Peter Rhodes on lifting lockdown, checking your oxygen and Brits who rush in where others fear to tread

After my item on the type of grass called Pendulous Sedge, which I said sounded like a Dickensian character, a reader says he's convinced it's a pop group. Other suggestions most welcome.

Penitent stool. I referred a few days ago to “Speaker Hogg.” He is, of course, Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle. Worryingly, not a single reader complained.

Memo to Downing Street. You don't make up for being too late on testing, too late on tracking and too late on supplying PPE by being too early on lifting lockdown. I suspect many people are much happier being skint and safe than having a full wage packet and suddenly developing a dry cough and knowing their worst nightmare has arrived.

For those of us of a certain age, lockdown is strangely familiar. I drove into town recently for the first time in a month. Mine was the only car, virtually all the shops were closed and hardly any pedestrians had ventured out. Some years ago such scenes were familiar. We called them Sundays.

The latest gizmo being touted as a life-saver is the oximeter, a device which clips on your finger and measures the oxygen in your blood. Mine arrived yesterday. What the adverts don't tell you is that some oximeters are designed only for the 15-60 age group and the instructions have been written in China by somebody with a PhD in Advanced Gibberish: “Functional tester cannot be used to asss accuracy.”

It is both sad and alarming to see the airline industry trying to kid us that safe-spacing can be achieved by face masks, sensible queuing and temperature testing. Not a hope. It really doesn't matter how virus-free they can make Heathrow, Birmingham or Gatwick. What about the other end of your flight? One of my most unpleasant airport experiences was standing in a vast, jostling crowd at a departure terminal in Poland. Coronavirus couldn't hope for a better breeding ground. The locals seemed to regard the crowding as perfectly normal.

And yet I may misjudge my fellow Brits. They may well rush back to the airports. Even in the worst days of air disasters and the threat of earlier pandemics, they still queued up for their two weeks in the sun. If Brits weighed all the consequences and planned cautiously they wouldn't get sunburnt or catch herpes. In 2004 I was dispatched to the Maldives where the government was desperate to lure tourists back after the terrible Boxing Day Tsunami amid the fear of a second wave. But by the time we hacks got there, tourists were already arriving – and the first groups were from the UK. Brits rush in where others fear to tread.

In my dispatches I call them plucky Brits. But maybe they simply lacked imagination.