Peter Rhodes: Luke-warm Jeremy

"WHAT'S an ansadoo?" Question asked by a reader's small child on first hearing the song: "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do"

I WROTE recently about the demise of launderettes and spelt it that way. And yet if the word derives from "laundry" where does that middle E come from? In the old pre-digital days I always wrote "laundrette". It still seems the more logical spelling but these days the computer spell-check shouts at you. Anything for a quiet life.

I MENTIONED that the Lib-Dems were campaigning to save Britain's surviving 3,000 launderettes. A reader says it's only spin.

SUMMER approaches, the garden goes mad. So, on a whim and for the first time in many years, I tuned into The Archers, just to see if they had any topical horticultural tips. Not a chance. It seems to be mostly about killing imperfect husbands. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. . . .

WHAT a difference a week makes. This one began with activists demanding that almost everyone in public life be forced to produce their tax returns for public inspection. It ended with Labour backtracking, after lobbying from some MPs, and suggesting that only the two top members of the party should comply. But some genies cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. I bet we do not have to wait long for an election or by-election when the squeaky-clean but not-a-chance candidate brandishes his documents and says to his Con / Lab / Lib-Dem rivals: "Here's my tax returns, now let's see yours." Any refusal to comply will be regarded as evidence of wrongdoing.

MEANWHILE, Jeremy Corbyn who voted against the Common Market in 1975 and against the Lisbon Treaty is trying to convince the British people that he really, really supports the EU now. If nothing else, Jez is giving our fellow Europeans a lesson in colloquial English by demonstrating that useful term "luke warm".

SO who was the villain and whose vested interests were being served by this week's disclosure that Tory media minister John Whittingdale went out with a dominatrix? Was it the pressure group Hacked Off, out to take a newspaper scalp? Was it the wicked Press, out to blackmail the minister? Or was it the BBC, eager to pile on pressure to keep the TV licence? This is an issue involving that old concept "the public interest." But the real public interest, the question that will not go away, the burning issue that Joe Public wants answering, is nothing to do with the Beeb, the Press or Hacked Off. It is simply this: How do you go out with a woman for six months and not know she is a dominatrix? I think we should be told.

OOPS. I got it wrong a couple of days ago in suggesting that the survey used in What British Muslims Really Think (C4) contained no control group to tell us what non-Muslims felt about the same issues. In fact it did, and it provided some fascinating, if little-reported, insights into what Brits really think. Astonishingly, about 10 per cent of the wider, non-Muslim population believes homosexuality should be illegal. I found that as worrying as anything else in the programme.

MORE childhood misunderstandings. A reader recalls her sister describing a school science experiment using a comical flask.