Toby Neal: Where will all the weapons go when Ukraine war ends?

No, I'm not talking about all the other things to worry about, that Putin will use nerve agents (again, e.g. Salisbury), or chemical weapons (again, e.g. Syria), or become so frustrated that he will use nuclear weapons and cross a boundary which has not been crossed since 1945 and plunge the world into a new dark irradiated era.

This is a different thing to worry about on top of the other things to worry about, something capable of bringing all or virtually all commercial air traffic in the Western world to a standstill, and making every Western leader vulnerable to unstoppable assassination unless they exist in a bunker.

Currently there is an arms race going on in the Ukraine. The West is piling in the latest hi-tech anti-armour and anti-aircraft missiles in a race against time, because although the Russians are halted at the moment, the spring is coming and spring brings with it spring offensives.

Whatever the eventual outcome, the eventual outcome of this war is that one way or the other Ukraine is going to be awash with hi-tech weapons delivered by the West.

When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Americans supplied the Afghans with portable anti-aircraft missiles which enabled a single Afghan fighter to shoot down a Russian helicopter. After the Russians withdrew, the Americans were very keen to get their Stinger missiles back, so offered generous bounties to have them returned.

The proliferation of Stinger missiles and anti-tank weapons which can destroy not only a tank but a presidential motorcade at a range of nearly three miles is something to cause sleepless nights.

So we have to hope and pray that the Ukraine will win, because that will mean these weapons stay in the "right hands," that is, the Ukrainian military. If Ukraine is defeated, or the nation otherwise fragments and descends into chaos, there is a serious danger that at least some of them will fall into the wrong hands.

And somebody with ill intent equipped with a Stinger missile under the flightpath to Heathrow doesn't bear thinking about. It's actually worse than that. They would not need to be under the flightpath. They could be anywhere within a very wide radius, including all of Greater London, to pose a lethal threat.

After chilling you to the bone, let's look for a brighter side of things. The coming of the spring doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the Russians who launch a spring offensive. It could be the Ukrainians.

Greatly outnumbered they may be, but it's a question of who's got what, where, and the Russians in particular have a habit of being defeated by numerically smaller forces. Disaster at Tannenberg 1914, humiliated by the tiny Finnish army in 1939, and, more relevant to Ukraine, while many people have heard of Hitler's devastating defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, less well known is that just weeks later the Germans launched a crushing counter attack which captured Kharkiv and left the Soviet forces reeling.

...........

As a member of the popular music scene who I'd never previously heard of got lots of publicity after a wardrobe malfunction live on the BBC's One Show, I only think it right to publicise my own wardrobe malfunction at the weekend.

I was in the supermarket when I felt something down my trouser leg (and no, this is not a Frankie Howerd sketch).

To my consternation I realised it was yesterday's underpants. Reaching in to retrieve them in a busy supermarket was unthinkable. And allowing them to pop out at the bottom of my trouser leg and then carrying a pair of knickers around the store was also something that would attract the attention of security.

However I discovered that if I adopted a particular unusual gait I could stop the knickers riding down any further, and that would mean that I could recover them later in the privacy of my car.

So as I walked around the supermarket I did so in a fashion that might be familiar with anybody who has watched Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.

Faced with two potential forms of embarrassment, this embarrassment was in my judgment the preferable.

In the great scheme of things it was trivial, but there again much of life is built on trivial incidents like this.