PETER RHODES: Just bung me a tenner

ANOTHER of your suggestions for a term to describe those days when it's colder in the house than it is outside. A reader suggests it's a baked Alaska day.

WITH only a couple of weeks to go to the EU referendum, I met an old friend, a professional economist. We disagreed on just about everything, save this: if Britain votes to leave the EU, we will not leave. Ten or 20 years down the road, the powers-that-be will still be ducking and diving and telling us what a long and complex business it is.

IF you have a spare half-hour and you like your comedy clever, crudish and engagingly silly, catch up with The World of Simon Rich on Radio 4. His description of life, as seen by a certain product bought in hope and kept for some years in a teenager's wallet, is wonderfully inventive. The product is never identified but assumes it is some sort of balloon. The moment of realisation and the horror of what may happen is followed by the product reaching its sell-by date, surviving it and living happily ever after. Pure joy.

THE Alchemist, Ben Jonson's 1610 yarn of con merchants fleecing the unwary in London, is the latest RSC offering at Stratford and one of the funniest things I've seen on stage for a while. But while the audience erupted in gales of laughter as a dodgy trio promised to turn bad luck into good and pewter into gold, I couldn't help wondering how many of us clever, sophisticated 21st century folk have fallen for dodgy lotteries, bogus-charity scams and those online crooks from "Windows technical support." The technology may evolve but charlatans and suckers never change.

WRITING more than 400 years ago, Jonson would probably never have dreamed of an England where the Church had lost all its power. Future-guessing is never easy. I wrote a few days ago about the double-decker trains of the 1950s whose passengers complained of being "kippered" by smokers below. The simple solution is to ban smoking but no-one would have contemplated such a thing back then. In the same way, back in the 1930s some scientists maintained that radio satellites would never happen because they would be too massive for any rocket to take into space. Why so big? In order to carry all the scientists who would have to change the radio valves.

MOVING seamlessly on, an old soldier tells me he recently visited the Royal Signals museum in Dorset and gave them some photos and other items from his time with the corps. I was reminded of a visit in the 1980s when the museum boasted a fine old 1950s Marconi valve radio, or "wireless," as the maker's plate declared. On closer inspection, this museum piece was the same model my TA signal troop was still trying to coax into life every weekend.

AND on the subject of cons, here's a new scam just arrived by email: "Dear user. We notice an unrecognized Sign-in from an unknown location in Syria (was this you). If not, kindly confirm." Just bin it.