Peter Rhodes: Solidarity, comrades

A TYPICAL weekend headline blared: "Labour hard left to picket hospitals." The actual advice to activists from the Corbyn-supporting organisation Momentum, regarding the strike by junior doctors, is: "Join them on their pickets, bring them tea, coffee, sandwiches or just a smile to show that we support them." Hardly the Communist Party manifesto, is it?

IN fact, if today's strike goes ahead, do join the doctors on the picket lines. Take them a hot drink and a slice of cake. Tell them how much you value them. And then, when you have their attention, tell them all about your bad back and see what they suggest. This could be the best chance you ever get to see a doctor in a hurry.

I ADMITTED last week I had never heard of Lemmy of Motorhead. A reader inquires sarcastically: "Ever heard of somebody called David Bowie?" But of course. His music was spun through my generation's formative years like a rich golden thread through the tapestry of life. David Bowie, whose death was announced yesterday, was a restless, eternally creative, endlessly re-inventing genius who gave us modern classics which will live for ever. And he still found time to invent the world's finest hunting knife.

AUNTIE Beeb, in a rare politically-incorrect slip, referred to Amy Johnson, the 1930s flyer who inspired Tracey Curtis-Taylor's recent 15,000-mile flight around the world, as an "aviatrix." This is the old feminine form of "aviator" and is hardly used these days. It dates back to an age when every girl entering journalism dreamed of becoming an editrix.

PRIVATE houses last for ever. They are repaired, re-roofed, re-glazed and extended. Millions of people are happy to live in properties built anything up to 500 years ago. Yet it's a different story with public-sector housing. Whole estates and forests of tower blocks are thrown up and then ripped down a few decades later. David Cameron's latest lament about "sink" estates, and the need for wholesale demolition, has been heard ever since the slum clearances of the 1920s. But the problem isn't always the poor quality of the construction or the lay-out of the estates. The unfortunate truth is that you can be the most decent of people and live in a perfect little palace, but if the neighbours on one side exercise their pitbulls in the yard and those on the other side are dealing drugs, it's never going to be paradise. The problem is not always where you live but how the people next door choose to live. Put them in some shiny new, architect-designed Cameron Court and it'll be a piggery in weeks.

POLITICAL definitions for our time. If you oppose mass migration you are an extremist. If you disapprove of mass sexual assaults in the streets of Germany, you are Far Right. If you call for asylum seekers who commit such crimes to be deported, you are clearly a fascist.

BROWBEATEN by endless screen prompts into upgrading to Windows 10, I stuck with it for barely a day. According to the TV ads, Windows 10 can turn Third World kids into political leaders and make artists of us all. It would not, however, allow me to put documents into folders. This is a basic function, the computer equivalent of putting on your own trousers. After 24 hours I reverted to the crisp, simple reliability of Windows 7. I'm back, old friend - and I bet I'm not the only one.