Peter Rhodes on quarantine in comfort, dogged photography and the secret age of a star

Brexit Day + 3. Are we all alive and well? Medicines run out yet? Supermarket shelves empty?

Australia is to quarantine its citizens returning from coronavirus-struck China with a spell on Christmas Island. The UK may not have easy access to such tropical islands but we do have some wonderful uninhabited specks of land off the west coast of Scotland. They have white-sand beaches, excellent fishing and peat fires simply made for imbibing what Alistair Cooke famously described as “the twilight wine of Scotland”. There are many worse places to spend a fortnight at the Government's expense.

It's more than 20 years since I interviewed Nicholas Parsons on the phone, in the days before Google and Wikipedia. Hanging up I realised I hadn't asked the great man his age. “You won't get that,” said a colleague. “It's a state secret.” Sure enough, in all our office reference books and newspaper cuttings there was not a hint about his age. It is a strange thing but while everybody knew when Nicholas Parsons turned 96, hardly anybody knew when he was 76.

What was the point of special cutlery for eating fish? I asked the question some days ago and I am most grateful to one of my younger readers, a lady of 91, for what may be the definitive answer. Her grandfather was a butler in Scotland in the early 1900s. His explanation was that until about 1913 cutlery was made of iron, steel or even wood and absorbed the taste of fish. The problem was solved in grander houses by using separate cutlery for the fish. The old man, who died in 1943, said the invention of stainless steel in 1913 made fish knives and forks redundant but the tradition continued, possibly through simple snobbery.

I am still perplexed by the Irish premier Leo Varadkar's pre-Brexit view that: “I don’t think the UK has yet come to terms with the fact it’s now a small country.” Au contraire, as they say in Kerry. Despite half a century of politicians, academics and teachers trying to kid us that we are a small, clapped-out, post-imperial basket case, the UK remains satisfyingly large. It has the fifth biggest economy in the world, as calculated by the UN, and will soon have the biggest population of any western European state, at 70 million. While global importance and cultural influence are hard to measure, a clue is that Mr Varadkar made his comments in English.

If you're in need of a little flumpy-February uplift, have a look at one of my favourite websites, Brownhills Bob, and its 2020 Photo Competition which has some of the best pictures of kids, dogs and countryside I've seen for a while. One question is unanswered. How do you get three Staffies to sit still at the same time? brownhillsbob.com/2020/01/26/new-year-2020-photo-competition-results-are-in/