Peter Rhodes on whingeing, looking under stones and sexting in the days of flash powder

He drove councillors to mass resignations but uncovered issues which were upheld by an auditor. He remínds me of Hugh, a reader who retired in the 1980s and spent many happy hours studying his own local council’s accounts. He, too, discovered a string of irregularities.

The media tended to refer to Hugh as a watchdog but he was modest about his digging. “Honestly,” he told me, “there’s nothing to it. Every time I turn a stone there’s something nasty underneath.”

I am sure we all wish the Government well in its imaginative plan to create a Water Restoration Fund by imposing unlimited penalties on polluting water companies. So the companies must pay the fines and then pay for improvements. Guess who really pays? (clue: look in a mirror).

In a sparky column marking the 50th anniversary of the mobile phone, national treasure Libby Purves makes the cautionary point that without a smartphone “you are less likely to send a picture of your private parts to a beguiling stranger.” Quite so.

In ye olden days before smartphones and sexting, if you were remotely interested in sending the beguiling stranger an intimate photo, you would need a box Brownie, magnesium flash powder, a roll of film and a steady hand. Having taken the image, you’d have to wait a fortnight for the local chemist to develop the film. He or she might well refuse to hand over your prints on the grounds of public decency. Even if you got the prints, your only means of delivery to the beguiling stranger was by entrusting obscene material to envelope and postage stamp – a clear breach of the 1908 Post Office Act.

Even assuming everything went to plan, given the primitive state of indoor photography in those days, the beguiling stranger might well wonder why someone had sent them a picture of the last turkey in the shop.

Thanks to the smartphone, the above process now takes a nano-second of your time (although the shame, humiliation and regret period is much the same).