To erase or not to erase?

PERFECT timing? From the Highways Agency comes this update: "On the A14 westbound at the junction with the M1 Catthorpe Interchange, there are currently delays of 10 minutes due to roadworks. Expect disruption until 6pm on 26 November 2017."

I SUGGESTED a few days ago there were 13 episodes of Fawlty Towers. Turns out I was venturing into urban-myth territory. There were only 12 episodes screened. The rumoured 13th episode allegedly involved a burglary at the hotel and, as with all good myths, the internet is full of someone who knew somebody who had a pal in the BBC who once saw the script, but there seems to be no real evidence it ever existed. This Loch Ness Monster of sitcoms is still waiting to be found.

A READER asks, if a computer game is as wonderful as the makers claim, why do TV adverts never show the actual computer-generated footage? Muttering darkly of misrepresentation, he warns: "We could end up with adverts of a mansion advertising a one-bedroom flat in an estate agent's window with some barely legible text saying: 'Photos not of property for sale'."

GUY Claxton, a cognitive scientist, has sparked a wonderful silly-season debate about erasers being an "instrument of the devil." His argument is that erasers create a "culture of shame" about error. As he puts it: "It's a way of lying to the world, which says 'I didn't make a mistake. I got it right first time,." He says children should not be ashamed of mistakes but should be encouraged to learn from them. I admit I lost the thread early in this debate, being distracted by the use of the word "eraser". Thanks to yet another Americanism, we are no longer allowed to call erasers by the name we all used in a more innocent age, rubbers.

CLAXTON'S words remind me of a curious interview I had some years ago with a charming, bright-eyed young American promoting some new mind-improvement organisation. He took the view that mistakes in life were a positive thing. Like "miss-takes" in making a movie, he said, they actually make you a better person. Once you believe that, he assured me with a big smile, you need never feel guilty again. He seemed surprised when I laughed.

THE latest argument in the euthanasia debate, raised by a Cambridge academic, is that English law effectively robs dementia sufferers of the right to use the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end their life because they cannot prove they have the capacity to take the decision. What a can of worms this is becoming. Suicide was once a crime. Then it became legal. Today it is a human right. How long before it becomes a social duty?

A POLL IN in the States reveals that the number of churchgoers supporting gay marriage has shot up from 30 to 47 per cent in the past ten years. It's a classic demonstration of how conservatism (with a small c) works. People with a conservative mind-set support the status quo and are wary of change. But when change happens, the change becomes the status quo. So they support it. Strange but true.

A GUARDIAN reader, responding to an announcement of a new boss at the socialist Morning Star, emails: "I wish the new editor the best of (nonimperialist) British luck." Full Marx for irony?