May you live in uninteresting times

TOMORROW is the Glorious Twelfth, the start of the shooting season and the only day of the year when the best advice you can offer one species of bird is the name of another. Grouse, duck.

DONALD Trump as President of the United States. Putin in charge in Russia. Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. What could possibly go wrong?

IF you believed the first reports, it seemed that sinister Romanian or Russian crime gangs had developed a safe, effective, knock-out gas, and used it in the burglary of Jenson Button's luxury villa in the south of France. But if they have, the Royal College of Anaesthetists would love to hear from them. After a spate of dubious "gas attack" reports last year, the College issued a statement: "Despite the increasing numbers of reports of people being gassed in motor-homes or commercial trucks in France, and the warning put out by the Foreign Office for travellers to be aware of this danger, this College remains of the view that this is a myth. . . . . If there was a totally safe, odourless, potent, cheap anaesthetic agent available to thieves for this purpose it is likely the medical profession would know about it and be investigating its use in anaesthetic practice." In other words, if anyone developed such a gas it would be worth billions of dollars to the drugs industry, so why would anyone muck about using it to rob a few caravans and motor homes?

BUT then the Jenson Button "gas attack" claim was hardly first-hand and has since evaporated like morning mist. It was based on a tabloid report quoting a "source" who in turn was reporting what he thinks the cops may have told the racing driver. In other words, it was pure moonshine. Knockout-gas burglary = urban myth.

I WROTE recently about the steady advance of metrification. A reader writes: "Thank goodness our money went metric. With the decline in maths teaching kids would be leaving school unable to calculate pounds, shillings and pence." Au contraire. It was the very complexity of the old £sd system which made kids competent in maths. We were good at sums because we had to be. Every trip to the shops involved multiplying or dividing by two, three, four, six, eight, ten or 12. The old money produced generations who could do mental arithmetic in their head. We never had to be told that three 45rpm vinyl records at 6s8d each cost a total of £1. We just knew it. Not that we ever had £1 to spend.

OUR changing language. An expert on hi-tech industry told Radio 4 that people launching new businesses often focused on the chances of selling the company and making a quick profit. Or as he put it, having "a liquidity event."

TELEVISION scheduling for beginners. In the space of a couple of hours a few evenings ago we had The Wonder of Britain (ITV) in which Julia Bradbury explains the importance of the sea to our plucky island race; Coast (BBC2) in which Nick Crane explains the importance of the sea to our plucky island race; and Britain and the Sea (BBC4) in which David Dimbleby explains the importance of the sea to our, well, you can probably guess the rest.

THE knowledge we gain from such programmes? Apparently we live on an island. And we are jolly plucky.