Peter Rhodes on a pole-dancing PM, making millions from alchemy and why the English are like Marmite

YET another online reminder of the importance of commas and suchlike in everyday communication. Get the punctuation wrong in "There's a maypole dancer" and you end up with "Theresa May, pole dancer."

I COULDN'T see the drunken hordes of England football supporters running amok in Amsterdam a few days ago without being reminded of the last page of A A Gill's book, The Angry Island, a study of England and the English. In his closing remarks Gill says this of our Island Race: "They are genetic Marmite - a little bit of them goes an awful long way." I'm sure Amsterdam agrees.

WISE words, too, from the veteran hack and David Cameron's former speech writer Ian Birrell on the harvesting and sale of personal data from social media. A generation has grown up which assumes that everything in cyberspace is free, or ought to be free. As Birrell puts it: "Remember that if something is free, you are the commodity."

THE Facebook / Cambridge Analytica furore is an example of yet another industry which has been created from nothing, as if by alchemy. It begins with a commodity which is virtually free or at least dead cheap. Yet by the magic of advertising and propaganda, that which was worthless suddenly develops a huge market price. Weddings, university degrees and personal information were once as cheap as chips. Over the past few years the average price of a wedding has hit £30,000, a second-class degree at a third-class uni will cost you £40,000 and a bundle of information about a few million Facebook users allegedly changes hands for a few million quid. There is a sort of magic at work, the transmutation of cheap things into hugely expensive things with the eager agreement of consumers who think BA after your name is a big deal and no wedding is complete without a hot-air balloon. The next big thing is surely already before our eyes just waiting to be exploited. Don't you wish you could see it? Me, too.

THE Government is making a big fuss about employing 3,000 new recruits to train as midwives. This will address the national scandal of a shortage of these valuable professionals. But I bet it won't diminish the most glaring inequality in the NHS. England has more than 30,000 trained midwives but fewer than 200 of them are male. When did you last hear a politician campaigning for this gross gender discrimination to be put right?

I WROTE recently about that agonising pain when you put snowball-chilled hands into warm water and suggested the best name for it is hot aches. A reader reminds me of the 1950s hit by Guy Mitchell, Hot Aches by the Number. Nice try. It may sound like "hot aches" but the song is actually Heart Aches by the Number and it has nothing to do with snowballs.