Peter Rhodes: A subordinating what . . ?

AM I the only diesel-car driver feeling a little less guilty this week? There is something about half of Alberta going up in flames and filling the atmosphere with thousands of tons of smoke that puts our own emissions in context.

THE best sort of tax is the one where everybody pays the same. Rich or poor, they all get the same bill. And if some poor families can't pay, then they should be dragged through the criminal courts and even jailed. Does that sound fair to you? No, me neither. It reeks of the despised and ill-fated poll tax. And yet this is exactly how the TV licence works. This week well-heeled Bafta guests were demanding no government interference in the BBC which every year gets a £4,000 million bung from the public purse. But you know in your heart that if the TV licence system, which dates from the 1920s, were invented today, the very same celebrities would be denouncing it as a grossly unfair imposition on Britain's poorest and most vulnerable families. Which it is. Of all possible ways of funding the BBC, the licence is by far the worst.

THIS time last week, we were tut-tutting at reports that so many children taking SATS tests had no idea what a subordinating conjunction was. And then we chatted about it with friends and discovered that nobody, including us, has heard of them either. Indeed, lecturers and grammarians who have spent their entire careers teaching the finer points of English are now lining up to confess that they have never heard of subordinating conjunctions which, if they even exist, are damn-all use to anyone, including kids. So where have they come from?

IF in doubt, blame the Yanks. An American website on English grammar tells us that subordinating conjunctions are words such as "after" and "before." It offers two examples of their correct use, as follows: "Before I saw the house, I was ready to just rent an apartment," and "After dinner, we'll go see a movie." Does your inner pedant not yelp? The first sentence contains a screaming split infinitive and the second is missing a conjunction. This may be Trumpish but it's certainly not the Queen's English.

SIX weeks from now, we will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a byword for slaughter and courage. Here's a fascinating statistic about the First World War. Britain lost 720,000 young men in the four-year conflict and there were fears that this "lost generation" could never be replaced. So how long did it take our country to make up the losses? In his fine 2013 book, Great Britain's Great War, Jeremy Paxman reveals that in 1920, two years after the slaughter ended, 957,000 babies were born in England and Wales, a "spectacular total" which has never been equalled in any year since. "Make love, not war" was a slogan of the hippie 1960s. Fifty years earlier, millions of battle-weary Brits were doing just that.

THE bitter irony, of course, is that the boys of that huge 1920 generation were the perfect age to be conscripted when the Second World War began just 19 years later.