Peter Rhodes on the Millennials taking over, the cost of equality and students behaving stupidly

What they mean: " You've had a heatwave? We've just had a week in Greece and it p****d down."

MEANWHILE, thank heavens, the water warnings have started and hosepipe bans may soon be with us. Call us panicky and it may seem premature but when it comes to fear of drought there are only two sorts of people - those who remember 1976 and those who don't.

WHEN Millennials take over. Private Eye spotted a promotion penned by some bright young thing on The Independent's website concerning "the forgotten British comedian who paved the way for Alan Partridge and David Brent." The forgotten comedian? Tony Hancock. But that's the way fame goes. We now have a generation of nurses who, when you are giving blood and quip in a jocular sort of way: "A pint? Why, that's very nearly an armful" just look blank.

ANOTHER generation-shock came in a poster for this month's Cornbury Music Festival with all the big stars in big type and the lesser stars in smaller type. On the bottom line, in the smallest type of all, is Andy Fairweather Low. Close your eyes and can't you hear him, a legend of the Sixties and Seventies? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, even if we were occasionally Wide Eyed or Legless.

A READER warns me about soaring roaming charges after Brexit. Oh, how I laughed. Technically I possess a mobile phone. When my wife upgraded hers some years ago, I took the card from her old Nokia and bought a dumbphone online for £9.50. I'm not exactly sure where it is just now but it's probably in the car and I always take it with me on the boat because setting sail without a mobile is foolish. But the idea of having it permanently with me, or endlessly consulting a smartphone, strikes me as intrusive and unnecessary. While celebrities including Simon Cowell boast about giving up their mobiles, remember that some of us, and we probably number millions, were never hooked in the first place.

"TODAY at the BBC I can say I am equal," trills the Beeb's former China editor Carrie Gracey, having not only won a massive wodge of back pay for herself but led to some of the Beeb's top male presenters taking huge pay cuts. She has now donated all her back pay, estimated at £100,000-plus (or 660 licence fees), to a charity and says she'll be taking a six-month holiday, unpaid. Equal with whom, precisely? Royalty?

AS Saddleworth Moor burned, a reader came across a group of kids trying to light and launch a number of aerial lanterns, each carrying a candle. The truly worrying part was that this happened on a campus, surrounded by tinder-dry fields, and the kids were university students. If this is the cream of England, God help England.