The mystery deepens

It’s a mystery of the deep which has baffled the finest French maritime scientists and climatologists for more than 30 years. Where do these Garfield telephones which keep being washed up on the coast of Brittany come from?

One theory is that a container of them fell overboard in the Channel some time in the 1980s and currents have pushed them southwards since. However, such a loss has never been reported to the maritime authorities, which may not be unusual as hundreds of containers slip overboard each year, but as owners are responsible for recovery costs they often don’t admit to it.

Containers go straight down to the seabed and break open over time, so there will be thousands of them down there with goodness knows what inside. Lord Lucan possibly.

These troublesome and persistent yellow and black Garfields, moulded as the cartoon character, are made of apparently indestructible plastic and they don’t float, so they have inched – or millimetred – towards France, pushed by the currents for three decades to the beaches. And, no, they don’t still work.

It’s possible – my theory – that the washed-up ones are pirate copies of the real thing, given there’s no serial number, stamp or other identifier on them. Certainly another damaging, if rather quirky, reminder of the plastic pollution in our oceans and seas.

Headline news on your doorstep

Like all good, lasting myths the one about the Press And Journal and the Titanic – “Aberdeen man drowns at sea” – has been impossible to scotch, even after more than 100 years ... and even although it isn’t strictly, or even a little, accurate. In fact, the headline in the Aberdeen Daily Journal, as it then was, blandly stated: “Aberdeen people on the Titanic”. But the myth will never perish.

I can vouch, however, that when commemorating Charlie Chaplin the headline (it may have been in the weekly paper, my memory isn’t what is was) said “Nairn was famous comedian’s favourite holiday resort”. I was in Nairn at the time, doorstepping a paedophile priest, so I swear it’s true.

Great headlines are immortal. A favourite of mine, long ago from The Guardian when it was worth reading, was “Queen in riot at Palace.” Sadly not about Her Maj and Phil having a bust-up over his wayward driving, but Scottish forward Gerry Queen in a punch-up at Crystal Palace. Then there’s “Super Caley go ballistic Celtic are atrocious”.

In the spirit of the P&J and Titanic, here are a few competitors from the Oldham Evening Chronicle, which died in August – the paper, not the headlines – but has now been resuscitated in an online version. “Cat saves owners as fire grips armchair”, “Braking bus shakes children”, but the real successor to the loon drowning, or not, in the Atlantic surely is “14 die in Bay blaze but Oldham man is safe”.

The new digital version its trying hard. “Oldham woman hit by tram at Oldham Mumps”, it reported during the week. The tram is said to be recovering.

Love in a cold climate

If you’re looking for a partner and you’re too hip, old, or ugly to try Tinder or Grindr then there’s a cool new dating app that has just launched. Cool? It’s pure Baltic.

It has the same swipe technology used by other sites but this one shows pictures of the contents of your fridge. Apparently, you can find a love match if all you have in the icebox is out-of-date milk, the remains of an Indian takeaway and a couple of cans of beer. Well, perhaps not. It didn’t work for me.

This is, of course, a pretty pathetic, publicity-seeking wheeze by Samsung to sell its Family Hub fridges, which are wifi-connected and come with an internal camera. Oh, and a price tag of around £4,000. The company claims that you can tell a lot about the personality of someone by judging the contents of their fridge, which, unfortunately in my case, may be true.

But why anyone would want to reveal their unpleasant secret, selfie-ing their mouldy comestibles while standing in the kitchen, and organising their life on the touchscreen of a fridge large enough to house Kathy Bates, defeats me.

When he became king

It will be 55 years tomorrow that arguably the greatest sportsman of our times, the then Cassius Clay, aged 22, beat world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, whose guts gave out and he retired on his stool at the start of the seventh round. In the run-up to the fight, where he was a 7-1 outsider, pundits chortled when Clay declared: “I was born to be great. I am great and I will be greater – the greatest.”

Three years later, having proved it, and now Muhammad Ali, he was stripped of the title in his prime for refusing conscription to the Vietnam war, famously saying: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong, No Viet Cong ever called me a n****r.” He was out of boxing for four-and-a-half years before his all-conquering return.

Will EU or won’t EU?

We may or may not leave the EU at the end of next month but, according to a recent survey, one-third of the people in France and Germany already think we have gone. Perhaps wishful thinking? It is almost certain that we won’t be participating in the May European elections and, according to surveys carried out in all 27 remaining countries, the far right is going to benefit from British absence.

The far-right ENF group (Europe of Nations and Freedoms) will be the main beneficiary, going from 37 seats to 59. This grouping hosts Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party and the Italian League party of Matteo Salvini, up from six seats to 27.

A VEXED QUESTION

Until last week I didn’t know what a vexillologist was (no, not someone who understands your unhappiness, but a flag fetishist), or that there was a charity called the Flag Institute, which manages the UK Flag Registry. Nor did I know that East Lothian had recently had its flag design registered – it looks like a Lion Rampant in a box being struck by thunderbolts. Or the stushie over the Sutherland one. The original design, which was a swooping eagle in red and yellow against the same colours, counterchanged, in the background, roused the ire of the locals, with one of the objectors claiming in evoked communism (no, me neither).

The Lord Lyon, who seems to have a say in these things, halted the process and a design was finally chosen, after a public vote. The final version looks like the kind of number stormtroopers wear on their arms, but apparently it evokes sunrises and sunsets – perhaps, if you’ve been poked in the eye with a flagpole. That’s a lot of not knowing by me to unfurl.

All of which leads to the, perhaps unsurprising, news that the sales of Union Jacks have gone up 75 per cent in the last few months. I like the Banksy quote from his work, Wall And Piece: “People who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have one.”