Peter Rhodes: The other Blackpool

OUR changing language, as used by weather forecasters. I've just been drenched to the skin by some spits and spots.

THERE are two Blackpools. The first, proclaimed by generations of PR people, is the one featured on Strictly Come Dancing (BBC1). It's a friendly, glamorous family resort, all spangles, sequins and feathers. The second Blackpool, as revealed in endlessly depressing official statistics, is the one I seem to remember, admittedly from some years ago. It was a place stinking of chips and vomit, stalked by drunken stag and hen parties. The BBC piled on the fun so thickly for Strictly that you might almost believe the less desirable Blackpool, the one of deprivation and unemployment, doesn't exist. And then one of the show's professional dancers, Gorka Marquez, was beaten up in the street by a gang of thugs. Welcome to the other Blackpool.

AS I remarked recently, on Screaming Lord Sutch's plan to tow Britain 500 miles south to improve the climate, the simplest ideas are often the best. You may have caught the former pensions minister Baroness Altmann this week stressing the need to save money for our social care. She says families need to have a fund. Or as she put it: "Let's say a few tens of thousands of pounds." See? What could be simpler? Just open up your East wing for tourists, sell off a couple of polo ponies, stuff £100,000 or so in the bank and all is solved. Such a simple solution, baroness. And so very baronial.

THE critic and writer A A Gill has revealed he has cancer. He says he will not fight it but he's up against one of the most entrenched cliches of journalism. According to the world's media, people always fight cancer. Sometimes they beat cancer. Sometimes they lose a battle with cancer. We treat cancer quite unlike other diseases. When did you last hear of anyone fighting dementia, diabetes or heart failure? Yet we kid ourselves if you only summon the blood and stiffen the sinews, you can fight and defeat the Big C, as though it were a dragon. Truth is, once you've got cancer you will either live or die. But that depends on the type of cancer, how soon it is caught and how skilled your doctors are. If you could fight it merely with courage, humour and positive mental attitude, my father would still be alive.

IT may have been madness for the relatives of a 14-year-old cancer victim to pay £37,000 for her body to be frozen in the hope of a cure 200 years from now. But are they any madder than those know-alls who assure us, as a scientific certainty, that cryogenics will never work? Just think of all the things that ordinary folk in 1816 would have thought impossible 200 years in the future. Just because we can't see how something might work doesn't mean that it may never work. For all we know, in the year 2216 long-frozen bodies may be brought back to life as a matter of course. I don't know how it could happen but then I probably couldn't explain an iPhone to Napoleon either. The future, almost by definition, is the place where the impossible happens.