‘Birds, boats and a sign of the times at a police station’ – The Peter Rhodes Column

Nearly 1,000 small-boat migrants arrive in a single day and four perish. I think we can assume that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has not yet smashed those criminal gangs. This year, next year . . ?

The day after last week's item on 100 years of MG cars, I spotted a 1964 MGB. The sight was glorious but the blue exhaust plume and the smell of real, hard-core leaded petrol was a reminder of the oily stench that once hung over every high street. The good old days were smelly old days.

The most chilling statistic in the growing debate about assisted suicide is that, in Scotland alone, the NHS could save an estimated £84 million a year by adopting the practice. God knows how much could be saved in the rest of the UK by offering the lethal needle as an alternative to palliative care. But the NHS is driven and controlled by financial targets and if euthanasia came to be seen as a cost-saving exercise, who knows where it would lead?

Of course, NHS hospitals could save even more money by adopting a simple new policy: refusing to admit poorly people. This would quickly clear the wards of sick and injured and save billions - leaving NHS managers free to concentrate on being inclusive to everyone and designing gender-fluid uniforms.

A police station in Northamptonshire is no longer staffed full-time. A poster advises visitors reporting on bail to submit a selfie of themselves outside the station to prove their attendance. I'm reminded of the street battles of the 1970s when one bitter little slogan appeared on T-shirts and button badges: “Help the police – beat yourself up.”

An employment-tribunal judge has ruled that calling women “birds” at work is derogatory. And I dare say the age of the utterer is no excuse. Otherwise we might point out that the great writer P G Wodehouse (1881-1975) used “bird” when describing both male and female characters, as in the short story about a cheating agent, “Jeeves and the Greasy Bird.”

But language changes. Today's harmless quip becomes tomorrow's deadly insult and before long you can't even sing along with Bertie Wooster's rendition of “Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors” without some frightful cove complaining. Bally shame, toodle-pip.