Peter Rhodes: It's Article 50 Day

TODAY is Article 50 day when the Mother of Parliaments begins the long-awaited process of getting us out of the European Union, a day so momentous that 100 years from now children will turn to their parents and ask: “So tell us again, what was all the fuss about?”

AND while it is grand to hear Jeremy Corbyn and other dithering politicians promising the most rigorous democratic scrutiny of the process as we are dragged out of the EU, does anybody recall much interest in scrutiny of any sort as we were being dragged in? Me neither.

THANKS for all your tips on training cats to use cat flaps, which range from the wildly inventive to the frankly sadistic. Since I wrote that item, our old tabby has finally ventured through the flap, thanks to some extravagant temptation involving sardines. I am reminded that some years ago we had another cat, a dim, foul-tempered, long-haired Persian whose previous owners, a delicate couple, said she was far, far too sensitive to learn how to use a cat flap. I trained her by shouting “boo!” I never saw a cat learn anything so quickly.

SINCE writing the above, I can report that our cat has mastered the technical aspects of the cat flap but not, alas, the etiquette. He has developed a strange routine of spending hours outside and then entering the house by the cat flap, having a pee in the cat litter and exiting again. This is not exactly what we had in mind.

A TIME traveller from 150 years ago might be horrified by the clothes we wear or the food we eat but he would be utterly bewildered by the sheer, incomprehensible wealth of us 21st century Brits. I have a friend who lives in a 150-year-old Victorian house. The kerb outside his front door has a foot-wide slope down to the road outside. It was provided by the builders of the 1860s for the working man to wheel his bicycle into the hall at night. The very idea that the working-classes would have carriages, let along horseless carriages – and that some families would possess two or three of these vehicles, would be outrageous. Yet today we have once-modest streets with 100 homes and 150 cars and a do-or-die scrabble every evening for parking places. Some folk have been known to red-cone “their” parking places and defend them with baseball bats. Now the Local Government Association is asking for greater powers to stop motorists parking on pavements, a practice which allegedly puts the lives of pedestrians, including blind people and mums with prams, at risk. But if pavement parking is banned, where are the tens of thousands of pavement-parked cars supposed to go? Rivers of blood, mark my words. .

A CONFERENCE of urologists in London heard from Japanese researchers that excess salt in the diet could be responsible for night-time trips to the loo. The boffins reported that volunteers who reduced their salt intake reduced the frequency from 2.3 trips to 1.4 trips per night. This poses an obvious question: what exactly is 0.4 of a trip to the loo?