The bongs fall silent

PANORAMA (BBC1) revealed this week that the number of arrests for drunkenness on UK flights or at British airports has soared by 50 per cent in a single year. Although I've had the occasional tipple at 30,000 feet, I have never entirely understood why airports have bars, why drunks are allowed to board planes and why airline staff, who have to deal with the consequences, are expected to sell booze. It wouldn't happen on the Number 47 bus so why does it happen on an Airbus?

THE unspeakable idiocy of silencing Big Ben for four years and spending £29 million repairing the clock and tower is beginning to dawn. Yet it's not a new story. When it was announced in October 2015 that the mechanism was to be repaired using Victorian technology I wrote: "What madness is this? Are we seriously expected to believe the only way to preserve Big Ben's clock is by rebuilding it as it was constructed in 1853?" I suggested a digital clock-face display and sound system would cost a fraction of the official estimate and produce a better and more reliable bong. Yet we critics were ignored and the four-year project is going ahead with the bells silenced to protect workers' ears. Can you seriously imagine any private company with a Victorian clock tower accepting either a four-year silence or a £29 million bill? Of course not. This carry-on could happen only in the public sector with politicians grandly signing enormous cheques and poor Joe Public paying.

WHY have the cops not managed to catch the jogger who infamously knocked a woman pedestrian almost into the path of a bus in London three months ago? Probably because in police terms it wasn't much of an incident: pedestrian knocked over, only slight bruises. It is only when the CCTV footage is publicised that the judgement and emotions of the Great British Public take over from the police assessment and it becomes the crime of the century. The video horrifies ordinary people. The man is a brute, the woman is defenceless and did you see how close she came to that bus? A man wrongly arrested for the incident (he was in America at the time) has received death threats, so God knows what the mob will do when the real offender is nicked.

I CAME across a website this week identifying which of today's second-hand cars will become "a future classic."The snag, as all motorists know from bitter experience, is the ruinous cost of keeping a banger long enough for it to become a collector's item. Future classic = present money-pit.

I WRITE from family experience. In 1971 my father parted with a troublesome Aston Martin for £1,400 and was glad to get that much. A similar model was auctioned last month for £495,000.

AFTER this week's item on the late Glen Campbell, a reader tells me of a friend who thought the Wichita Lineman was a song about a football match.

INEVITABLY, I have to ask how many other pop songs could relate to football? Over to you.