A gun killer aged two

A WINTER fashion mystery. When Al Pacino wears a knitted woolly hat in Serpico, he looks dead cool. When Charles Bronson wears a knitted woolly hat in Death Wish, he looks dead hard. When I wear a knitted woolly hat in the park, I look like a teapot.

A NEW year begins and a leaflet arrives full of self-improvement courses at our local college. It is from something called the Adult and Community Learning Service. Shouldn't that be a teaching service?

ON a shopping trip in Idaho, a two-year-old toddler reaches into his mother's handbag and fires her pistol, killing her. Police describe it as a tragedy and an accident, In truth, it's more of a statistical inevitability. Take a nation of 300 million people. Add the same number of guns. Draft a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons. Create the mind-set where a woman in a quiet suburb on a trip to Walmart sees nothing unusual in carrying what appears to be a loaded pistol, cocked and ready to fire. If that's the society you want, there is a price to be paid. Despite endless tragedies, America seems prepared to pay it. The love affair with guns goes on.

MY item on the many odd names found in bricklaying has spawned an email storm of snots, quelks, gorrets and other strange terms, for which many thanks. It is hardly surprising that the business of laying one brick on another, practised for thousands of years, has produced so many expressions. A reader recalls overseeing the building of his house and being asked by one embarrassed brickie if he'd ever heard the term "a course in pig" (also known as a pig course or a pig in the wall). It's what happens when a bricklayer lays a course of bricks all the way around a house and ends up one level higher than he should be. My reader says there were some stern words exchanged on the subject of levels, string and suchlike.

IT'S all very well criticising the Ebola-screening procedures at Heathrow, and they may well have left something to be desired. But if NHS volunteers had been kept in isolation for just a few days in Africa at the end of their tour, the infected nurse, Pauline Cafferkey, would have been identified and given the quickest and best treatment. There would have been no crisis and no risk to anyone in the UK. A quick re-think of strategy is in order. So, too, is an admission that we may not know as much about Ebola as we like to think.

YOU may recall my pre-Xmas spat with a reader whose house is insulated to Scandinavian standards. I suggested the yuletide flatulence would hang around her hermetically-sealed abode until Easter. She responded by alleging my draughty old Chateau Rhodes stank of dogs. A few days later came news from researchers at Exeter University Medical School who have found a strong link between "green" homes insulated to a high standard and asthma. Every unit achieved on the government's SAP rating of energy efficiency raises the risk of asthma by up to three per cent. This is not a result I would care to crow about but it does make the point that progress is usually two steps forward and one step back.

POSITIVELY the last mention of Christmas. A reader writes: "This Christmas my wife and I watched three DVDs back to back. Luckily, I was the one facing the TV."

AND a forecast for 2015? It strikes me, in a glum moment of foreboding, that we haven't had a rabies scare for a long time.