Peter Rhodes: Make me a Peaky Blinder

OUR changing language. A clothes brochure arrives promising: "Gear and apparel to outfit you every step of the way." Little by little, verb by verb, the Americans are steadily outfitting our language with their strange words.

LATEST news from Rio. Yet another person you've never heard of, competing in a sport you do not understand, has won a medal which, in the next few years, may be taken off them and given to somebody else you've never heard of.

AND off to the hairdresser's where the lad in the next seat is telling the barber how to turn him into a Peaky Blinder. Razor-cut up the neck, clippers up the back of the head and a mop of unkempt hair to top it off. It is a shame no-one has told him that he's never going to look like a Peaky Blinder because he hasn't got a face like Cillian Murphy. Sure enough, the lad emerges from the barber's looking nothing like a 1930s Birmingham gangster but resembling a roughly-uprooted carrot plant. There are a lot of them about.

WHY so many daft haircuts? PresumablY so that when the kids report for school next month they can fulfil that ancient English tradition of being sent home again. You can feel it in the air like the gathering chill of autumn. Stupid kids with stupid haircuts and stupid parents bleating about their human rights. Another school year approaches and with it the old, old question. Who'd be a teacher?.

MEANWHILE, the conversation in the barber's turned to horses, Olympic dressage and suchlike, and what powerful beasts they are. Damn right. I will never forget our encounter with a Clydesdale horse and her foal some time ago on holiday in Yorkshire. In the next paddock was a noisy, irritating little Shetland pony which, as it approached the dividing fence, was clearly making the big horse uneasy. Eventually, she leaned over the fence, seized the Shetland pony's neck in her teeth, lifted it bodily off the ground, shook it like a rat and dropped it. Neither animal seemed any the worse for the experience but we humans hid in the house for a while. In my book, anyone who even gets on a horse deserves a medal. Or counselling.

SMALL world. Just a few weeks ago, commenting on The Musketeers (BBC1), I described that old movie cliché, the clinking-bullet gambit. This is the one which ensures anyone will survive the gravest wound, if the bullet can be dug out and dropped on to a tin plate to make a satisfying "clink!" There was a particularly clinky example this week on the Russell Crowe movie, 3.10 To Yuma (Film 4), a remake of the 1957 Glenn Ford classic. Not only was the bullet dug out of the bounty hunter and dropped with the mandatory "clink!" but the camera panned back to reveal a surgery hung with pictures of farm animals. The "doctor" turned out to be a vet. Nice touch.

THE independent inquiry into child abuse now has its fourth chairwoman, Alexis Jay. It has yet to hear a single word of evidence and could last for up to 12 years. I cannot help wondering how long the late, great News of the World would have taken to interview the witnesses and name and shame the guilty. Six months max?