Whom can you trust? Peter Rhodes on reliable professions, online scams and learning to live with bed bugs

THANKS to all of you who pointed out that the phrase 'my helicoper is full of eels', which appeared in this column some days ago, is a thinly-veiled copy of 'my hovercraft is full of eels', from an old Monty Python sketch about a Hungarian phrase book. It only needs adding that 'You have plagiarised a Monty Python sketch' in Hungarian is 'plágiáltál egy monty python vázlatot'. Now, about this dead parrot . . .

HERE we go again. Along comes yet another opinion poll on which professions are most trusted by the general public. It puts journalists almost at the bottom of the pile. The absolute bottom place, as always, is reserved for politicians. But why do we hacks fare so badly in the hearts and minds of Joe Public? You may find the answer by carefully examining the responses to this Ipsos/Mori poll. While journalists are trusted by only 27 per cent of the public, TV news readers score 67 per cent. This is bizarre, given that TV news readers are no more than journalists reading stuff written by other journalists. To thicken the plot, only 50 per cent of people responding to this poll actually trust pollsters. It is as some of us hacks have long thought. The general public are simply not bright enough. They do not deserve us.

UNSURPRISINGLY, the most trusted of professions in the poll, with 94 per cent of the vote, is nursing. If you wish to believe this, fine. But if you ask the question: "Am I going to die?" I bet you get a straighter answer from a hack than from a nurse.

MY pre-Xmas emails included news of two scams. The first was from an old friend warning us that, for the second time, his personal details had been stolen and used by someone claiming to be him, injured and stranded abroad, and in desperate need of money. The second was from a small chandlery, 'devastated' that their customer's names, addresses and phone numbers have been filched and are being used in a bogus online scam involving 'bargain' angling equipment. If all the computer knowledge, expertise and energy invested by crooks were used for the benefit of mankind, what a wonderful world this would be. In the meantime, can't we have scammers publicly flogged?

A SCOTTISH academic, Dr Heather Lynch, claims that some folk in Glasgow have given up trying to get rid of bed bugs and are living 'side by side' with the insects. If it's any help, a former resident of a back-to-back in Birmingham once told me their bed-bug remedy was to light the fire in the affected room, piling coal on to the grate to make the room as hot as possible. Eventually, in order to escape the heat, the bed bugs would tunnel through the plaster walls into the house next door. Don't knock it until you've tried it.

I REFERRED recently to Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. That's exactly how they present their name. They may have both cats and dogs but they don't have any apostrophes.