Peter Rhodes on surrogacy, earworms and a camera so tiny it can be popped in a pill

After years of miscarriages and other traumas, the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow and his wife, Precious, have announced the arrival of a baby boy with a surrogate. He is 73, his wife is 46 and I'm sure we all wish them well.

However (I bet you knew that was coming), 73 is a hell of age to be tangling with nappies, night feeds and the joint-torturing business of hauling a baby in and out of its playpen. A few years ago Snow said he believed everyone had a fairly fixed “mental age” and his was 23. While it's great kidding yourself you have the shiny, fresh brain of a young man, it's not the brain that lets you down at 3am. It's the spine. It's the knees.

This baby talk leads on to another little milestone for our grandson, now 13 months. I have presented him with his first grown-up possession, having first removed the batteries. He sits on the sofa delightedly pressing the buttons because that's what the Big People do and anyone of any importance has one of these things. His first status symbol. A TV remote control.

An earworm is usually a snatch of music you can't shake out of your head. But the term can also apply to random words that pop into your consciousness and will not go away. Some time ago I was occasionally haunted by the words Petulengro, Scobie Breasley and Allis Shad which were respectively an astrologer, an Australian jockey and a type of herring. That's the thing about earworms; there's no rhyme or reason to them. A friend tells me she has been thoroughly earwormed for a few days by the name of the Hindu theologian on Thought For the Day (Radio 4): Akhandadhi das.

The chief objection to a new coal mine in Cumbria seems to be that it would embarrass Britain and send out all the wrong signals in the build-up to the UK hosting the COP26 climate-change conference in Glasgow in November. I foresee two scenarios. The first is that the mine will be cancelled irrevocably in the coming weeks and the UK delegates at COP26 will bask in the reflected glory of this great victory against fossil fuels. The second is that the Government will order a review which will drag on until the conference is over, the delegates have gone home and, well, you can guess the rest.

Scientists have unveiled a “pillcam” camera so small that it fits in a capsule and can be swallowed to film tumours deep inside a patient. It is all very impressive unless you happen to remember the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage in which an entire submarine and its crew were shrunk to microscopic size to find a way through blood vessels and repair a scientist's injured brain. So you didn't only get a tiny submarine in your head. You got Raquel Welch, too.