Peter Rhodes: Unfair to wolves

MOBILE etiquette. At a party, the host encouraged his guests to mingle and introduce themselves to each other. A reader reports that while most complied by smiling, hand-shaking and chatting, one woman switched her smartphone to movie mode and, holding it in front of her, videoed everyone she met. Nobody knows where that footage may end up and it just seems rude. So what do you do? Turn away? Make a scene? Or are my reader and I just a pair of technophobe fogeys – technofogeys, if you prefer.

TECHNOFOGEY. I'd like to think I invented the word. Sadly, Google has 6,000 references to it. Some days it seems the chief purpose of the internet is to prove there's nothing new.

A READER wants a ban on the term “lone wolf” to describe a solo terrorist. He says the wolf is a noble creature and the word glorifies the terrorist while denigrating the wolf. Wanted: a new term. Lone rat? Lone weasel? Lone git?

ONE irritant we cannot control is what new owners do to our much-loved old houses. In Scotland I made a sentimental journey to our old holiday home on the shores of Loch Long. My father built it in his successful days as a builder and was forced to sell it five years later when the money ran out. Almost half the bungalow is glass and we enjoyed vast, wide views across the loch to the mountains beyond. The current owners have barricaded themselves behind 30 years' growth of gloomy, impenetrable conifers. The house cannot be seen from the loch, nor the loch from the house. Bizarre.

ON the foreshore, 40 years slipped away. I could almost see the Old Man steaming with frustration in a Scotch mist as we waded chest-deep in the sea loch to recover his wretched, broken-down boat and haul it on to its trailer. He then attempted to drag the trailer up the shingle beach using his powerful American coupe and 40 yards of rope. The 5.9 litre engine screamed, the wheels spun, pebbles flew like shrapnel and the rope, mercifully, snapped. The next day a local bloke with an old Land Rover did the job in five minutes. As any engineer will tell you, power is not the same as torque.

WHILE all the political parties are sparring over the winter-fuel payment, no-one has mentioned the utterly pointless Christmas Bonus which dates back to 1972. Paid every year to pensioners and others on long-term benefit, it is a measly £10. Scrapping it would free up millions of pounds and I doubt if a single recipient would even notice. So why is the Christmas Bonus still with us? Simple. No politician wants to be called Scrooge.

INCIDENTALLY, before the fuel-payment row erupted, the least popular policy among Tory party members was HS2. Behold, naked self-interest. Threatening to take money off wealthy pensioners trumps a white-elephant railway any day.

NEWS reaches me of a woman who had an upsetting diagnosis and her wonderful husband who arranged a day trip to one of Birmingham's favourite attractions to cheer her up. The diagnosis: type two diabetes. The day out: Cadbury World.