Peter Rhodes: Boom time at the Bank of Mum and Dad

SOME days ago a number of newspapers carried a picture of a person with a curious caption that couldn't have made sense to most readers. However, some folk smiled and tittered and winked at each other. For they are the ones who know that this person obtained a super-injunction a couple of years ago to prevent any mention of something I can't even hint at here. We are becoming two nations. Those in the know and those in the dark.

AND the irony is that if the super-injunction were suddenly lifted and we all knew the truth about the person whom I can't even begin to identify, we probably wouldn't think much worse of them. So what's the point?

BOMAD – the Bank of Mum and Dad - has become the 10th biggest lender in Britain, helping 300,000 people a year on to the property ladder. That's hardly surprising. Many of the Babyboomer generation enjoyed free university, lifelong jobs on decent salaries with generous pensions, and benefited from rising property prices. What could be more natural than passing on some of their good luck? Yett Bomad is being denounced as unfair. Why should some kids get a helping hand, but not others? But is it unfair that some parents have saved money rather than spent it and now choose to help their children? Anyway, if the entire wealth of this nation was divided up equally and fairly tomorrow, by the end of this year some would be millionaires and others would be on skid row. You could call it unfair. You could call it human nature.

I BET the politicians are already thinking of ways of tapping into this flow of loot between parent and child. How long before any gift to a child made by someone over 60 is taxed? Unlikely? I recall a think-tank which, some years ago, suggested a brand-new tax. Its argument, in all seriousness, was that, because people pay stamp duty when they move home, those who stay in one house for many years are evading stamp duty and should be taxed. Our destiny is decided by some very odd brains.

THE march of academia goes on. Two recent bits of university research caught my eye. The first tells us that labradors are obedient because they will do anything for food. The second informs us that if the miniature people known as The Borrowers in Mary Norton's children's book actually existed, their mass-to-surface-area ratio would make them blind and deaf. Don't tell me this isn't worth £9,000 a year.

A LUXURY cruise on the good ship Disney Wonder is the latest to be struck with a rampant stomach bug. I have only ever been on one cruise, on a press trip. The catering was magnificent. When the chief sommelier is summoned to the captain's table to advise you on the perfect South African wine to accompany your wildebeest steak, you feel you have arrived. Yet the experience was spoiled every so slightly by the constant procession of fellow cruisers, usually aged ladies, trooping to the antiseptic gel dispensers, to keep the diarrhoea at bay. It was like sharing a ship with a crowd of very old hand-washing Lady Macbeths. Out, damned trots.