Peter Rhodes on skin-tone jokes, Monty's unsafe scarf and why "grooming" doesn't apply to jihadi brides

IN Monty Don's Japanese Gardens (BBC2) our hero committed the horrendous health-and-safety howler of climbing into a tree while wearing a long and flowing scarf. One slip, Monty, and you'd have given us the horticultural equivalent of Isadora Duncan's scarf and sports-car malfunction.

MY thanks from all the IT experts recalling their finest hour spent preventing the Millennium Bug from crashing the world's computers as the year 2000 dawned. But their stories only reinforce the case for regarding Brexit as a sort of Millennium Bug Mk II. The point is that the bug, like Brexit, was portrayed as some inevitable catastrophe. In fact, the bug was fixable. Just as Brexit will be fixable. And, given a chance, successful.

THE heart-wringing over Shamima Begum goes on. A reader piously condemns "people who want to blame and punish groomed children." Oh, please. Grooming means bullying and pressurising people into doing things they don't want to do. In the case of jihadi brides, they didn't appear to need much urging and Begum doesn't even seem to regret running off to join Islamic State.

IN any case, the "groomed" argument quickly becomes one of those pointless, unprovable psychobabble dilemmas with no ending. Why did she join IS? Because she was groomed. But how do we know she was groomed? Because she joined IS. And so on . . .

MY guess is that Begum's newborn baby, having some claim to British citizenship, will eventually be admitted to the UK and his mother will come too because of the "right to family life" enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. The purpose of the Convention was to save the world from the rise of more dictators, not to save silly schoolgirls from their own wickedness.

AND a word of advice to the correspondent who refers to the reaction of "puce-faced Daily Mail readers" to the Begum affair. This is the 21st century. Educated people generally agree that commenting on the colour of somebody's face is best avoided. Do try to keep up.

I'VE just bought a new (by which I mean very old) boat. As a rule, it is better if we columnists avoid anything that smacks of ostentation but when I used a picture of my ancient lugger at Christmas, a reader scoffed and sneered and said that wee thing would fit in his bath (How many readers have 16ft baths?). Anyway, the new boat is a bit longer and more seaworthy. But what strikes you immediately is how snug it is. The roof is low, the cabin on the intimate side of cosy. There is no mystery to this. It was designed in the 1970s and constructed in the era of Minis and Ford Anglias. Cars, boats and houses of that age were built for much smaller, slimmer people. The average sailor today would have been regarded 40 years ago as very useful ballast.