Warning over the perils of going online

THANKS for your emails about my cat who was floppy and flumpy after his annual cat-flu jab. He is fully recovered which means he has killed a ping-pong ball, torn another tassel off a cushion and disembowelled the latest Private Eye. Cats, like children, are at their best when they are just the tiniest bit poorly.

A LOST album recorded by Johnny Cash is to be released in March. You will not have heard the tracks but you can be fairly sure they will include the following: jail, railroads, whisky, dusty roads, Chevys, Cadillacs, the Bible, handguns and at least one person getting shot (or possibly hanged) in either Memphis or Reno. You can bet that nobody in a Johnny Cash song drinks shandy, drives a Volvo or dies during liposuction in Boston.

WHY the sudden furore from Macmillan Cancer Support about the elderly being regarded as "too old to treat" for cancer? More than 20 years ago my father, in his sixties, was diagnosed with bladder cancer and was told he "only just qualified" for an operation. If he had been 18 months older, it would not have been offered. The NHS has always rationed treatment and, unless it has a limitless budget, always will. And if the choice is between treating an 80-year-old or saving a child, does anyone doubt where the money should go?

A LETTER arrives – a proper, old-fashioned handwritten one with a stamp on - from a woman with a challenge. She and her husband are low-paid workers with no children and are among the 17 per cent of UK households not connected to the internet. She asks whether getting a computer and going online would save her money. A couple of years ago I would have unhesitatingly advised her to enter the online community where bargains abound and your loved ones are only a webcam away. I would have told her that, simply by shopping online for car and household insurance, she'd recover the cost of the computer in a couple of years. Now, I'm not so sure. Hardly a day goes by without one or two scam emails arriving on my computer. Open the wrong attachment and your personal files can be swiped or your passwords stolen. The internet is becoming a happy hunting ground for crooks. By chance, on the day this letter arrived, an extremely computer-savvy friend of mine had to pay to have his computer cleared of a virus, a bill which probably wiped out any recent savings he has made on internet bargains. If you're happy without the internet, stay happy.

IF JUSTIN Bieber was wearing handcuffs, how did he get his hair looking that good?

EVERY time this column suggests scrapping the TV licence, I get emails from angry people denouncing "commercialism." Leesten, I will say zis only once. I don't want a BBC based on subscription or advertising. If the BBC really needs £4 billion a year of public money, so be it. But for pity's sake take it out of central taxation, not from licence fees. That way, the rich would pay more, the poor would pay less and 180,000 people per year would not be dragged before the courts for non-payment of what is a stupid, outdated and perfectly wicked form of poll tax.

I AM not always proud of this profession of mine. What sort of press photographer sweeps his camera along the kerb to catch Joan Collins struggling with a short skirt as she clambers inelegantly out of a car? Collins is 80, for heaven's sake. The up-skirt snaps from Beverly Hills a few days ago are not news but a form of elder abuse.

OWN up. Before Winterwatch (BBC2) how many of us knew the correct name for a group of Britain's best-loved insect? It is a loveliness of ladybirds.