Peter Rhodes: Offended by stew

SOMEBODY opens the wrong envelope in Hollywood and it dominates the world's TV, radio, newspapers and internet for the next two days. No, I don't get it either.

THE gardening resumes and with it the age-old question. Why are robins so relaxed about human company that they come within a couple of feet of us? The obvious answer is that they're hungry for worms and grubs. But a naturalist friend reckons it is because, before humans came along, robins hung out with wild boars which turned the soil and unearthed food. All these millions of years later he reckons robins still have a race-memory of boar and, compared to them, humans are a good-tempered, genteel and sociable species. Nice to know somebody appreciates us.

“SURE, I know there are bigger issues, but microaggressions are a reality of the everyday existence of many people of colour.” That anonymous email by a Cambridge student allegedly offended by “cultural misrepresentations” on his college menu, including Jamaican stew and Tunisian rice, will surely be recorded in the official history of the Snowflake Generation. How blissful your life must be if you have time to take offence at stew being mislabelled by the dinner ladies.

ONE account of this spat tells us that some students responded “with humour,” including the one who texted: “Don't get me started on the Yorkshire puddings.” But how can we be sure it is humour? For all we know, some Snowflake undergraduate from Harrogate could genuinely be sobbing him / her / gender-neutral self to sleep every night at the wicked misrepresentation of his county's delicacy. We live in fragile times.

INCIDENTALLY, the Cambridge college in question is Pembroke. How long before the Welsh take up arms over this geographical misappropriation of one of their towns?

OUR broadband fault rumbled on for a few days. The most sensible communication I had was from Amit at BT who phoned to let me know the fault had been fixed, and then stopped in mid-sentence, admitted he could hear the line was still crackling and got the Openreach engineers back on the case. The pure bliss of a human voice.

THE most irritating part is the BT website's assumption that it is dealing with half-wits who have no real problems and simply enjoy being a nuisance. You hit the button marked “Track a fault” and BT comes back with: “You don't have any faults to track.” The website goes on: “If it's still not working, your line is probably faulty and you can report it online at www.bt.com/faults.” Except that you can't because your broadband isn't working, which is why you contacted them in the first place. Stick with it, Amit.

SOMETHING odd, isn't there, about the killing of the North Korean dictator's half brother at Kuala Lumpur airport? It is said that Kim Jong-nam died when VX nerve agent was wiped in his face by a woman. VX is said to be so lethal that the United Nations classifies it as a weapon of mass destruction. And yet the alleged assassin seems in good health, no-one else suffered any ill-effects and the airport has been declared safe. What are we not being told?