Envy, apathy and a full belly

THINKING more about the cyber-researched and personalised advert I received from Triumph bras, it occurs to me that a few days earlier I was indulging the guilty pleasure of looking at pictures of old Triumph Heralds. You have to think as a computer thinks.

HAS the penny dropped yet? Have you at last twigged the one essentially Cornish ingredient missing from 18th century Cornwall, as depicted in the BBC's latest blockbuster? The answer is, of course, torrential rain. What do you call Cornwall without a cagoule in sight? Poldark.

AND now the computer takes over from telly. All six episodes of the new Peter Kay comedy series Car Share were available on iPlayer before being screened on BBC1. It is clever, lovely, life-affirming stuff, as you would expect from a national treasure like Kay, and the casting of unknown Sian Gibson as the shop worker sharing Kay's car, and morphing from plain lass to rock chick as she fantasises about being a pop star, is perfect. I loved the mis-heard confusion over who had been assassinated . Was it JFK or Geoff Capes?

TWITCHER alert. I am by now fully aware, thanks, that the greater spotted woodpecker in yesterday's column is actually the great spotted woodpecker. I suddenly fancy a cider.

MORE birdy stuff. I am just back from a feather forage, gathering the raw materials for Mrs Rhodes's medieval potato hawk. When Raleigh returned from America all those years ago laden with these muddy, lumpy chunks of carbohydrates, the Tudors spent some time thinking what to do with them. One solution was the potato hawk. You stick feathers into a potato and suspend it about a foot above your freshly-sown seeds on a length of string attached to a whippy twig. It jiggles in the breeze and birds, mistaking it for a predator, leave your seed beds alone. More than 400 years on, it still seems to work. The strange part is that seed-eating birds are so dim that they actually confuse a feathered potato with a hawk. Doesn't say much for a vegetarian diet, does it?

I AM not wealthy and I never expect to be. But I don't envy the rich in their automobiles and I certainly don't hate them. Yet this election is being fought by all three parties as a war on wealth. Every step on the road to the New Jerusalem is to be paid for by taxes on mansions, taxes on big pensions, outlawing tax avoidance (which has never been a crime) or stripping benefits from those deemed rich enough to manage without. The message to anyone earning over , say, £50,000 a year is not that they have done well, but that they have done something terribly wrong and must pay for it. You can't build an economy on envy.

NOR can you build a society on apathy. With millions of Brits not even on the electoral role and kids stunningly ignorant of politics, a reader recalls the landmark 1945 General Election. In the old Black Country constituency of Bilston the Labour candidate was Will Nally. "We lads entered into it with great enthusiasm," recalls my reader. He and his mates "liberated" dustbin lids and roamed the street, beating them like drums and chanting their electoral slogan: "Vote for Nally – He'll fill your bally." Sure enough, in the the great Labour landslide, Nally was elected.

"IT'S hot and upbeat, like the jauntiest level of Hell." Australian comedian Deborah Francis-White on Radio 4 this week, explaining her reluctance to return to her native Oz.