Free to travel?

"IT'S like a washing machine for your brain." Henry (The Fonz) Winkler, writing about fly fishing in the current edition of Big Issue.

OUR changing language. To you and me, a summer house bought with NHS funds to give a patient his own space is simply a summer house. To outraged senior doctors it is a "non evidence-based therapy."

THIS country gets more like the United States every day. Americans spend much time and energy agonising over what the Founding Fathers meant when they drafted the Constitution back in 1787. Now, we EU states are trying to remember what the Common Market rules of the 1950s really meant when they referred to the "free movement of persons, services, goods and capital." Are the persons just persons? Are they persons looking for work? Or as Home Secretary Theresa May insists this week, should free movement be restricted to persons with definite jobs to go to? I suspect May is on to a loser, and knows it. Anyone who remembers the days of grim-faced immigration officers stamping English passports in French trains knows that the freedom of EU citizens to travel freely within the EU is the best thing about it. It worked perfectly well when the European Economic Community was a small cluster of affluent nations. Today's blame lies with the idiots who are turning it into a massive superstate from the Atlantic to the Urals. Coming soon, Albania.

PENITENT stool. I wrote recently that Japan has 30,000 centenarians very year. The correct figure is about 40,000 Japanese aged 100 or more, with about 3,000 new centenarians every year.

IT seems the girls' name Catalina may not be derived from the WW2 flying boat, as I suggested a few days ago. A reader points out the island of Catalina off the coast of California. He adds: "If island names are to catch on, can I recommend Svalbard, Tierra del Fuego, or, from my home town, Frog? Frog Island is bounded by the River Soar and the Grand Union Canal in Leicester."

ACTUALLY, some Scottish islands have possibilities for rare and unusual names. Among the likes of Lunga, Kirkibost, Swona and Muck, there is one wee island which, as far as I can discover, has not been used as a forename. Oxna.

HORIZON (BBC4) looked at what the boffins call synthetic biology and critics call playing God. When we start tinkering with DNA and swapping molecules between species, you have to believe there are sufficient safeguards to prevent global disaster. That belief is not made any easier by the late, great Terry Pratchett's timely warning that some humans, given the chance, would do literally anything. He said: "If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End Of The World Switch – Do Not Touch,' the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."

IN Thailand, the cops announce that they have solved the Bankok bombing and are therefore claiming the reward themselves. Thank goodness our authorities cannot line their pockets in such a way. Apart, of course, from the speed-trap racket. Another 10,000 drivers nicked , another £1 million to be divvied up between Whitehall and the cops.

A READER writes: "I have seen my first gritting lorry of the season, complete with snow shovel." Is this a record?