Peter Rhodes: Change your hairstyle, change your politics

IN the early days of automation, the joke was that it took a split-second for a computer to make a cock-up that would take a team of men months. British Airway's bank-holiday nightmare makes the point perfectly. Whoever imagined that an IT crash would have more global impact on timetables than a real crash?

DIANE Abbott says she may once have hoped for a British defeat by the IRA, but has changed her mind, just as she has changed her hairstyle. So that's all right, then. Let's hope she doesn't suddenly go for a cut and blow-dry and emerge from the salon cheerleading some other bunch of murdering psychopaths.

ABBOTT tries to distance herself from her pro-IRA days by repeating that it was 34 years ago. That makes it worse. For she was praying for the Brits to lose the struggle in Ulster at a time when the IRA were committing atrocities on the British mainland such as the Hyde Park bombings (11 soldiers and seven horses killed) and the Harrods bombing (three police and three civilians killed, 90 injured). Her views back then were shared by only a tiny, rabid number of extremists. The passing of time is utterly irrelevant and her favourite phrase “moving on” does not wash.

A READER shares my view on the unfair funding of Alzheimer's treatment, with some patients subsidised by the state and others driven into penury by care-home fees. He suggests we learn a lesson from old lags. If you seem to be developing dementia, commit a serious crime. That way, you get 24/7 care in a warm, dry, comfortable prison with three meals a day, constant medical attention and no worries about security. And it doesn't cost you a penny.

I WAS surprised to hear Lucy Worsley pronounce “schedule” as “skedule” in Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors (BBC2). Even our national treasures are going Yank.

AUF wiedersehen, pets. We have just bade a fond farewell to our German friends, over here for a few days for the first time in five years. It was a great reunion, as though we had last met only a few minutes ago. Nothing seemed to have changed, apart from the arrival of their son, now 22 months. Turns out entertaining a German Terrible Two is much the same as an English Terrible Two. Fill a small watering can mit Wasser and watch them find endless amusement in watering the plants, the lawn, the grown-ups, the cat and anything else. Mehr is a most useful German word. It means more, as in “mehr Wasser,” “mehr Trampolin” and “mehr Katze.” If anything makes a two-year-old shriek with laughter, you know he'll want mehr.

I RECKLESSLY put my old festival tent on the lawn as a play house. Beware of any tent which comes with one instruction for putting it up (it leaps out of its pack and self-erects) but eight instructions for packing it away again. Folding up a spring-loaded festival tent is like trying to get ketchup back in the tube, except that you can't do it in private. Mehr Englander wrestling mit tent. Wunderbar.