Old 'uns all look the same

OF course, it should be illegal to buy and sell confidential medical information. But in a nation of 60 million gossips, is anything confidential? I learned this week that a lady aged 85 had died suddenly, two weeks after being diagnosed with liver cancer, and that her passing was peaceful. Apparently she had never had a day's illness in her life. So that's name, address, medical condition and past history - all from a five-minute chat among customers in the paper shop.

MEANWHILE, the Daily Mail's shock-horror investigation into the leaking of health information finally catches up with this column which has been banging on about it for years. Dozen of my readers have been in touch with tales of being mysteriously approached by everything from stair-lift firms to double-glazing companies after an appointment at an NHS surgery or hospital. Clearly, some NHS employees are not above slipping names, addresses and medical details to pals running businesses, presumably in return for backhanders. But when their NHS bosses are selling such information to data firms on an industrial scale, who can blame the workers for grabbing a slice of the action?

IN The Ark (BBC1) Noah (David Threlfall) is given the bad news of the coming flood by an angel sent by God. Noah looks away for one moment and when he looks back, the angel has vanished. We live in coarse times. Even the angels are getting ruder.

CHANNEL 4 News has been outside its London comfort zone this week, dispatching Krishnan Guru-Murthy on his bike to cycle around the Dales. He is asking t'local folk: "Are you better off now than you were five years ago?" Anyone with a knowledge of the North knows better than to ask Yorkshire folk such a thing. They do not do contentment. Has Channel 4 never heard the tale of the Yorkshireman who arrives at the Pearly Gates and asks: "What place is this?" "It's Paradise," replies St Peter, "but you won't like it."

BUT then the metropolitan media don't have much knowledge of anywhere beyond the M25, as you might guess from Channel 4's screen caption for Guru-Murthy's latest leg of his North Country marathon: "Rippon to Otley." Actually, it's called Ripon.

I WENT to the barber's this week and took my place in the queue next to a couple of old, grey blokes. Another couple of old, grey blokes came in. After a while the barber looked around and said: "Right, who's next?" We five old, grey blokes looked at each other and hadn't a clue who had arrived when. That's the snag with getting older; we all get to look the same. So is anyone really surprised at this week's story of old, grey Neil Richardson moving to Braintree in Essex and finding himself mistaken for old, grey John Jemison? The pair are hailed as "unrelated identical twins" but although they look like each other, they also resemble lots of other blokes of a certain age and colouring, including two of my acquaintances. And when summer comes, just to complicate things further, we old, grey blokes wear Cotton Traders rugby shirts and jeans and millions of us look the same. It will be hell in the barber's.

A READER writes: "I have developed a way of dealing with people who say Jeremy Clarkson should not have been sacked. I call them a lazy **** and punch them in the mouth."