Wise after the event.

AND so, in a few weeks or months from now, Mr or Mrs Squeaky-Clean, a prominent citizen against whom there is not a breath of scandal, will be appointed to chair the long-delayed inquiry into child sex abuse within the Establishment. And then someone will recall that Mr Squeaky-Clean squeezed her bottom in 1967, or an old photo will emerge showing Mrs Squeaky-Clean wearing a badge with the logo: "Jim Fixed It for Me." This one could run and run.

WHY did the teenager Will Cornick murder his teacher? Because he is a psychopath. How do we know he is a psychopath? Because he murdered his teacher. Yet again a mental-health diagnosis in a murder case seems to be nothing more than being wise after the event.

SO farewell, Acker Bilk. Older readers may recall his greatest hit from back in 1961 when it was used as the theme tune for a BBC series, Stranger on the Shore. Jeanne Le Bars played a French au pair in Brighton who was trying to get to grips with English life ("So zat is 12 pennies to ze shilling?"). The series was set in a pre-decimal, pre-EU age when Britain and France were two very different places. It would be fascinating to see the series again, to show how things have changed. Sadly, like so much of the Beeb's early output, most of the episodes have vanished. Over the years, priceless BBC tapes have been either wiped or lost on an industrial scale, including episodes of Blue Peter, Not Only But Also, Doctor Who, Top of the Pops, Hancock's Half-Hour, the Quatermass Experiment and even the Beatles' last live TV performance. BBC: the British Binning Corporation.

I WAS upbraided by a lorry driver for last week's item about "avoiding homicidal truckers." He tells me what fine chaps most truckers are. He is right. It is a maniacal few who get the profession a bad name. However, when truckers behave badly it tends to be highly visible and very scary. Shortly after our exchange of emails, news broke of a trucker-v-trucker road-rage incident near Epping which involved one driver bashing the other's vehicle with an iron bar while both were travelling at 50mph on the crowded dual-carriageway. How's that for multi-tasking?

MARY Whitehouse, the 1970s clean-up TV campaigner, must spend a lot of time turning in her grave but the past few days will surely have driven her into spin-overdrive. There was a quite unnecessary use of the C-word in the gentle comedy Detectorists (BBC4), full nudity and wall-to-wall smut in Not Going Out (BBC1)and the less said about Michaela Strachan blowing into a tube in Autumnwatch (BBC2), the better. You get the impression that television producers are all aged about 15 and incorrigibly smutty.

HOWEVER, at least it's good to see the rat being treated as part of the natural world on Autumnwatch and not as the devil incarnate. We see rats showing off their climbing agility and even diving into a stream in the hunt for freshwater mussels. Rats are brilliant, intelligent, adaptable creatures capable of living on every continent and surviving on any old rubbish. Rats and humans are two of the most successful species of mammals on this planet and we share one blindingly obvious thing in common. There are far too many of both of us.

THANKS for your humorous gravestones. A friend reminds me of the most famous Wild West cemetery, Boot Hill in Tombstone, Arizona, where an inscription recalls the passing of Lester Moore, killed in an 1880s gunfight. It reads: "Here lies Lester Moore. Four slugs from a 44. No Les, no more."