Peter Rhodes on deadly siblings, frozen fliers and black faces in Tudor England

AFTER the furore about a woman refusing to cover up her skimpy top on a flight from Birmingham, I recall that the most exposed flesh I ever saw on a flight belonged to a party of scary, drunken Scots lads flying noisily home from Corfu in armless T-shirts and skimpy shorts. It was a toasting 35C in Corfu and I was delighted to read that when they arrived at their destination airport, Glasgow, it was a brass-monkey 8C. Where's your sporran when you need it?

I SAW something strange in the garden. It was next door's cats, eight months old and already eager mousers, hunting together. They were after the same little creature in the undergrowth and as one cat moved, the other froze. You will see lions hunting in this co-operative way but most other cats, including tigers and domestic cats, are fiercely independent and hunt alone. Unless, as in this case, they happen to be related. The female of the species, as the poem tells us, may be deadlier than the male but there's nothing quite as lethal as a brother and sister on the hunt.

THERE is a well-tried formula for TV documentaries. You might call it Demolishing the Belief. It starts by telling you that you used to believe in A. However, new research shows that A is wrong and B is right, so you were mistaken all along. The weak point in this formula is that nobody believed A in the first place.

CONSIDER Skeletons of the Mary Rose (C4) which began with the assumption that we all believed that the crews of Tudor warships were entirely white. Frankly, I bet most of us hadn't given it much thought. And if we had, we'd probably think a mixed-race crew was entirely likely. For hundreds of years galley captains picked up slaves at ports all over the known world. Press gangs weren't choosy about whom they grabbed off the streets. The Trafalgar Memorial in London shows an African sailor among HMS Victory's crew. And in his poem about the Thames, Rudyard Kipling describes pre-Roman London where "Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek / Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek." Ships and ports have always been a melting pot, so why should Mary Rose be any different? And why do we seem to make more of a fuss about such things than the Tudors ever did?

A LETTER from NS&I, the Premium Bonds people, invites me to send them my full details, including email and mobile-phone, plus my NS&I number and a sample signature. Why now, after so many years? The blurb reads: "Having your full details greatly improves the security of your transactions." Really? I would have thought popping all that personal stuff in an envelope was deeply insecure.

A JOKE for printers. A reader claims he saw the word "baptize" in 16 point and asks: "Is this a large font?"