazard a guess that it was somewhere in the terms and conditions, that vast mass of legal bumf that nobody ever bothers to read.

IN fact, let's have a National T&C Day when everybody refuses to sign up to anything on the internet without first thoroughly reading every single paragraph of the terms and conditions. The system would crash.

ANOTHER reader says he's so fed up with unwanted messages on his smartphone that he's gone back to using his old Nokia dumbphone. He keeps the internet safely tucked away in his laptop and he alone makes the decision when and whether to go online. A happy man.