Peter Rhodes: "NHS waiting lists full with people bombarded by healthy-living advice but prefer to ignore it"

QUIRKY phrases department. It was reported this week that coastal areas "bore the brunt" of Storm Eleanor. Interesting word, brunt. Nobody really knows where the word comes from and we hardly ever use it except when something or someone is bearing it. Brunt. The more you say it, the weirder it sounds.

ABOUT 1,400 cars were destroyed in the spectacular car-park fire in Liverpool. I wonder how many insurance claims will be made.

THE wonder is that such fires are so rare. If you take the gloomy view, a multi-storey car park is basically a pile of petrol bombs parked closely to each other with its sides open to the wind and with ramps helpfully providing a route for an inferno to grow and spread. It sometimes occurs to me that if the internal-combustion engine were invented today, it would never get past the health-and-safety people. So, Mr Inventor, in order to refuel these so-called cars of yours, you will need 100,000-gallon petrol tanks buried in the centre of all our towns and cities, and you will park these cars in thousands of high-rise crematoria? Not a chance.

IT is hard to rejoice at the 70th anniversary of the NHS this year when we have spent the past seven decades moaning that it has never been as good as it used to be. We get all wistful about some legendary golden age, usually involving tightly folded bedsheets, carbolic and Hattie Jacques. The big difference between 1948 and 2018 is the nature of patients and their illnesses. Seventy years ago the sick were, by and large, ill as a result of things done to them by the establishment.They were the wounded and shell-shocked of two world wars, the victims of damp slums, dangerous factories, dusty coal mines and malnutrition. They were the hapless customers who believed the all-pervading propaganda that smoking was not only fashionable but good for you. Today, NHS waiting lists are stuffed with people who are bombarded with healthy-living advice but prefer to ignore it and are ill as a result of lifestyle choices. And while it may be wrong to ration or refuse NHS treatment to those who have screwed up their own health, you can't help thinking what the hungry, bronchitic, war-wounded patients of 1948 would make of the obese, hungover patients of today. They might well ask: "What are you doing in the queue?"

ONE of the enduring mysteries of the internet age is that people who are already online will email or text about an issue without first making an elementary check on Google. For those who harangued me on the subject, there is nothing blasphemous, lazy or ungrammatical about the term Xmas.

OH, dear. Donald Trump has got into an "I've got a bigger nuclear button than you" contest with Kim Jong-un. Whatever next?

MEANWHILE, it is revealed that thousands of medical emergencies are being answered not by paramedics but by specially trained fire fighters. "Hello, is that 999? I've got this burning sensation."