Let's start giving to bad causes

I MET an old pal who was glumly studying the paper. "Bad news?" I asked. "Obituary column," he replied. "Don't you sometimes feel you're reaching the head of the queue?"

SCIENTISTS in Utah believe elephants are protected from cancer by something in their DNA that humans lack. There is another significant difference between humans and elephants. I seem to have forgotten it.

SPOT the weak point in the new 5p charge on plastic bags in supermarkets? The money raised goes to charity. So if you have to buy one, you can at least congratulate yourself on helping some good cause. It would make far more sense to put the money towards a thoroughly bad cause. If every 5p helped provide wide-screen TVs for paedophiles in prison, plastic bags would vanish overnight.

FROM all the fuss about the Northern Lights being seen in Britain, you might assume that the farther north you go, the better the view. Not so. Some years ago when I was helping to rescue a polar explorer from the Arctic ice floes (hell, I love dropping that line) I suggested that Resolute, the Inuit village in northern Canada where we were based, must get brilliant sightings of the Aurora Borealis. "Nah," said the town mayor. "We're too far north. You have to go down to Yellowknife to see the lights."

REMEMBER when kids became adults at the age of 21 and middle-age began at 40? Today we have a Peter Pan generation of men behaving like overgrown, irresponsible boys until 30 or later. Take the banned driver who shot across a red light in the Black Country, ploughing into a soldier's car and killing him. The judge at Wolverhampton Crown Court last week referred to the defendant as "a young man" while the defence barrister spoke of his "youth and immaturity." The driver was 27. The more we treat grown men as kids, the more they will refuse to grow up.

WHENEVER the Army rebrands its reserves, it peddles the same weary old myth. It goes like this: the old TA was "a bit of a drinking club," but the new, improved TA (now the Army Reserve) is lean, mean and fighting fit. When I joined the TA in the 1970s, we were told the TA of the 1960s was "a bit of a drinking club." The 1960s Terriers had been told much the same about the Z Reservists of the 1950s. A few days ago my eye was caught by a feature on a bunch of plump, amiable Army Reserve medics just back from camp in Gibraltar. True to form, it told us how the TA of 20 years ago was "a bit of a drinking club." In the 1980s I served in two camps on Gibraltar with TA soldiers of the Fusiliers and the Light Infantry who looked considerably fitter, harder and more soldierly than this latest lot. Our Cold War TA was 70,000 strong, yet today's Army Reserve can barely muster 12,000 and recruitment is flagging. What's more, you can bet that 20 years from now the reservists of 2035 – assuming we have any – will be told that the Army Reserve of 2015 was "a bit of a drinking club." It's enough to drive you to drink.

INCIDENTALLY, when did the Royal Army Medical Corps get all holier-than-thou about booze? Army medics have to be trained how to use rifles and machine guns but I can't recall a single one who had to be shown how to use a corkscrew.