Peter Rhodes on defusing policing, the blood bill for driverless cars and writing your own obituary

You know the Black Lives Matter crisis is getting no better when Charles Ehikioya, a black inspector in the Metropolitan Police, sues the force, claiming he was racially profiled by two white officers when they stopped his car. I can offer only two suggestions.

The first is that every police officer stopping a driver of any colour or creed should behave as though the driver is an off-duty police inspector. Secondly, every driver of whatever background, when stopped by the police should try using this useful and anger-defusing little phrase: “Hello, officer. How can I help you?”

No phrase is more calculated to make you worry than “Please do not worry” in a letter from your GP. I had a blood test last week and the “please do not worry” letter dropped on the doormat a few days later. I called the surgery and tremblingly fixed a phone interview with the doctor for later in the day. Next, being a journalist, I did what all hacks do in the face of worrying letters from the GP. I began composing my obituary.

I have done it several times. I like to think I do a rather good obit, stressing my dazzling literary skills, my humanity, my rapport with the common man and above all my humility, while glossing over that business at It's a Knockout.

Anyway, it turns out I am not dying and there really is nothing to worry about. My blood is a bit short of potassium but a change of medication and a fruitier diet should put it right. You have to question the thought processes of a Divine Creator who designs human beings to run on potassium and then hides the potassium in bananas.

When a GCSE student interviewed on telly said he was getting his results on Fursday, did anyone else wonder how a British school pupil can get this far in education without somebody giving him a hand with his spoken English? It's Thursday, not Fursday and while it is anyone's absolute right to speak how they wish, don't be surprised if some people fink you're fick.

Self-driving cars may appear on our motorways next year. And what, I wonder, is the death forecast? I suggested some time ago that Whitehall would never have embarked on “smart” (i.e. lethal) motorways with no hard shoulders without first agreeing an acceptable, and highly secret, figure of fatalities. The same process of balancing technological progress against human life must have been going on in the corridors of power with regard to self-driving cars. How many road deaths are deemed reasonable in order to get this new technology working? We should be told. We won't be.

It sounds like the title of a novel but it's actually Mrs Rhodes's harvest off our sunny south wall: Fifty figs in August. Particularly amusing for my German readers.