PETER RHODES: Making astrology look respectable

YOUR inventiveness always impresses me. I asked for a new meteorological term to describe those days when it's colder indoors than outside. A reader suggests 'outclement', as opposed to inclement. Perfect.

LONG after this EU referendum is over, I will cherish the definition I heard on the World Service in the early hours as one pundit poured cold water on others. It's an old line from the economist J K Galbraith but I'd never heard it before: "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

SO what happens when astrology and economic forecasting overlap? If Britain pulls out of the EU, the bad news is that 2.8 million jobs will be lost. The good news is that they'll all be Librans.

LEESTEN, I will say zis only once to those of you who write and email to assure me that the European Union has given Europe 71 years of peace. If you wish to believe that the reason France and Germany no longer knock bloody chunks out of each other every half-century or so is because we have an EU Parliament in Brussels, good luck to you. I will stick with my theory that the reason we no longer have Franco-Prussian wars is that France has the atomic bomb and Germany does not. It would be a very short sort of war, wouldn't it?

I WAS touched by a letter from a reader following my recent item on blood pressure. He asks: "Have you got rid of your hypertension yet?" As I understand things, it tends to work the other way around.

A GREAT sense of calm has come over me for, all being well, by the time this appears I will be on holiday in Devon. Real holiday, that is. The sort when all you have to do is get there, flump on the big sofa in the holiday cottage you have used 20 times before and make a decision between clotted-cream and honey-gingerbread at ye olde ice-cream parlour.

LEADING up to Devon I had two enjoyable but stressful weeks, the first sailing up Loch Lomond and the second organising a sailing rally. Being a rally organiser means you get to hold a clipboard and worry about things. What if someone sinks? What if a boat falls off a trailer? What if somebody pulls the plug out of the reservoir bottom and all the water vanishes and I have to sell my wife and daughter into slavery to pay for it to be filled up again? At 3am in a small boat buffeted in a stiff gale, it's amazing what you can find to worry about. In the event, the rally went well and everybody wants to do it again next year. That's really worrying.

SLOBBY Britain. A reader stopping overnight at a hotel near London was depressed rather than surprised to find a mother and her offspring queuing among other guests at the breakfast buffet, still wearing pyjamas. Any similar sightings?

TROLLING through the vast wastes of cyberspace, I came across this description of how mere males struggle to understand what a woman really wants: "It's like trying to figure out what colour the letter seven smells like."