Peter Rhodes: Have big ends stopped going?

THE Great British Sex Survey (C4) presented porn as serious research and introduced us to people who get turned on by latex, balloons, spanking and other people's feet. Half-way through there was an advert for Lipton's tea. So British.

THE march of technology. Flicking through a motoring mag in the dentist's waiting room, I found the tale of woe of a driver whose warning lights suddenly indicated that his front tyre pressures were too low. He checked, and found them to be right. The warning light insisted they were not. It turned out he had inadvertently entered the wrong "preferred pressure" setting into the car's onboard computer. You never had that trouble with a Hillman Minx.

ON the other hand, cars of yore were always having their big ends go. As a kid I often wondered what these big ends were and where they went. Anyway, modern cars presumably still have big ends but they never seem to go. I am sure someone out there can explain why.

STILL on cars, I've been shopping around for breakdown cover. I have had some sort of cover for the past 47 years and never used it. If I had saved all those premiums I could probably have bought my own breakdown truck.

IN fact, the only time I have called out a breakdown service was when my father's old Lancia had not been driven for three months and refused to start. A bloke from the RAC worked on it for hours until, with a great eruption of black smoke, it burst into life. The RAC, bless 'em, took the view that Dad had paid his premium and was entitled to the full service, even though he had died three months earlier. You never forget that sort of service.

ALSO in the dentist's waiting room was a mum, grandmother and three-year-old tyrant demanding attention. After running up and down for a while, he found the letter box in the door and began flicking it up and letting it clang back. "It goes boing, doesn't it?" said gran cheerfully. A few dozen intensely irritating boings later, she decided enough was enough and restrained her little angel. "Ow, you've hurt me!" she suddenly exclaimed. The little angel had bitten her, hard. I am aware that grumpy old gits like me have been complaining about the younger generations for at least 5,000 years of recorded history. But I suspect these last few decades have been the only ones when some kids have never heard the word no.

AFTER my recent item on the Islamic full veil, a reader points out that France has banned them, so why shouldn't we? The answer is the old law that says if something can go wrong, it will. Cops have an amazing ability to nick the wrong people. If veils were made illegal the cops would be arresting the wives of diplomats, short-term visitors, women with disfigurements and others with a perfectly valid reason for hiding their faces. There is no law more powerful than sod's law.

I REFERRED recently to Brussels' dream of a United States of Europe. A reader writes: Has anyone considered the lesson of history concerning what happened in America when the southern States tried to secede from the Union?" I just hope that this time we secessionists get the smart dark blue uniforms. Confederate grey really shows the blood.