Peter Rhodes: A circus without clowns

LAST week we touched on eggcorns, those curious phrases used by people who have either misheard or misunderstood the original expression. A reader tells me his step-son, despite being corrected many times, still refers to a calm sea as being "as flat as a milk pond." Another reader recalls her sister describing it "raining prams and dolls."

WHY eggcorn? The word was coined to describe the case of a woman who pronounced "acorn" as "egg corn."

MANY thanks for your admissions of things you believed when you were very young. Spare a thought for the little girls and boys who between them thought that: Everybody using a walkie-talkie was called Roger. You could buy a new lawn from a turf accountant. The National Anthem suggested sending the King some plums (Victorias). It was impossible for a lady to have a baby unless she was married (this was a long time ago). Piccadilly Circus should have had clowns. Goulash was a wild Hungarian dance. The foreman of the jury sat on a huge chest of jewellery.

THE one that made me smile most was the reader who, as a little girl, lay terrified in bed because the family was off on holiday and her mother said they had to be up next day for some terrifying phenomenon called the crack of dawn.

MEANWHILE, back in the grim and grisly present, the Russians seem determined to end the war in Syria in the same way that they ended the Second World War, by flattening everything in their path. Aleppo 2016 twinned with Berlin 1945.

CALLING for a review, David Cameron asks: "Is there anything worse than a baby spending time in prison with its mother?" Yes, there is. It is spending time with its mother outside prison. Our legal system assumes that men commit crimes but women have syndromes. As a result, relatively few women are jailed. The ones that get sent down have committed deadly serious or persistent offences. And while it may seem hideous for women and their babies to be in secure accommodation, let's not forget that the 100 infants incarcerated last year were fed, bathed, kept warm and constantly supervised in a supremely safe place. How might those babies have fared in some wretched bed-sit, particularly one shared with the mother's latest drug-dealing boyfriend? The Prime Minister wants a review of how pregnant offenders are treated. Let us hope it is wise enough to realise that for some babies from the most deprived backgrounds, the best possible start in life is mother's milk and porridge.

WEEKEND reports of money being filched online from HM Revenue & Customs raise once again the issue of online security. I consider myself a bit of a cave-man for never signing up to online banking. So you may be surprised to hear that my hip, happening and fully wired internet engineer friend takes the same Neanderthal view. "This," he says, holding up his left hand, "is my money, nice and safe in the bank and this (holding up his right hand) is the internet, crawling with crooks. Why on earth would I connect one to the other?"

HAVING extended the hand of welcome, and seen its services swamped, Sweden's latest plan is to send home about 80,000 failed asylum seekers on chartered planes. So that's a fleet of airliners, each carrying 400 angry, resentful, powerful young men. Any volunteers to be pilot?