Work for your money, Auntie

I SUGGESTED on Monday that women footballers, having proved themselves as valiant as the men, should be called lions rather than lionesses. After all, feminine terms such as actress, lady doctor, aviatrix and editrix are now regarded as patronising. But it seems I am a voice in the wilderness. The Times, no less, referred to our women's soccer team this week as "England Glory Girls." How charmingly 1930s.

YOU know the worst thing about trying to report a phone fault? It's not waiting on the line for half an hour with a mobile phone gluing itself to your skull (I hate mobiles). It's not the stupid person who informs you every couple of minutes that they are very busy and will answer your call as quickly as possible (how about employing more staff?). It's not even the wildly cheery chap on the helpline in India who assures you the job will be fixed within 24 hours and everything will be back to normal and "have a wonderful day, sir" when it's quite obvious your scorched and smoking computer, modem and router, whacked by a lightning bolt at the weekend, are all knackered beyond repair. No, the worst thing about trying to report a phone fault is when they ask for your customer account number which is on your latest bill which, now that you have paperless bills, is locked inside your computer, which is bust. Misery.

AS Dallas Campbell continues his excruciating trips into panic-inducing pot holes in Britain Beneath Your Feet (BBC1) I was reminded of the intrepid pot holer on Countryfile (BBC1) who assured us that very few people suffer from claustrophobia when pot-holing. That, my friend, is because we yabba-dabba-do claustrophobics keep well away from pot holes. Call me windy but of all the ways a man can choose to die, being stuck by your shoulders 200 feet below ground and hearing the water rising must be the worst.

THE BBC is a bit like the RSPB. As far as the RSPB is concerned there can never be too many birds. A 30 per cent drop in the number of sparrows is announced as a national tragedy while 20,000 guillemots clinging to some godforsaken rock in the Atlantic, slithering in each other's guano as they fight for a few square inches of nest space is celebrated as a "breeding success." Likewise, if you ask the average BBC executive how big the BBC ought to be, he probably won't understand the question. The BBC is enormous and getting bigger by the minute, thanks to that wonderful, guaranteed bung of £4,000 million a year from the licence payers. As far as the BBC is concerned, the BBC is such A Good Thing that, on screen, on radio or online, it can never be too big. Now, at last, some sanity is returning. The Government is telling the BBC to pay for free licences for the over-75s and to try to extract licence fees from the can't pay / won't pay iPhone generation (and good luck with that). The Beeb has gone into full shock-horror-apocalypse mode, much as the RSPB would do if all the robins suddenly died. But it won't wash. Other media organisations on a fraction of the Beeb's budget routinely outperform the Beeb. Time to work for your money, Auntie.

LITTLE blue leather sandals, short socks, red romper shorts and white blouse. Good to see, from Princess Charlotte's christening photographs, that Prince George is being raised just like any other little boy. Any other little boy of 1953, that is.