Richard Bacon brings European history home

Car mirrors, health safety, Richard Bacon and mashed potato are among the hot topics for Peter Rhodes this week.

FOLLOWING my piece on car mirrors stuffed with ridiculous amounts of expensive technology, a reader tells me he was quoted £160 by a garage to replace his broken mirror. Any advance?

CAR sticker spotted by a reader in the United States: " One Big Ass Mistake, America." The message is in the initials.

AFTER David Walliams's epic swim up the sewage-filled River Thames, a reader recalls the story of the girl who won the accolade for being England's fastest milkmaid. She said it wasn't the first time she'd had a pat on the back. (The Two Ronnies, I believe?)

IS IT an age thing? I find myself getting terribly excited about the arrival of the latest Screwfix catalogue.

A PAL who is a skilled and long-serving electrician writes, still seething from a little lecture by a health-and-safety inspector. He (the sparky) admits that when the safety zealot is not there, he slips off his safety gloves because he can make a better connection with bare hands. He also declines to wear his safety helmet in enclosed rooms.

I am reminded of an old steelworker who told me how the worst burns in his foundry were suffered by those daft enough to wear the safety gloves. In bare hands, any molten bits of metal were quickly brushed off. But molten metal landing on the glove burned through the leather and was trapped against the skin.

And from my days on the building sites I recall that you were far more likely to bang your head while wearing a helmet than bare-headed.

THE exciting world of public relations. A rather puzzling press release arrived yesterday followed, five minutes later, by this email: "I'm so sorry for any confusion caused in the last release that I sent out to you. It was in fact supposed to have details of the James Martin Electric Knife but there has been a mix-up at my end and the text in the release was for the lady's trimmer. "

Ah, that would explain the reference to the bikini line.

CLASH? What clash? A reader points out that BBC1 showing Spooks at 9pm on Sunday, coinciding with the opening episode of Downton Abbey (ITV) is not the catastrophe some viewers seem to think.

She says the simple solution is to catch Spooks from 9-10pm and then switch to the digital channel ITV+1 where Downton Abbey will start at 10pm.

The snag is that Downton is a 90-minute programme and, for some of us early risers, going to bed at 11.30pm on a Sunday is the worst way to start the working week.

DOES anyone collect Baconisms, the political thoughts uttered by Richard Bacon on his Radio 5 Live show? This week's cracker, during an interview with historian Neil Oliver, was that, as Britain was joined to the continent until 8,000 years ago: "Those people that are against European integration should realise that it's very much part of our history."

Priceless.

OUR changing language. A Guardian reader, arguing with a restaurant review, alleges that the reviewer "expensed his lunch bill."

As the Americans put it, there ain't a word that can't be verbed.

DISAPPOINTING news from the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Scientists searching for the "God particle" are now apparently doubtful that it will ever be found. The good news is that, at a mere £7,000 million, this Terry Pratchett-style search for a screamingly irrelevant subatomic nonentity isn't quite as expensive as the London Olympics. At least not yet.

WORDS for our time. Tatercrater : hole dug in mashed potatoes for gravy.