Peter Rhodes on leaky loos, flying doctors and the bad old good old days

It's a huge problem. The water company reported a couple of years ago that it was losing 150 million gallons a day through leaks. This, we are told helpfully, is enough to fill 227 Olympic swimming pools, although how we'd get the water from our loos to those 227 pools is anyone's guess.

Older readers may recall my Campaign for the Restoration of Authentic Plumbing a movement, possibly doomed by its own initials, which would ban leaky loos, dodgy mixers and taps you bang your head on. I sense its hour has come. And talking of hours, leaving aside the water wasted by new cisterns, what about the time? How many millions of hours are wasted by optimists who trust the eco-flush, then realise it has not done the job and have to flush it a second time? Glad you asked. In his lifetime, the average Brit wastes 17.3 years waiting for cisterns to re-fill. And 87.6 per cent of all statistics are made up.

Thames Water. I must add him to my list of great names for TV detectives. With his trusty clergyman sidekick, Venerable Ballcock.

The difference between optimists and pessimists will be seen when the world's first jet-suit powered paramedics, unveiled this week, swoops into action to rescue injured walkers in the mountains of the Lake District. The optimist, on seeing this flying figure approach, will assume it's help. The pessimist will think it's an angel.

I referred yesterday to the reader who wrote about how much better things were 50 years ago. So do you imagine that if we went back through the newspaper archives to 1970 we'd find lots of correspondents writing to say how thoroughly excellent everything is? I doubt it. When I came into this profession in 1969, old folk spoke fondly of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yes, they were hungry, cold, dirt-poor and families were riddled with rickets and TB but “we all pulled together.”

The idea that there was a time when we all helped each other runs deep. A good cure is to sit down, as I once did while researching a history book, and trawl through the local newspapers of 100 years ago. In terms of squalor, deprivation, life expectancy, child neglect, drunkenness, street crime and a truly vile diet, the good old days were unspeakably bad.

After last week's list of 21 spine-chilling safety warnings found, surprisingly, on a hot-water bottle, this week a truly deadly item arrived at Chateau Rhodes. It is an electric weed-burner with a 2kw element designed to vaporise shoots and roots. The instructions includes: “Do not use this weed burner as a hair dryer.” There is a fine line between warning people and putting ideas in their silly damn heads.