Peter Rhodes on the vanishing future, amateur theatricals in Westminster and a case of advertising overload

Our changing language. How do you persuade volunteers to get infected with Covid-19 to help in the search for a vaccine? Sky News tells us the way forward is to “carefully parameterise it.”

On a planet of 8,000 million humans, 800 million are hungry and 1,000 million are obese. My thanks for this troubling snippet to Farming Today (Radio 4).

Great to see ITV3 repeating the entire run of Downton Abbey. At least it would be if we could get more than a few minutes of action before a torrent of adverts. Carson the butler is about to say something stern and significant and suddenly we are into the following commercial break, noted between two parts in a recent episode: Viking Cruises ad, Mental Health Awareness Week ad, Touch of Frost preview, Nurofen ad, Sensodyne ad, Aldi ad, preview for the film 1917, BT Technical Tips ad, Go Compare ad, Coronation Street preview, Long Lost Family preview, Foyle's War preview and another flaming ad for Viking Cruises. You were saying, Carson . . ?

The Dominic Cummings affair gives our politicians a chance to do what they do worst - amateur dramatics. If Boris's chief advisor broke the lock-in rules and lied, then clearly it's a sacking matter. But spare us, please, the mock outrage, the eye-rolling, the melodramatic gasps of horror. I switched on the telly to catch one MP in full pantomime mode, mouth agape and eyes the size of saucers. It was the sort of face Widow Twankey might pull on finding Aladdin in his Y-fronts, a caricature of shock, not the real thing.

Why do politicians do it? Probably because they refined their acting skills when the House of Commons was sitting in all its yah-hoo bear-pit cacophony and you had to yell and make a fuss to be heard. But in these quieter lockdown times, with interviews conducted one-to-one via Skype, some performances look embarrassingly OTT. Oh, yes they do.

The lady who launched the Clap for our Carers events 10 weeks ago says it's time to call a halt. Annemarie Plas was “overwhelmed” by the support for the ritual, but says: “I share some of the opinions that some people have about it becoming politicised.” She finds common ground with the anonymous NHS doctor who declares in a column for the Guardian: “What I don’t find nice, and I really don’t need, is people clapping. I don’t need rainbows. I don’t care if people clap until their hands bleed with rainbows tattooed on their faces.” The doctor's point is that rather than being applauded on a weekly basis “it would also be nice to have worked for the past 10 years in an adequately funded NHS, staffed by people listened to by the Government.”

OUR changing language. A reader suspects the term “the foreseeable future” is steadily being shortened to “the foreseeable.” Maybe there is no future.