Peter Rhodes on a chilling tale of cyber-hysteria, a fine Cold War movie and the forgotten delights of river fish

AS the temperature rises in Britain's stand-off with the Kremlin over the Salisbury nerve-agent incident, it feels as though we could slip back into the Cold War. To prepare yourself, try catching the 2015 movie Bridge of Spies, a brilliant evocation of the era of espionage, spy swaps and Checkpoint Charlie. What a fine film it is. But then, if you have the Coen Brothers writing, Steven Spielberg directing and Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance in the lead roles, what could go wrong?

HERE'S a cyber-vigilante tale to chill your blood. A teenage driver was savagely beaten up by two older men in a car park near Oswestry. Shortly before this attack, the teenager had accidentally over-revved his car engine, frightening some children. After that trivial incident, social-media hysteria took over. Shrewsbury Crown Court heard that "a Facebook message said there had been an attempt to abduct two girls and a boy." And that's why the two men hunted down and attacked the teenager, leaving him with a dislocated shoulder, bruised eye, and a chipped tooth. In court, both men accepted their victim had been entirely innocent. One got a suspended sentence, the other was ordered to do community work. And the rest of us have a grim lesson on the irresponsible use and uncontrollable consequences of social media. In the old days the mob would scream "witch!" and some innocent old lady would be burned. Today, an utterly baseless cyber-whisper of child abuse is all it takes to unleash the same savagery. Technology changes but the mob is still with us.

GOUJONS of plaice for tea. I wonder if, in the entire history of humankind, anyone has died from a surfeit of goujons. They are one of those rare foods (Pringles and prawn cocktails also spring to mind) that you fancy you could eat for ever.

MY goujon feast reminded me of a press trip to a remote restaurant in a tiny cove right at the tip of northern Scotland. The first course was morsels of prawns, shrimps, mussels, winkles, langoustines and crabs, all stirred into a glorious emulsion of double cream and whisky. When this starter from heaven was all gone, we asked for more. They brought more. And more. And eventually they abandoned plates and brought the huge stainless-steel mixing bowl from the kitchen with six spoons. We scraped that bowl until it shone, and could still have eaten more.

GOUJONS, incidentally, is a French word for the small bottom-feeding fish we call gudgeon. In great-grandad's day, a cheap working-class luxury was a fry of gudgeon, caught and cooked from your local river in a matter of minutes. Sadly, like so many delicacies in this fast-food age, it has faded from memory. The phrase "a fry of gudgeon" produces only one result on Google in English, but several references in Polish. Unlike us, the Poles still cherish coarse fish. Do not carp.