Peter Rhodes on vegan milk, dancing cowboys and the computer that beat Top Gun

If reopening the schools is such a low-risk affair, as the Government and its advisers assure us, how come more than 40 schools in Berlin have reported coronavirus infections only two weeks after re-opening?

Two senior politicians have resigned from the Irish Government after breaking lockdown rules by attending an 80-strong golf dinner. One of them apologised thus: “It was an unintended but serious lapse of judgment.” Unintended? So which bit of “Oireachtas Golf Society's 50th Anniversary Dinner” didn't they understand?

A third of young people are now buying vegan milk rather than the dairy stuff. And while that may strike you as A Good Thing, the Sustainable Food Trust warns that some soy products are actually worse for the environment, especially the rainforests, than grass-fed dairy herds.

I am reminded of a trip to the States some years ago when aloe vera was the cure-all wonder substance of the age. It sounded like miracle juice from kindly Mother Nature. But the aloe vera farm we visited was hardly kind. To every horizon the land had been stripped of natural plants, creatures, trees and grass, and replaced with millions of aloe vera cacti. It was the most startling exercise in chainsaw monoculture I've ever seen. Moral: When you try to build a better world, what you see on the tin is not always what you find on the ground.

According to some reports, the BBC will pay up to £100 million to a private firm for collecting the licence fee and chasing up over-75s who decline to pay. Before the first sobbing little old lady has even told her tale to the cameras, this is a PR disaster for the Beeb and Government alike. If we can find the money for furloughs, and subsidised meals, we can surely find the money to pay for the BBC from central taxation. Thus, the rich pay more, the poor pay nothing and nobody goes to prison. Sorted.

In yet another poll (what would we do without them?), Levi 501 jeans have been named as the most iconic fashion item of all time. If nothing else, this is an opportunity to re-tell yet another much-loved old tale that I suspect may be an urban myth. Originally, it is claimed, Levi's had a brass stud in the crotch for extra strength. But this was removed from production after cowboys / miners / frontiersmen, etc, complained that if they squatted by a campfire, this rivet would overheat, inflicting intimate burns. The image of John Wayne lookalikes dancing frantically by the campfire is delightful but probably too good to be true.

A more mundane problem with 501s is the traditional button fly. For us gentlemen of a certain age, by the time you've buttoned up, it's time to unbutton again. Hell, no. Buttons and Budweiser ain't never gonna mix.