Peter Rhodes: A suitable case for censorship?

ONE last eggcorn. A reader recalls his mother talking about the difficulty of "making hen's meat."

ANOTHER reader points out that eggcorns – expressions coined by people who have misunderstood the original phrase – have a tendency to pass into everyday use. And then we take them for granite.

A MULTILINGUAL correspondent, referring to my recent item on things left behind on buses and trains, points out that while the English term is "lost property," the French call it "objets trouves" or "found items." He wonders whether the French are being more logical than the Brits. It sounds to me as though they take the finders/keepers view and stake a claim to it.

THE man who invented predictive text died yesterday. His funfair is next monkey.

I'M no fan of censorship but I might make an exception for news about cures for cancer. The latest, revealed this week, comes from Seattle where some patients treated with immune cells have shown complete remission from blood cancer. Some who were expected to die months ago are alive. The doctor in charge declares: "This is extraordinary. This is unprecedented in medicine." So why not shout the good news from the rooftops? Here's why. I have been in journalism since1969 and cannot remember a time when a cure for cancer was not just around the corner. I lose count of the claims for "magic bullets" to hunt down and destroy tumours. And yet the suffering and dying goes on: Alan Rickman, Terry Wogan, David Bowie, Lemmy and all the others. If you read the small print in the news reports, you'll always discover that the latest "miracle" treatment needs years of laboratory testing before it will be available. Those "cure for cancer" headlines create hope among the hopeless, and a certain bitterness that asks: "How can it be that patients in Seattle will live but I must die?" A total blackout on news until we have a proven and available cure for cancer would be impossible to impose and goes against every journalistic instinct. But wouldn't it save a hell of a lot of anguish?

A FRIEND was holding his boat at the quayside when a sudden gust caught the sails and snatched the rope from his hand. He says the most depressing part, as he waited for the rescue vessel to tow his boat back across the lake, was to reflect on all the hours he had put in to honing his sailing skills to a fine pitch, only to see his little Mary Celeste sailing perfectly beautifully without him.

NO surprises in the news from New York where researchers claim that e-cigarettes may not be safe for pregnant women. If nothing else this might deter those vapers who think it's all right to light up in your home, producing vast quantities of sweet-smelling stuff that looks like smoke even if there is nothing burning. Have you noticed how the only people who think vaping isn't smoking are smokers?

MY item on NHS screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm caught the eye of a patient who was watching the monitor screen as the medics discovered he had a slight bulge in his aorta. He writes cheerfully: "The AAA screening is worth a go but it's not as good as The Revenant."