Peter Rhodes: You felt the what in your hand?

FROM this week, dogs must be identity-chipped by law. But one expert Richard Allport, a senior vet and owner of the Natural Medicine Centre, says that implanting the chip could prove fatal in small dogs or puppies. I'm pretty sure that's what killed our stick insect.

THANKS for your tips on how to de-criminalise the Tom Jones hit, Delilah. As you may recall, the song is causing concern among folk who think it encourages violence with the line: "I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more." We need a non-lethal object in the hand. A reader points out that the singer John Otway has already recorded a version with "I felt the spoon in my hand." Other readers have suggested that stopping Delilah laughing could be achieved with a pair of socks, the TV remote control or an Aston Villa season ticket. Good to see you're all taking it so seriously.

YES, I know the Bond film Spectre was released over a year ago, but I have only just got round to seeing it, so indulge me. My favourite quote of the film is Bond explaining to Q what has happened to his latest Aston Martin after that fracas in Rome: "If you've come for the car, I parked it at the bottom of the Tiber." In my experience, transport managers do not respond well to that sort of thing.

AFTER my dazzling forecast yesterday that even if we voted for Brexit, it would never happen, allow me another leap into the future, this time to a day when Planet Earth is glowing radioactively after the Third World War. Our grandchildren, running the geiger counter over the wild bulbs we have foraged for breakfast, ask how it happened. And we will have to tell them that way back in 2016 when the Panama-leaks story broke, we were all so focused on David Cameron's father's tax affairs that no-one bothered to find out who was paying for North Korea's nuclear bombs. It's all about priorities, isn't it?

AND now, a leap into the past. It is infuriating to see that slimy old spy Kim Philby addressing East German agents in the tape unearthed by the BBC. There he is, the silver-spooned son of Cambridge, languidly telling a roomful of communist snoopers and torturers how easy it was to pass British secrets to a Soviet handler. He must have been thrilled to hear them chuckle so appreciatively. But that was 1981 and time was already running out for the Reds.

HOW wonderful it would have been to get control of the public-address system in Philby's lecture room and let them know what was coming: "Only eight years to go, Comrades. Then the Berlin Wall comes down, you're all out of a job or in prison and your children will grow up in a united, capitalist Germany and serve as soldiers with Nato. And you, Kim Philby, who will even remember your name?"

MORE things misunderstood in childhood. One of my younger readers remembers being in the cinema one day in 1945 when the manager came on stage to announce that the Second World War was over. She tells me: "Everyone started to leave which upset me. I wanted to see the end of the film."

THE same reader recalls seeing the cinema screen announce "News Items". She mis-read it as "New ITMA" and waited in vain for Tommy Handley to appear.