Peter Rhodes: Time to ban chess?

OUR changing language. A reader heard the PA system in a supermarket alerting staff to an "ambient partners' huddle." Turned out to be a meeting for shelf-stackers.

THANKS for your many suggestions for a modern euphemism to take the place of "sleeping with" as a term for having sex, which is a daft expression because sleeping is rarely on the agenda. My favourite so far is "ecstasysing."

THE Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, has ruled that chess is forbidden in Islam, on the grounds that it wastes time, keeps people from their prayers and encourages gambling. From the Twitter-storm that followed, I liked the suggestion that we should start putting bets on what the Grand Mufti will ban next. He would then know that every time he tried to ban something, he was actually encouraging gambling. This might eventually persuade him to stop banning things altogether and the good people of Saudi Arabia would be much happier.

MIND you, having spent a couple of days in Saudi Arabia, it did not strike me as the sort of place where anyone wanted to be terribly happy. The national pastime appeared to be scowling.

DICKENSIAN (BBC1) takes favourite characters from Charles Dickens's most popular books and jumbles them up in a new story served, like a soap opera, in 30-minute segments. Purists may be horrified but Dickensian is wonderfully acted (don't you love Pauline Collins as Mrs Gamp?) and hugely entertaining. So why stop there? You could have a lot of fun taking an assortment of cross-dressers, twins and sprites, adding a gloomy Danish prince, a homicidal African general, a bloody-handed Scottish queen and a Roman emperor and stranding them all on Prospero's magic island. After Dickensian, bring on Shakespearian.

LORD Bramall, 92-year-old war hero and former head of the Army, is not going to get anything resembling a proper apology from the cops for being investigated as a result of sex-assault allegations by a single unknown witness referred to as "Nick." A grudging letter from the Met referring to "insufficient evidence" is as much as he can expect. I can only repeat the point I made last September. At any stage in this big and ruinously expensive inquiry, has "Nick" ever been invited to take a lie-detector test? If not, why not?

JEREMY Corbyn's plan to send nuclear submarines to sea leaving their nuclear missiles behind is, like so many pacifist brainwaves, exceedingly dangerous. If a crisis suddenly developed and we realised we needed nukes after all, it would take some time to get them ready and load them on board the subs. Any potential enemy would know the race was on and he would have to act quickly or risk a hammering. And that, as any historian will tell you, is precisely how the First World War began.

USEFUL Russian phrases. 1) More tea, comrade? 2) My, how your samovar is glowing. 3) Mr Putin knows absolutely nothing about any of this.

MY recent item on how things in tubes on the bathroom shelf tend to look the same (toothpaste, hand cream, etc) strikes a chord with a reader who was vigorously massaging his bald head with what he thought was skin-care ointment. For the rest of that day he exuded the distinctive whiff of haemorrhoid cream.