Peter Rhodes: A particularly nasty nabbott

A DRIVER displaying a P plate pulled up at the red traffic light outside our local corner shop. Leaving the engine running and an elderly passenger in the car, he ran into the shop, bought a newspaper, ran back to the car and drove off. The P plate stands for "probationary" driver, one who has recently passed the driving test. I bet we can all think of other words beginning with P.

NEW terms for out time: The nabbott. A nabbott is a sudden and mysterious disease which immediately disqualifies the victim from important business, such as voting in the Commons. The defining characteristic of the nabbott is that not everyone believes it is real. As in: "He's just throwing a nabbott."

HOWEVER, if Diane Abbott was genuinely struck down by a migraine just before the Brexit White Paper vote, she deserves our sympathy. Nobody ever gets just one migraine. They strike time after time. In my case it was once every six months. They came, throbbed for exactly six-and-a-half hours (so regular that you could set your clock by them) and then vanished, leaving me weak and wobbly but strangely cleansed. I suffered years of migraines; they suddenly stopped when I was put on blood-pressure tablets.

STILL no definitive explanation of the Brummie expression for a weeping person "blarting like Friday." A lady reader suggests it comes from Friday being pay day, with distraught housewives in tears over their husband spending his wages in the pub. "It's a woman thing," she says.

YOU know an online petition is failing when the round-robins begin. An email arrives signed "Caroline," with a link to the petition against a state visit for President Trump "which if you and your family, children and grandchildren would like to sign would help demonstrate to the world our qualms about the future of our children's world, in Trump's power." I find it vaguely unpleasant when parents rope their kids into their own political posturing. It's moral blackmail: sign the petition or the kids get it. If I was tempted to sign before, this email turned me right off.

I OBSERVED a few days ago that the "prevent Trump" petition was most popular in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow and Edinburgh. A reader responds: "You can see the correlation between intelligence and Remain voters." Well, I suppose you could make that connection. On the other hand, these are all cities with large rivers, so you could just as easily suggest it's something in the water. But even if city dwellers are more intelligent than straw-sucking yokels, does that make their view any more relevant? A university lecturer in London has his set of life experiences. A plumber in Norfolk has his. They are very different but both are valid. Democracy is about votes for all, not merely for the dons and doctors.

THE Government says singletons and couples occupying big houses will be "given incentives" to move into smaller properties. A reader asks: "Will the same criteria apply to the stately piles of England: Buckingham Palace,Windsor Castle and Clarence House?"

ANY more questions like that, my lad, and you'll find yourself in a very large dwelling. The Tower.