Anyone seen my hand?

A READER is not at all surprised at the report which suggests too many doctors prescribe too many pills and medical procedures which do not benefit the patient. He recalls the French philosopher Voltaire's words on the subject: "The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

AND here's another quote to treasure:"I didn't realise my hand had gone until I went to pick up a piece of wood and it wasn't there." Retired headmaster Edryd Jones of South Wales, who sliced off his hand with a DIY power saw. Neighbours put the severed hand in ice and surgeons successfully re-attached it. He's keeping the saw.

THE Prince of Wales, in one of his many letters to ministers, called for a cull of badgers in order to avoid another food scare. You may find this shocking. Or you may think it pretty meek and mild compared with his sister's views on badgers. On Countryfile (BBC1) last year, the Princess Royal memorably called for badgers to be culled on conservation grounds, even if there were no link with bovine TB.

PRINCESS Anne's argument is that there are simply too many badgers. There is certainly no shortage of the creatures as you can tell from that most reliable guide to animal populations, road kill. More than 30 years ago I stopped to take a photo of a dead badger at the side of the road, because it was such a rare sight. Today, badgers are so common that we barely give a second glance to their bodies at the roadside. The rise of badgers has coincided with a tragic decline in their favourite crunchy snack, hedgehogs.

WARNING bells ring, too, about the amazing success of red kites, once extinct but now counted in their thousands, thanks to a well-meaning reintroduction campaign. The snag is that the kites take not only the chicks of ground-nesting birds, including pheasant, partridge, duck and lapwing, but also kill young hares. The road to hell – and to a silent, sterile countryside – is paved with good intentions.

HERE'S the latest low-tech tip for discovering if you're too fat. Measure your height with a piece of string. If your waist is bigger than half the length of the string, you're overweight. A useful tip is to use strong string and pull tight. A report at the weekend confirmed that when it comes to being in denial about your weight, Brits top the list. Good to be first at something, eh?

IF you even doubted that modern cars are designed to keep the main agents and roadside-repair industry in business, you should have joined me in changing a friend's tyre a few days ago. The car jack was dangerously flimsy. With no bolts on the hub, the spare wheel had to be balanced in mid-air to locate the fixing bolts. If ever a wheel-change system was devised to defeat the average driver, this was it. Good news for the professionals but I wonder how many drivers have been killed on the hard shoulder waiting for the experts to turn up to do what used to be a simple five-minute job.

THE new GCSE course in music will include three songs from the Sergeant Pepper album: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, With a Little Help from My Friends and Within You, Without You. Pity they haven't extended the course to include the White Album track, I am the Walrus. Generations of kids would love to know what a crabalocker fishwife is. And why was everybody kicking Edgar Allan Poe? Days beyond bliss.