Time to shuffle Bolessssss over threat to Green Belt

I HAVE no idea how much Virgin has spent on its prestigious new "Unleash Your Mojo" brochure, with its sultry promise that a week or two in the sun will perk up your libido. I didn't get past the opening Welcome section which contains two glaring grammatical errors. Call me picky but if they don't know how to write plain English what else don't they know?

ONE of my younger readers admits: "What worries me is that I'm 65 and I'm still only sure of some things, while lots of younger people are sure of everything."

TAKE 48-year-old Nicholas Edward Coleridge Boles, for example. Nick Boles, as he prefers to be known in politics, is the super-confident Tory planning minister who terrified countryside lovers a couple of years ago with two little words; he declared the Green Belt was safe - "for now." One small side-effect of this veiled threat is that I cannot see Boles's name in print without imagining the final S turning into a long pantomime hiss of disapproval: Bolessssss. Anyway, the minister proudly unveiled new measures this week to enable developers to bypass councils which are deemed to be taking too long to grant planning permission or imposing "unreasonable" conditions. Bolesssssss says this will "save the industry precious time and money." It is hard to imagine the construction industry having a more loyal and enthusiastic supporter in Parliament. However, the job of a government and its ministers is not solely to bump up the GDP at all costs. It is also to cherish and protect a land which has been 1,000 years in the making. No-one gives them the right to extinguish local democracy in order to carpet England with housing estates and concrete. Memo to Dave: time to shuffle Bolessssss.

IN A landmark case, an Afghan man has been granted asylum in Britain because he has renounced Islam to become an atheist. He fears he would be killed if he returned to his homeland. After Fusilier Lee Rigby was murdered on the streets of Woolwich, what makes him think he's any safer in England than in Kabul?

A READER writes: "Yesterday I accidentally drove over Dave while getting into the car." Turns out Dave was the name of the sat-nav which had served him and his wife loyally for 10 years. They miss his voice. He wonders whether other readers give their sat-navs names.

HERE'S something that could never possibly happen in a democracy. You get a demand to pay £145.50 towards somebody else's pension. If you don't pay you will get a criminal record and could end up in prison. It is happening. The BBC is taking £740 million of TV licence payers' money to help plug a £2 billion hole in its pension fund. The equivalent of five million viewers' fees will be spent not on making programmes but to ensure BBC employees spend their retirement in rather more comfort than most of us can expect.

SO what do the following countries have in common: Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Hungary, Iceland and Holland? They're among the 14 countries in the world which once had TV licences but had the good sense to scrap them. The sooner we do the same, the better.

ACCORDING to the poet Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP. Which probably explains why Heidi Thomas, writer of the 1950s BBC drama Midwives, insists that the series will be a bonking-free zone with only "chaste romances." Quite right. Before 1963 babies were found under gooseberry bushes. It was a sensible arrangement and everybody was much happier.