Peter Rhodes: The next candidate?

HOW money works. The Bank of England cuts its base rate to 0.25 per cent. The interest charged on a payday loan is still more than 1,200 per cent. And the poor get poorer.

TALKING of dosh, I referred last week to the Swiss plan, defeated in a recent referendum, to give every citizen about £1,700 a month, whether they are employed or not. The day after my item appeared, 35 economists wrote to the Guardian suggesting Britain's economy could be stimulated by "direct cash transfers to households, resulting in an immediate increase of household disposable incomes." Apparently such a scheme has never been tried but is regularly debated by academics who call it "helicopter money."

SO Farewell, Dame Lowell Goddard, the New Zealand judge who, being untainted by any contact with the British Establishment, was reckoned to be the ideal new broom to become the third leader of the independent inquiry into child sex abuse. She has suddenly quit, apparently because she misses her family. So who'll be the fourth person to lead this fated project which seems to get kicked further into the long grass with every passing year? The ideal candidate, bearing in mind the inquiry is expected to last 10 years, will be a frail old judge aged at least 97, a lawyer who is later found to possess a Jim'll Fix It badge, or anyone serving on the International Space Station.

TWEET of the Day (Radio 4) featured the cry of the skua, and instantly took me back to a memorable trip to Scotland. We had been fishing off Dunnet Head, the most northern tip of Great Britain and were bouncing back to Scrabster in a tiny boat when the skipper nodded toward the horizon and suddenly said: "Give the birdie a fish." So I took a small whiting from the bucket on the deck and held it high as the approaching bird got bigger. By the time it arrived at the boat the great skua seemed the size of my back door. It flew past, gently taking the fish from my hand in its massive beak. The skua is a bit of a pirate, usually described as aggressive and bloodthirsty, but my encounter was like feeding an angel. A rare privilege.

NO sooner had police blamed last week's London stabbings on mental illness than Time to Change, a campaign to stamp out the stigma surrounding mental health, chimed in. Their message was that the media must report the incident in an "informed and balanced" way that did not stigmatise the mentally ill. It's a noble aim but there are very good reasons why mental illness gets a bad press. The range of conditions can be puzzling, alarming, frightening and occasionally dangerous, which is why mental illness has been treated as a taboo throughout human history. The scariest part is that, for all their experience and qualifications, the experts fail, time after time, to work out which patient is safe to release and which one will head straight for the nearest knife shop.

THE cops insist the Russell Square atrocity was not terrorism. Some of us prefer to apply the duck test: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.