Peter Rhodes on Blue Peter badges, Oprah's interview and the horror of sinkholes

Good to see campaigners Marcus Rashford and Greta Thunberg getting gold Blue Peter Badges. There was a scandal a few years back when fake Blue Peter badges were found on sale online. I've just checked and they're still on eBay, starting at 12 for £3.99. And if the BP badge strikes you as a bit Goody Two Shoes, there are other designs. Loved the one with the words: “I've Never Won a Blue Peter Badge.” The bad-boy version.

Is it true that some celebrities have returned their Blue Peter badges in protest at the logo being based on a slave ship? No, I just made it up.

Truth is, the BBC artist Tony Hart based the badge logo on the pirate ship from Peter Pan. Presumably on the grounds that while slavery was unspeakably evil, the English take the view that piracy was yo-ho-ho and a barrel of laughs.

Oprah Winfrey is one of the world's greatest interviewers. And yet she allowed Meghan to make an allegation about a conversation on the colour of Archie's skin a) without getting the exact quotation and b) declining to name the person who uttered it, thus casting suspicion on everyone at the Palace. I have worked in newsrooms where Ms Winfrey, on returning to the office with her tape, would have been straight back to get the full story.

If I've been quiet about my lockdown reading lately, it's because I've been ploughing through Richard Holmes' magnificent 2004 book, Tommy. It's a 700-page, deeply researched study of British soldiers in the First World War. Holmes was a master at portraying the grand strategy and then peppering it with thousands of individual accounts. He dug out a snippet about Jones and Joubert, two war horses who spent 1914-18 on the Western Front in France. Returned to their old barracks in Aldershot after four years, the pair “walked unhesitatingly to their old stalls.” You can find hundreds of fine books about the First World War, a conflict which still fascinates and challenges us 100 years on. If I had to choose just one, I'd probably choose Tommy.

Here is the stuff of nightmares. A farmer in Cumbria was crossing a field on a quad bike when the earth swallowed him. Rescue workers found him, shocked but alive, 60feet down a sinkhole. There is something uniquely chilling about sinkholes. The solid earth beneath our feet suddenly giving way to empty black space turns all certainties upside-down.

And while we may expect such things in urban areas, we tend to assume the countryside is safe. But today's countryside may well have been yesterday's industrial site where, over thousands of years, our forbears quarried anything from flints to coal . When the seam was exhausted they would cover the shafts with a few old beams and a bit of earth and in time the cover would be forgotten, and rotten. Tread softly for you tread on their beams.