Pop-up nookie

TERMS for our time. Until this week I had never heard of pop-up brothels. Apparently they are set up for a few days or weeks in houses or flats hired from unwitting landlords, sometimes under the Airbnb system. And you thought that lovely American lady was taking Bible classes?

ANYWAY, I dare say pop-up brothels serve a certain sector of society. But as the babyboomers grow older and the whole UK population ages, where are the pop-up chiropodists, the pop-up bingo parlours and the pop-up denture repairers? Knock three times and ask for Steradent.

WHEN you switch on the telly tonight, you'll find that Gardener's World has been extended to one hour on BBC2, swallowing the slot formerly held by Victoria Coren Mitchell's fiendishly difficult quiz show, Only Connect. After many weeks of being made to feel stupid in your own home, you will now be made to feel inadequate in your own garden.

I WROTE a few days ago about the motorist who ran up a £24,500 penalty for ignoring parking tickets. She had convinced herself that the tickets were unenforceable in law. Now along comes a reader, picking me up for claiming you can be nicked for speeding at 34mph in a 30mph zones. He believes that this is not speeding. Speeding, he assures me, is the speed limit plus 10 per cent, plus 2mph which means no-one will get a ticket until they hit 35mph. If you wish to believe this, by all means do. But it is based on a police recommendation, not law. If you still need convincing, just consult Google where you will find a number of aggrieved motorists who have been fined or sent on speed-awareness courses at less than 35mph. Just as pride goes before a fall, so an urban myth precedes a ticket.

AS you may have gathered, I firmly believe the population is divided not so much socially or politically but between two ancient and irreconcilable tribes: the optimists and the pessimists. So I am grateful to a new radio series, Glass Half Full (R4), for showing us that it is entirely possible for one clever doctor to be wildly optimistic about the future of personalised, gene-driven medicine, while the equally clever doctor next to him is deeply depressed about the coming global pandemic which will wipe out about one-fifth of humanity.

NOT sure about Jeremy Corbyn's plan to slap 20 per cent VAT on private-school fees and use the money to provide free lunches for kids in the state sector. Some parents scrimp and save to send their children to independent schools and probably have less disposable income than the parents of the kids Corbyn wants to feed. In any case, the real factor in teaching children is not a free portion of shepherd's pie, but a dollop of commitment. The kids who do well at school, whether public or state, are the ones who come from families or cultures where education is seen as a great gift.

AND yet another term for our time. People who are raised in a religion but later become atheists or agnostics are known in clerical circles as nonverts.