Peter Rhodes: All in the mind?

WE have never been so white-collar. Yet despite the fact that most Brits work in professional occupations, six out of 10 like to describe themselves as working class. This level, reported by British Social Attitudes, has not changed since 1983. The team behind the research suggest that millions of Brits are working class only in their own minds. As the post-Brexit fallout has revealed, many members of this so-called "working class of the mind" not only have nothing in common with the real working class, but despise them.

DAMNED by the F-word. I was intrigued by a radio interview with someone who knows Boris Johnson and Theresa May well. Asked to choose words to define them, she described Mrs May as "factual." Which may explain why Boris decided not to stand as Prime Minister, with all the public scrutiny that would attract. Unfactual Boris?

THREE years ago, Theresa May was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes which is lifelong and incurable. Sufferers can live an almost-normal life but only if they heed expert opinion and follow a regime of diet, exercise and injections. To cope with Type 1 diabetes you have to be disciplined, meticulous and constantly planning ahead, which seem to be excellent qualities for any politician. As a friend with the disease tells me, with a certain graveyard humour, there is no such thing as a stupid Type 1 diabetic.

ANOTHER shortlist has been announced, this time for the Wainwright award for nature writing. One of the judges, Bill Lyons calls it an "exploding" field of literature, with more and more writers turning to nature to calm their stressed-out lives. Well, that's one explanation. Another is that this country is simply overrun with wildlife. From bugs to beavers, there has never been more to write about. Britain has more trees than at any time since the Industrial Revolution, more deer than at any time since the Ice Age and an estimated 30,000 urban foxes. Look out of the window. Have you ever seen England looking so green or found so many once-rare birds coming to your garden? When nature overflows into your space, the most natural thing in the world is to feed it, photograph it and write about it.

THE hole in the earth's ozone layer is getting smaller. Deja vu, on the other hand, is growing all the time. If last week's headlines about the shrinking hole seemed familiar, it's probably because similar reports about the ozone hole getting smaller appeared in 2002, 2009, 2013, 2014 and 2015.

LAST week's item about the Church telling Tommies of the First World War that God was on their side, reminded a reader of his school days in the 1960s when he was, in his own words, a smartarse. In a religious-education class, he dared to quote from the Bob Dylan song, With God on Our Side. The verse tells us: "You'll have to decide / Whether Judas Iscariot / Had God on his side." Confronted with this, the RE teacher manhandled the lad out of the classroom and banned him from future lessons. I'm not surprised. As I recall, RE teachers had the shortest of fuses. Apart, of course, from maths teachers.

OUR changing language. A reader reports a radio discussion of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket inventor who later led the US space programme. Once in the States, Von Braun was said to have been "cosmeticised."