Peter Rhodes: A gift to ivory poachers

THE imperial / metric jumble continues. A reader reports the following conversation at the fish market. Reader: "Can I have a piece of smoked haddock please, about 12 ounces?" Fishmonger: "Couple of grammes over, sir" Reader: "How much is that?" Puzzled silence . . .

I WAS doing my public-speaking thing the other night and found, on the handbill for the event, I was described a "veteran journalist." Hell's teeth. Where have the years gone? Ten minutes ago, it seems, I was a cub reporter. Next, I was the bright young thing in morning conference. I became a stalwart of the features desk and a globe-trotting correspondent. And suddenly I'm a veteran, like an old Hillman, to be buffed up and wheeled out on special occasions. I have seen the next age many times and it is grim. It is "grand old man of journalism" and beyond that, occasional visits to the office where young sprogs look up and say: "Didn't he used to work here?"

BUT it need not be so. If we are moving into an era where we are allowed to "self-identify" our gender, why not our age, too? Shackling anyone to the unremitting tyranny of years and decades is a monstrous infringement of their right of expression, civil liberties, human rights and all that stuff. From today I am 37. You may call me Brenda.

THE Caesarean delivery of a dead calf in Countryfile (BBC1) was strong stuff. Yet without showing such harrowing scenes, how are townies to understand what farming is all about and where their food comes from? Our questions are answered, which is the purpose of journalism. As we wince, we learn.

COMPARE and contrast Countryfile with The Supervet (C4). Time after time, Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick performs amazingly intricate surgery. He makes lame dogs walk and brings half-dead cats back to life. And yet week after week, as the Supervet becomes a superstar reaping massive amounts of publicity, the same question goes unasked and unanswered. How much does it cost, doc?

NOT everyone is thrilled at the prospect, unveiled last week, of scientists recreating long-extinct woolly mammoths. "Who is paying for the pointless research?" growls one reader who says there is nowhere to put a new species of elephant, given the hard time that existing species are having from poachers. He has a point. How long before the first woolly mammoth would be found, shot to death and stripped of its mighty tusks?

MIXED-metaphor department. I suggested last week that lawyers may already be preparing compensation claims for all those mammoths we humans wiped out in prehistoric times. At the same time, some councils are busy planning to impose whopping new parking charges on polluting diesel vehicles. Thus, the first newly-created woolly mammoth could become a Trojan horse at about the same time that diesel cars become cash cows. Confusing, isn't it?

IN response to my item on the ultimate sandwich, a reader waxes lyrical about a fried egg, sandwiched between two slices of fried bread and then served between two slices of fresh bread. "Totally delicious," he enthuses. I wonder if he's writing from hospital.