Anyone for rat?

SHOCK, horror. Some contestants in a TV talent show are alleged to be not fresh-faced amateurs at all but professional musicians. Meanwhile, far away in a wood, a bear squats down . . .

A HOSPITAL in Sussex stands accused of covering up the real reason a grandmother died after a knee replacement eight years ago. Doris Knight, 85, was given a transfusion of blood of the wrong type. Apparently the NHS regards such accidents as a "never event," meaning something that should never happen. The NHS even has its own Never Events Policy and Framework document. The snag with such a title is that staff can come to believe that a "never event" is one that can never happen. In fact, one or two NHS patients die each year after being given the wrong blood. It might be better all round if the NHS adopted a policy of never saying never event.

I EXPECTED a furore at my suggestion that we should be suspicious that so many migrants heading across Europe from North Africa are young men of military age. For the record, I am not suggesting that every young Libyan or Syrian fleeing north is a war criminal. Nor do I believe this is some evil Islamist super-plot to flood our continent with jihadi terrorists. What I am suggesting is that when young men flee from a war zone, there's a good chance they have been involved, willingly or not, in the war. And given that there are few good guys in such conflicts, it might be wise to establish exactly what they have been doing for the past couple of years. If that is wickedly cynical then I am a wicked cynic. Cynicism is the safest option.

INCIDENTALLY, in 2002 a report for the United Nations studied the number of female migrants caught up in every population exodus all over the word in the previous 40 years. It found that between 1960 and 2000 almost half the migrants were female and that proportion seemed constant. In 2000, for example, the world had 90 million male migrants and 85 female migrants. Any normal exodus would produce about the same gender balance. Yet the groups of migrants at sea or on land today are overwhelmingly male. Something unusual is happening and we are not asking the right questions.

GEORGE Monbiot, eco-activist and writer, prepared and cooked a squirrel on Newsnight (BBC2), generating a national debate about road-kill recipes. One of the strangest, in the Daily Telegraph, was for cooking a fox. It began: "Soak well to remove the foxy taste." Hang on. What's the point of cooking a fox if you're getting rid of the foxy taste?

MY own experience of such cuisine extends to a dead squirrel I picked up some years ago, intending to stew it. One touch of the tail made me chuck it away in horror. Inside every fluffy squirrel tail is a thick, leathery tail, a reminder that your squirrel, whether live, dead, grilled or casseroled, is basically a rat.

A LETTER to one of the London newspapers is almost too good to be true and yet, in this brainless age, I am inclined to believe it. It concerns a man who returned his faulty mobile phone to the store to be repaired. After some days, having heard nothing, he contacted the store to be told that they had been trying to get in touch with him, by sending text messages to his phone . . . .