What wimps some of our countrymen are. It is good news that tourists stranded in Bangkok are now able to fly home, but instead of standing around moaning into media microphones in hotel lobbies, didn't any of them consider the overnight train from Bangkok to Butterworth Station near Penang airport, or onward to Kuala Lumpur?

It's a lovely journey. Thai and Malaysian railways are clean comfortable and cheap. Second class is fine: you sleep in curtained-off compartments and awake, rocking gently, to green fields, flowering trees and sharp, outcropping little hills that seem to float along the horizon. Some of those so-called airport refugees - those at least with insurance - could have seen not a problem but an opportunity.

Hamster cheek

Naked near a bathroom mirror on Monday I was dismayed to see a crumpled hamster, man-sized, return my glance. I know this hamster well. He shoots a furtive look in my direction from shop windows, car mirrors and every polished surface at which I may carelessly glance. In the microsecond that it takes to realise it's me, and to wrap the image in self-regard, this coarse-faced, diminutive, undistinguished stranger with a look that suggests he's smelt something nasty, keeps catching my eye.

The Times yesterday explains all: “A ‘body-swap' effect that convinces people they inhabit a different body from their own has been induced by scientists for the first time,” reports our science editor.

He is talking about me. For the body I feel I inhabit is tall and handsome. Being (at 5ft 8in) the tallest of six siblings, taller than both grandfathers (the grandmothers were under 5ft), all uncles, my 5ft 5in father and nearly all my cousins, I felt a giant at home.

I still duck at door-frames way above my head, and call friends who are (they protest) taller than me, things like “little Paul”. I'm good-looking too, in my head: not strikingly, but pleasantly, so. Photographs disappoint.

So I'm walking around in a body that is just a mental construct. The real me is that crumpled hamster, glimpsed from the corner of my eye. Ah well. If I'd been anything like as handsome as I thought, I'd be dead of Aids by now.

Abuse of terms

“One in 10 children suffers abuse, say experts” - The Guardian. The report in the latest edition of The Lancet did define its terms, but its authors must have known that their findings this week about the extent of “child abuse” in Britain supported such headlines. It turns out that the one-in-ten figure applies to what should properly be called “mistreatment”, not “abuse” - whereupon it becomes clear that the news is sad but unsurprising.

The devaluation of the term “abuse” is irresponsible. It should be a very strong word indeed, generally implying serious sexual interference. It can also be used for severe beatings or physical violence of a brutal kind. One can even imagine systematic mental cruelty being so described. But the more loosely we draw the strings around what we mean, the more we cheat our audience into thinking that we are making a more shocking claim than the small print later explains.

This in turn begins to rob a word such as “abuse” of its power to shock. The final victim is the child who really is abused in the full sense - for whose plight there are no words left to convey the necessary horror. Cheapening a word by borrowing it to pump up public concern, is a kind of linguistic theft. We have raped the word “rape”, beggared the word “poverty”, misread the word “dyslexic” and killed the word “genocide”. Now we are abusing “abuse”.

Badly spoken

Mr Speaker was in a pickle yesterday and knew it, I thought, while watching him make his statement on the arrest of Damian Green. Michael Martin will probably survive, but it is hardly edifying to see the top man dumping on someone junior to escape blame. It may be fair to criticise the police for not disclosing - and the Serjeant at Arms for not establishing - that the Commons authorities could have insisted on an arrest warrant; but all this would have become clear if a certain key individual had woken up to the explosive nature of what was in prospect, and summoned together his clerk, his legal advisers and the Serjeant herself.

We have most of us had experience of working for a boss who just occasionally shunts back at us something we had waved airily under his nose, and barks: “Hold on. This is not routine. This could be trouble.”

That's what bosses are for. That's what Mr Speaker Martin didn't do.

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