Peter Rhodes: Farewell, slamming

OUR changing language. According to one TV report this week, thousands of air passengers were impacted by a computer outage.

MEANWHILE, back at the kitchen DIY shop, a cherished and time-honoured tradition is no more. The endless quest for progress has given us special friction hinges and little pneumatic dampening pistons which prevent doors and drawers on kitchen units from being slammed. The harder you try, the better they work. Without a word of consultation, "slam!" has been replaced with a gentle sigh. Dear me, I fear for the future of marriage itself. Generations of couples have grown up understanding that the slamming of a kitchen drawer is that vital safety valve in the arms race of domestic disputes. It fills the gap, giving pause for thought between stage one (raised voices) and stage three (chucking plates). By removing stage two, the inventors have made our kitchens a more dangerous place.

THERE is another unintended consequence. If you inadvertently slam your friend's un-dampened kitchen cupboard, you are, in effect, telling them that their kitchen is older, and far less sophisticated, than yours.

THE phone rings. It is a lady claiming to be a "local energy advisor," telling me that my house is fairly energy-efficient but she understands we have fibre glass in the loft, and is this the case? So I tell her that her boss is an idiot. He (or she) believes it is a great sales pitch to phone people at random and pretend to have inside knowledge about their home. It is no such thing. It is untruthful and intrusive and why would I dream of doing business with a company like that? I ask the "local energy advisor" to pass this message to her boss and she says she will, using the tone of voice that suggests I am an imbecile. I hear it a lot these days.

A SAD little job. I have just written the obituary for the chief reporter in the district office where I worked all those years ago. Tom died last week at 81 which is a good age for a journalist but a rotten age for getting a decent obituary. His colleagues have passed on, either geographically or spiritually, and hardly anyone on his old newspaper even remembers him. All the old anecdotes and tributes are beyond reach. And yet for 30 years Tom was a local legend in Leamington Spa, dedicated to spending as much time out of the office as possible and avoiding the news editor's phone calls at all costs. He retired 20 years ago and was thus spared the tyranny of Twitter, iPhones and all that stuff. He got his exclusives not off the internet but from a quiet chat with his moles at the council or among the movers and shakers at the Regent Hotel bar. He produced great stories from nowhere and ran the office with a cheerful efficiency. We worked together for nine years and I never heard him utter a cross word, which is a rare epitaph in newspapers and a memory to cherish. Tom Swain 1934-2016.

WE have been invited by some nature-loving friends to go on an evening moth walk this weekend to see how many species of the little fellers we can find. I asked whether we should bring one fly swat or two. No sense of humour, some people.