Peter Rhodes on damp fish, big drawers and police who tread on eggshells

Our changing language. I heard a youthful contributor to a TV debate warning that government handouts to reduce the impact of energy bills might prove to be “a damp fish”.

When a word or phrase is misquoted like this, it's called an eggcorn (after an alleged mishearing of acorn). You know the sort of thing: “wipe board” for “whiteboard”, or “card shark” misheard from “card sharp”. Some years ago a reader reported hearing someone say the sea was “as calm as a milk pond”.

A newspaper's holiday review from Scarborough includes the borderline-egghorn statement that a hotel's in-house entertainment is “one of the big drawers of any stay”,

Do police really spend their lives treading on the eggshells of wokery? In the excellent The Capture (BBC1, Sunday), detectives dealing with a non English-speaking Chinese witness are told to expect an interpreter. A few minutes later a Chinese woman arrives and DS Flyn (Cavan Clerkin) assumes she's the interpreter. But she isn't. She's a cop who happens to be Chinese, and Flyn is clearly rattled that his error may be construed as racist and even threaten his career. Are the programme-makers being sensitive in featuring such a “microaggression” or are they taking a swipe at extreme wokery? Genuinely puzzled.

Life is like one of those old circus plate-spinning acts where the skill is in keeping all the plates up and spinning at the same time. In the space of a few days last month I passed my annual skin-cancer check, sailed through an eye examination, tested negative for Covid and got the car through its MoT. All plates up and spinning. And then, out of a clear blue sky this week, a tooth broke in half. Moral; sometimes you have more plates than you think.

Nasa's latest moon rocket looks like a 1960s Saturn V. The new supersonic airliner Boom Overture is a dead ringer for Concorde. Don't you get the feeling that inventors have been replaced by re-inventors? How long before some genius unveils the pogo stick?

“I was born in the 1950s, which is to have won God's lottery” - author Robert Harris, quoted in the Sunday Times. And who can argue with that?