Peter Rhodes on Trump's America, the servant problem and the passing of a wartime hero

BIG questions of our age. "How can you have a servant at home who keeps their own passport with them? What’s worse is they have one day off every week, " Kuwaiti social-media star Sondos Alqattan on the problem of employing Filipina maids. Servants, eh? Who'd have 'em?

OUR changing language. Full marks in the creative-English stakes to the police officer on Radio 4 who described a rise in acid attacks from 700 a year to 800 per year as "a de-escalation." What she meant was that the rate of increase was slowing down. It's a bit like inflation which makes prices go up, even when it's falling.

THIS weekend sees the start of Travels in Trumpland (BBC2). The former Labour politician and Strictly Come Dancing hero, Ed Balls, travels to the parts of the US where they not only voted for Trump but still revere him. Prepare to be surprised.

FOR these are the American communities we rarely visit, a world removed from the sharp slickness of New York and the West Coast, as seen on most TV series. These are the understains of the Union, the left-behind places where nothing is more important than Jesus and the right to bear guns. These Americans are not bad, but betrayed. They have been let down by America's troubled and deeply unequal state school system, parts of which which makes our worst sink-estate comprehensives look like Eton. They do not read much. They rarely travel outside the US. An estimated 30 million US adults are illiterate. These are the "plain folks of the land," as the US writer (and alleged racist and anti-semite) H L Mencken sneeringly described them nearly 100 years ago.

H L Mencken's quote in full goes: "As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." Well, that couldn't possibly happen, could it?

GEOFFREY Wellum DFC, who has died at 96, was the youngest RAF pilot in the Battle of Britain. But unlike others of "The Few," who rushed into print with their breathless, wizard-prang and hate-the-Jerries memoirs, Wellum did not produce his book, First Light, until he was 80. So he writes with the wisdom, compassion, empathy, honesty and guilt of an old man who saw many of his generation die young, and did his share of the killing. He says things in the cold light of peace that could never be uttered in the earlier, gung-ho days of post-war Britain.

IN one memorable episode, Geoffrey Wellum describes how he and another Spitfire pilot sneaked unseen behind two German fighters and blew them out of the sky. He wrote: “This was just about as callous and as calculating as you can get, just plain cold-blooded murder.” If you only ever read one book about the war, make it First Light.