Peter Rhodes on voter ID, vanishing chocolate flakes and the curious world of best-sellers

Thanks for your examples of nursery-babble that pass into a grown-up family's language. A reader admits that he and his daughter, who is now in her 40s, still refer to single-storey homes as bunglehouses.

“It hardly seems worth coming out of lockdown now". Twitter user, responding this week to the news of a sudden shortage of Cadbury 99 chocolate flakes for sticking in soft ice cream.

I assumed the above tweet was a joke. But you never know. We have become such a sensitive, quickly-offended and easily-bruised nation that, for all any of us know, some individuals could be genuinely distraught and seeking therapy over the 99 crisis. There is no worse dilemma than being with someone who is describing their worst trauma when you think they're telling a joke.

Apparently the 99 shortage is partly the result of most of our supplies being made in Egypt. This is a grim warning of what happens when a nation allows its most precious strategic commodities to be outsourced.

Thankfully, we have good old British ingenuity to fall back on. If flakes are not to be had, what else can we stick in our soft-scoop ice creams? Suggestions welcome. Keep it clean.

The veteran journalist Simon Jenkins says the Government should scrap plans to issue ID voting cards to the estimated 3.5 million people with no other form of photo-ID. He says it would be “another step, however modest, towards the regulation and surveillance of daily life, an obsession of governments worldwide since the digital revolution.”

I'd agree with him if the voter ID card morphed into a full-blown state ID card, to be produced at the whim of any passing cop or town-hall minion. But as a simple “voting card” to be kept safely at home and produced on election days to ensure you are the voter you claim to be, what's the harm?

Frankly, I'm more concerned at the rapid spread of app-land, the process which, day by day and with no democratic oversight, is making life without a smartphone almost impossible. Smartphones are the ultimate state-control and corporate-snooping devices and yet we allegedly freedom-loving Brits are snapping them up like sweeties. Surveillance? We love it.

My thanks to those of you who have bought my new book, Bloody Adjectives (Brewin Books), thus unleashing one of the great mysteries of our time – the Amazon best-seller rankings. In the morning of the first day my book had soared to the dizzying height of 74,876th most-sold book on Amazon. By the afternoon of the next day it had slumped to 130,753th. Yet by the following morning it had climbed to 98,974th best-selling. I suspect a computer has been at work.

Intriguingly, among the books listed by Amazon next to my book and described as “products related to this item,” there's a volume entitled Desperately Seeking Sex & Sobriety. Clearly, a computer with imagination.