Peter Rhodes: Is one man's privacy worth 150 lives?

CONFIDENTIALITY can kill. I recall the death of a man who hanged himself in prison some years ago. The inquest heard from a prison visitor that the deceased had talked about taking his own life, but the visitor didn't alert the authorities because that would have been a breach of trust. I was reminded of that needless tragedy this week when the inquiry into the Germanwings air disaster heard that the pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had a "psychotic episode" shortly before flying the airliner into the Alps, but his doctors were forbidden by privacy rules from informing the airline. So one man's privacy is worth 150 lives? Let's get real.

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THANKS for your emails on the old custom of naming children after military victories. One reader recalls a great-aunt called Mafeking, after the Boer War siege. Another had a grandmother, christened in honour of the first battle of the Crimean War who for her entire 91 years detested her name: Alma.

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HERE comes the sun, and with it a lesson in physics. If I light our stove, the lounge takes about two hours to warm up. If the sun shines through the windows, the room warms up in 20 minutes. Even though it's 93 million miles away, the sun is remarkably good at making things hot. This rarely gets a mention in the issue of climate change, yet Google has more than a million references to climate change and solar activity, varied enough to endorse any theory you choose to support, and demolish the ones you don't like. Something to read while toasting in your hammock this blazing March.

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THE Archbishop of Canterbury says it is not racist to worry about mass immigration, and he makes the headlines. Yet while it is moderately interesting to hear an archbishop admit migration can bring problems, it is far more interesting to hear a migrant saying the same. Keith Vaz, the Labour MP who came to the UK with his family in 1965, says the system for resettling asylum seekers is unfair. The usual line from the Left of British politics is that immigration, diversity and multiculturalism are wholly beneficial, and the more the merrier. The Left love to use words such as "cultural enrichment" and "vibrant" and try to pretend that it's a joyous thing to have lots of non English-speaking surgeons, and schools where 50 languages are spoken. But Vaz says: "The dispersal system appears unfair, with whole swathes of the country never receiving a single asylum seeker." In other words, the inner-cities have had enough, thanks. It's time to share the vibrancy around.

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AFTER the recent thread on eggcorns (old sayings, misheard and repeated wrongly) a reader asks: "What's the difference between an eggcorn and a mondegreen?" The answer is that a mondegreen is usually a misheard song lyric. The most famous comes in an old Scottish ballad, The Bonnie Earl o' Moray which contains the lines: "They have slain the Earl o' Moray and layd him on the green." In the 1950s the American writer Sylvia Wright admitted she always understood it as a tale of two murders: "They have slain the Earl o' Moray, and Lady Mondegreen." The rest is history.

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BETTER late than never. Under the headline "You Couldn't Make it Up," Private Eye this week reports the curious fact that a director of Volkswagen, the car maker accused of falsifying diesel emissions, is called Olaf Lies – as reported in this column on October 2 last year.