Peter Rhodes: Whatever happened to little Goose Green?

AUNTIE Beeb says the Top Gear stunt, with a wheel-spinning Mustang clouding the Cenotaph in tyre smoke, will not be broadcast. Well, of course not. It has served its purpose. It has proved the old adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

MORE readers' tales of the old custom of naming babies after military victories. One reader had a teacher whose forename was Ypres. Another had an "Uncle Frank" whose actual name was France Loos.

A READER wonders whether modern battles, such as the victories in the Falklands in 1982, ever make it to the christening. I would not be surprised. After all, some fans name their kids after every single member of their preferred football team. I bet that somewhere in this big wide world there is someone now in his 30s labouring under the middle name of Goose Green.

CAMBRIDGE students are under fire for the grave sin of "cultural appropriation" by organising May balls with foreign themes, thus encouraging the appallingly insensitive prospect of white students wearing Japanese kimonos or Chinese straw hats. I can't help noticing how many foreign students have adopted the national dress of the United States. The blighters, in their thousands, have culturally appropriated T-shirts and denim jeans. The tut-tutting starts here.

AFTER much shopping around I have bought a year's breakdown cover. Barely was the deal done online than an email arrived from the company telling me: "As you recently purchased breakdown cover, we would really appreciate your feedback on your experience with us." Experience? What experience? Let me tell you this, you saviours of stranded vehicles: it really does not matter how user-friendly your website is, how charming your phone team are, how slick the direct-debit process has become. All that matters is that, on a wet and scary night on the hard shoulder of the motorway, you turn up promptly and save me, my loved ones and my car. Then, and only then, will you get your feedback.

ASK a silly question, get a silly answer. The form for a US visa asks: "Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage or genocide?" John McGarry, a blameless retired cop from Lancashire, says his travel agent mistakenly ticked the box. As a result Mr McGarry was marched off the cruise ship when it docked in New York and was questioned by police, an experience which he says ruined the trip. But why ask such an odd question in the first place?

THE truth is that strange questions on US immigration forms have been around for ages. The tale is told of a British wit who, confronted with the question on a form: "Do you intend to undermine the Constitution of the United States of America?" wrote: "Sole purpose of visit." It's a great yarn but as it has been variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, Gilbert Harding, Robert Morley, Evelyn Waugh, Michael Foot and Peter Ustinov, I guess it probably never happened.

MORE things misheard in youth. A former cookery teacher recalls the pupil who thought she was using self-erasing flour.