Peter Rhodes on the price of honey, the perils of black shorts and signs of a second wave

A piece in the Guardian makes the point that schools actually have little effect. It's home and family that really determine our futures. The author rages: “Children with middle-class, professional parents are exposed to more words earlier on, opening up a gap in vocabulary at a young age.” But how can any system ensure all kids are raised in homes where they are talked to properly? Some years ago a politician told me the only solution was to rehome kids. Officially the idea was called “early intervention.” His fear was that most people would call it the state kidnapping of children. If there was an easy answer to unfairness we'd have found it by now.

Wanted: busy bees. The NHS says honey may be more effective than antibiotics in treating respiratory conditions. So what next? Will the NHS start dispensing the stuff? And if so, given its track record for paying the earth for everything from drugs to visors, how much will it pay and what effect will it have on honey prices? Today, you or I can purchase a large jar of honey for about a fiver. If the NHS procurement people start elbowing into Holland & Barrett, how long before it's £100 a time?

Meanwhile, the new counting system for Covid-related deaths has driven the daily rate down. But is it an illusion? The number of new cases seems stuck at a worrying 1,000 a day. My first forecast was that life would be normal by August and nasty by October. I hope I'm wrong.

Too many heatwaves, not enough shorts. I am down to the bottom of my shorts drawer and have reached the infamous black pair. They were a well-intentioned gift but, well, you see the problem? A decent chap cannot put on a pair of black shorts without thinking of Roderick Spode, the preposterous would-be dictator in P G Wodehouse's comic stories. By the time Spode set up his group, all the black shirts had been bought by other fascist groups and so he formed the Blackshorts instead.

Spode was based on Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. The name is a clue. Mosley's family had Staffordshire connections and Spode is a famous firm in the Potteries. Save this for when the pub quizzes resume.

My black shorts are on the baggy side and I could never be mistaken for big, angry Spode whom Wodehouse famously described as if “Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment." Lovely stuff.

If anyone is writing gentle Wodehousian humour these days, I have yet to encounter it. The internet wasn't much help. I typed “Modern Wodehouse” into the search box “Do you mean 'modern wooden house'?” it replied. Somewhere, in a far-off dimension, Jeeves smiled.