Spouses are good for you

Beer, Devon.

MY holiday reading down here in Devon is J D Salinger's globally best-selling teenage odyssey, The Catcher in the Rye. Or at least it was supposed to be. I actually bought a second-hand copy last Tuesday and had finished it by Thursday. It's that sort of book. I had been meaning to read it for at least 40 years. Turns out to be a bleak, if occasionally funny, reminder of how thoroughly awful, painful and self-deceptive your teenage years can be.

IT reminded me of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale in which the Shepherd, despairing of young men, suggests it would be better if youths slept away the years from 16 to 23, “for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” And as Salinger might have added, going mad.

ZO, m'dearz. Did any of ye happen to notice Poldark's unpredictable scar? As I pointed out when the BBC bodice-ripper first screened, it cannot be easy for make-up artists to ensure Poldark's scar is in exactly the same place, week after week. A reader claims: “The front cover of Radio Times shows a long scar almost level with the corner of his mouth. But another photo of him (page 7) shows a shorter scar that curves slightly towards his earlobe.” Forget Springwatch, we need Scarwatch.

AFTER that item, I cannot think of Poldark withour hearing Lee Marvin singing in that basso-profundo voice in Paint Your Wagon: “I was born with a wand'rin' scar.”

SOME atheists regard religion as “the noble myth.” In other words, it may be based on a great untruth but, in making people behave in a good way, it serves a noble purpose. Man-made climate change may or may not be the cataclysmic threat we are warned of but it's a bit like a religion. Yea, brothers and sisters, we have sinned and polluted our planet. If we do nothing we will perish horribly. But if we repent and mend our ways, the New Jerusalem will be ours. The bibles of the new religion are the great international climate-change treaties; the cathedrals are those mighty white crosses of the wind turbines. Whether the climate-change catastrophe is gospel or not, we should all celebrate the news that, for the first time, renewable energy provided more than half the UK's electricity one day last week. For whatever you believe, it is surely better to create power from sunlight and wind than by sending men underground to dig coal, or by burning oil that took millions of years to make. Believers, sceptics and deniers alike should look at the progress of renewable energy across Britain and utter a little hallelujah.

NEW research suggests that being married is good for your health, possibly because a loving partner encourages you to eat and drink wisely. In my experience they also encourage you not to dismantle the lawnmower while it's plugged in or fix the roof while wearing roller skates.

LAST words on the election. A reader tells me his local councillor, invoking the spirit of 1939-45 to persuade people to vote, declared on his website: “Let their lives not be lost in vein!”