Not such a massive mandate?

STILL paranoid about online scams after the Talk Talk fiasco? Watch out for an unexpected "order acknowledgement" from Ikea arriving among your emails. It appears to be a new trick for either phishing your personal information or inserting unpleasant software in your computer. Just bin it.

SCIENTISTS on the Rosetta programme say they have have found oxygen around comet 67P. They say this suggests that the comet, 300 million miles from Earth, had a "gentler birth" than they first thought. Mind you, as any serious conspiracy theorist will tell you, the presence of oxygen could also confirm that it's all being staged in a big hangar in the Arizona desert. Just like the moon landings, innit?

IN my praise of the new part-opened Catthorpe motorway Interchange earlier this week, I should have mentioned the curious fact that the new slip road from the A14 joins the northbound M6 in the fast lane. Keeps you on your toes.

DOES a day go by without supporters of Jeremy Corbyn proudly boasting of his massive mandate? Corbyn took a whopping 59.5 per cent of the vote. That's 251,417 of the 422,664 votes cast and it looks impressive. But, lest we forget, the Labour-leadership election was open not only to existing Labour Party members but to the entire nation. Virtually anyone could pay £3 to register as a Labour "supporter," and they had many weeks in which to do it. So here was a transforming event, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all the angry, disaffected folk in the UK to rise up and support a new sort of politics. Here was a chance for 45 million potential voters to throw their weight behind a genuine Left-wing politician, for less than the price of a pint. Corbyn's 251,417 votes represents only about one voter in every 180 in the UK. That "massive mandate" is maybe not so massive, after all.

NEXT year will see two great centenary commemorations. The year 2016 marks 100 years since the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising in Dublin. Both have been meticulously examined and re-examined. Both still have the power to start bitter arguments and the occasional punch-up.

THE Somme, the four-month "Big Push" by British forces against German positions in northern France, is at least easy to follow. But the Easter Rising was the culmination of centuries of friction and intrigue and the starting point for yet more myth and legend. When the Irish novelist Colm Toibin promised a few days ago that the centenary commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising will look at the event "in all its complexity," he was promising a lot. It is hard to believe that one small island produced so many factions, leaders, pacts, poets, pledges, murders and betrayals. The one constant, through eight centuries of conflict, is that the bloody British were always in the wrong. And then you get to the stage where one group of Irishmen are borrowing artillery from the bloody British in order to kill another group of Irishmen. Then you begin to understand why the events of 1916 and after are still so hard for many Irish folk to discuss. Some issues are simply not black and tan.

MEANWHILE, a reader fresh back from Ireland reports seeing this sign outside a pub: "Today's special offer. Buy any two drinks and pay for both of them."