Peter Rhodes: Big-cat wisdom

REFLECTION rage. A reader writes of his irritation as he followed a series of lorries bearing the sign: "If you can't see my mirrors then I can't see you." He wishes his car had another label, reading: "So why the hell don't you fit a rear-facing video camera so that you can see me? It isn't rocket science."

THEY say the difference between wisdom and knowledge is the tomato test. Knowledge tells you that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom tells you not to put it in a fruit salad. Here's another example, following Mickey McCaldin's recent safari experience in Kenya. Knowledge tells you that the young cheetah which has just jumped into your vehicle is most unlikely to attack a human. Wisdom told Mr McCaldin to keep very, very still. "I've been lucky all my life," he says. And wise, I bet.

GUESS which minority community has just reached the educational landmark of getting a member into either Oxford or Cambridge? Blind or disabled people? The Bangladeshi community? Of course not. They achieved Oxbridge years ago. The group which has taken so long to get one of its children into the ivory towers is the travelling community. Shelby Holmes, a member of a fairground family, has graduated from Trinity College, Oxford. Teachers everywhere will not be surprised at the travelling community's dismal academic record. Shelby, 21, reckons she missed half her schooling. Thousands more traveller kids dip into school for a few weeks and then move on, learning nothing and equipped only for life on the fairs or asphalt gangs. Some come from communities where being unable to read and write is regarded with pride. Misplaced cultural sensitivity and pure cowardice have prevented successive governments from getting to grips with the problem of uneducated traveller children. Shelby Holmes shows how much young talent is going to waste and highlights a national scandal.

OFF to the optician, one of those professions (others include dental hygienist and chimney sweep) whose job description includes giving the customer a good telling-off. It seems everything I have been doing with my contact lenses over the past 13 years has been wrong. The worst offence of all, she said, was leaving their little plastic bath open in the bathroom. Barring the occasional cobweb, I have always considered the bathroom at Chateau Rhodes to be one of our cleaner rooms. To an optician, however, a bathroom is a deeply unhygienic, guano-encrusted hell-hole with a foul faecal miasma spreading infection to unwary contact lenses.

AT this stage in the conversation I may have raised one eyebrow. Big mistake. No professional is more likely to spot a raised eyebrow than an optician.

AND off she went on another tack. Did I know the brand name of my contact lenses? I groped for the elusive name and admitted defeat. "But I bet you know the name of your after-shave, don't you?" she continued, accusingly. Well, of course; it is Tabac. "But you only slap that stuff on your face," said the optician "You put contact lenses in your eye." Well, true enough. On the other hand, the perfume companies spend millions choosing clever names which will stick in your mind and roll off your tongue: Lynx, Aramis, Obsession and so on. The same white-hot marketing does not apply to "Acuvue Advance Contact Lenses for Astigmatism."

A WOMAN with learning difficulties has been awarded £65,000 in NHS compensation after hospital staff in Walsall cut up and "tortured" her favourite doll. Now come the weasel words. An NHS spokesman apologises for "failure of care." Not deliberate cruelty, then?