Rhodes on full brains, deadly missiles and Mr Putin's holiday plans

I suggested a few days ago that children's brains were once much “stickier” than they are now, picking up knowledge like a strip of Sellotape in a lint factory. A reader has another theory. She reckons young brains today are overloaded with endless digital input, from TVs to smartphones and there's simply no room for general knowledge.

If this theory rings a bell, you may be thinking of an old Alexei Sayle gag in which he suggests that, once your brain is full up, learning any new fact means losing some brain function. Thus, somebody tells you Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia and you forget how to walk. It's only a theory.

Missing RT? Me too. The TV station previously known as Russia Today was taken off the air a few days after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, on the orders of the regulator Ofcom. And so we are deprived of seeing a succession of British reporters dutifully spouting the Kremlin line which is that Ukrainians, usually branded nationalists or Nazis, are blowing up their own towns and cities.

Call me an old softy but I thought it was possible, in the days just before the shut-down, to discern just a hint of remorse in some of the RT presenters. It can't be easy for an RT anchorperson talking to war correspondents in a war zone surrounded by the wreckage of war and weapons of war knowing that if you actually utter the word “war,” even by mistake, you're looking at 15 years in the salt mines.

Meanwhile, in scores of David and Goliath encounters across Ukraine, the tank-hunting goes on, demonstrating what the poet Rudyard Kipling called Arithmetic on the Frontier. Kipling rattled the Establishment by pointing out that in warfare it's not always the side with the most money that wins.

Every T-72 Russian tank costs Putin about £1.5 million. The British-supplied anti-tank missiles used to such deadly effect by the Ukrainians cost just £20,000. Kipling wrote: “Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can / The odds are on the cheaper man.”

Astonishingly, Putin is said to be planning to attend the G20 economic summit in Bali in November. The Russians have a word for it. Optimism.