Peter Rhodes: Happy birthday, Vera

OUR changing language. A reader asked his insurance company for more time to sort out a claim. The manager wrote back: "I have diarised the matter forward to next week."

YOU may smile but before you know it, gibberish such as "diarised" gets forwardly dictionarised and sometimes even thesaurusified and before you know it is in common userage.

ON the continuing theme of nitrogen emissions causing a glut of nettles, a reader writes: "I used to eat boiled nettles as a lad. I am now 74 and still a pain in the neck." Proof: you are what you eat.

WELL done, Dame Vera Lynn, on reaching 100. The singer's centenary will doubtless be an excuse for yet more concerts in which people will dress up in uniforms they are not entitled to wear, sing songs they can't begin to understand and perpetuate the myth that the Second World War, far from being all bad, was a jolly sort of musical event. The rest of Europe, watching the Brits singing about hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line, can only despair.

SOME years ago, hurtling recklessly along the edge of an ice ravine on a snowmobile, I hit a rock. The snowmobile flew one way and I went the other. In my brief flight I saw I was heading for a snowdrift and thought: "Mm, that looks a nice, soft place to land." It was as hard as iron. The impact rattled every tooth and I came home from Canada with a leg so swollen that my baggy corduroy trousers were skin-tight. How could this accident have been prevented? By not pratting around on snowmobiles at 20 degrees below zero in the High Arctic. If you choose to do daft, edgy things in dangerous places, do not complain when it all goes pear-shaped. So while we rejoice that a load of tourists and a BBC film crew survived the lava of Mount Etna a few days ago, the moral is obvious. If you wish to avoid volcanic eruptions, stay away from volcanoes.

I WAS buying a widget from an online store I have used many times. But this time it wanted to know whether I was a new or existing customer. As soon as it twigged I had shopped there earlier, it demanded my password which I have, of course, long forgotten. So the system emailed me a new password. But the moment I tried to use it, up came the message: "This connection is not secure. Logins entered here could be compromised." Well done, the geeks. They have scared off another customer.

I HAD a Freemasonish sort of moment, reading the many comments on George Osborne becoming editor of London's Evening Standard, posted on the journalists' website, Hold the Front Page. One comment consisted of four squiggles in Teeline. It was a pungent and obscene invitation to go away, George. It could be read only by the dwindling band of us who still use shorthand.

CRITICS say Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, is not qualified for his new job at the Evening Standard. To be fair, he wasn't qualified for his old job, either.