Peter Rhodes on helping Wonga's customers, cars with green number plates and cars without spare wheels

VOLKSWAGEN says it will make no more Beetles. A reader asks: "Is this Herbiecide or insecticide?"

TALKING of cars, we have just bought a new one. Which I should explain, for those of you who get annoyed at any hint of gracious living on my part, is actually quite an old car. Even so, it is part of that 21st century generation of vehicles which have a gaping cavern under the boot. This, in ye olden days, is where the spare wheel went. Now, if you're lucky you get an emergency space-saver "skinny" wheel or, in our case, not even a skinny but an aerosol of sealant and a little electric pump to re-inflate your punctured tyre. Thankfully, there is a thriving online trade in proper spare wheels with proper tyres. So we bought one. I have also removed the sat-nav and disconnected the gizmo that switches the engine off and on at the traffic lights. Nothing improves a 21st century car quite like a dash of the 20th century.

THE car came with a sheaf of receipts illustrating what happens to people who insist on getting their cars serviced at the main dealers. It was almost too painful to read the previous owner's regular fleecings. For a "minor service" which was basically no more than an oil change for a tiny one-litre car, the bill was £142.

WHICH reminds me of a friend who was quoted £140 last week for a main-dealer oil change. His local garage did it for £49.

THE idea for the Church of England to buy Wonga's debt book came not from a political party but from an individual MP. It was Frank Field who floated the plan to save Wonga's ex-customers from falling into the hands of loan sharks. Political organisations talk grandly about helping "the people" or sometimes "our people," as if they own them. Frank Field is a good man. He has always set out to help neither "the people" nor "our people" but just people.

POLICE are investigating whether some messages posted online by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn constitute antisemitism. Will this scandal never go away? In an idle moment a few days ago, I searched Google for the phrase "Jeremy Corbyn has apologised" and got 9,500 results.

"THIS is all due to Brexit." Contributor to the HeraldScotland website, commenting on forecasts that storms from the United States will batter Scotland.

THE Government's grandly styled Behavioural Insights Team, better known as the "nudge unit," says drivers of low-emission cars should have special green number plates to show off their environment-saving credentials. From my own behavioural insight into the human species, I suspect if green cars are marked out as morally superior, cars without green plates will get kicked and scratched by the lunatic fringe of environment zealots.

AN unhappy customer complains about a computer on the John Lewis review website: "Two slow. low buget, model took it back next day got a reefund never bye again." Try one with a spell-check, perhaps?