But I still dare to hope that one day, some French company will buy Severn Trent, because then they could call it Eau Eau Severn.POIGNANT news from the Ministry of Defence testing establishment at Boscombe Down. The Prince of Wales, a large balloon, was utterly deflated during a masting operation last May. Sadly, according to a parliamentary written answer, its thin skin cannot be repaired The cost of a replacement has not yet been established. Let us move quickly and quietly on.n GREAT rejoicing here last week. This, after all, as you know, is the column that supports dentists.

Here we have no truck with the professional style snobs who would rather banter with a barrister or break fondue with a brain surgeon. And now it has been announced by the General Dental Council (no toothless body this!) that dentists can now call themselves doctors. But, I hear, you say what about Doc Holliday and Dr Crippen? Well, Holliday's qualifications are disputed, and Crippen's extractions were very much a sideline Next!NICHOLAS Soames Update News just in. The Princess of Wales is, the Captain has just been told, by this man in a black cab with the partition half-open and his eyes searching for mine in the rear-view mirror, the patron saint of the London cabbie She can do no wrong. And hanging would be too good for anyone who offered her an insult Which is bad news for the said Soames. "Just let him try getting a cab after this!" shouted the Captain's man. "None of us is going to have him in the back of our cabs, none of us!" Black cab blackball! A portly figure forever forlornly gesturing kerbside, come wind, come rain! I think I'd rather be Captain Hewitt.The Captain's catch-up ServiceIN WHICH you are brought bang up to date with the rest of the week's news ...

Dutch burglars are being caught by the ear prints they leave on windows while they listen outside before breaking in ... More than 20 per cent of MPs suffer from indigestion, according to The House Magazine ... Customs officers broke a smuggling ring after finding rare cockatoo eggs hidden in a bricklayer's underpants, a court heard. Christopher Owen was searched as he boarded a flight home to Britain from Australia. The leader of the ring is believed to be an Australian master criminal called Bill Grumble ... Staying with airports, Peter Ferris, radio traffic newscaster, was delighted when his bag was the first up on the carousel after a Dublin flight into Heathrow Then he noticed a large rip. Then he discovered that police sniffer dogs had eaten all the bacon and black puddings that his mother had sent him off with ...

and, finally, would representatives of the Observer newspaper's circulation department please make their way to Elm Grove, Portsmouth, where they will find a large bundle of unsold copies of their newspaper cluttering the place up Thank you.. WOULD like to endorse what Kenneth Tuson said about the need to change to a system of insurance for health care ("A healthy dose of realism", Business, 19 November). I lived in Holland for more than 20 years and found that the insurance schemes there resulted in efficiency and fairness. There is not the gulf between public and private medicine that exists here and private insurance does not buy the ability to jump queues Waiting lists are, in any case, much shorter. Of course, those able to afford it pay more than they would in the NHS. Last year I tried to interest both Labour and the Conservatives in adopting a similar system. David Blunkett, then health spokesman for Labour, sent me thoughtful replies but was finally unable to contemplate anything other than a uniform system: "I cannot countenance any service which develops a two- or even three-tier access to the system," he wrote Virginia Bottomley's department replied that "... there would be considerable opposition to the introduction ...

of the need to take out medical insurance if one's income rose above a certain level".A solution is staring at us from across the North Sea but entrenched attitudes prevent us from taking it.G F SteeleIpswich, Suffolk. KENNETH Tuson asserts that we shall not be able to afford a health service funded by the state in the 21st century. Mysteriously, however, we shall be able to afford it if we have a system of compulsory health insurance, which will "return responsibility for funding to the individual". What is the NHS but a system of compulsory insurance? Who pays for it except the individual? The only real change which his system implies is that everyone would pay the same, thus transferring the burden from the rich to the poor: this thinking is the same as that which led to the disaster of the poll tax. D J BellWare, Hertfordshire. THERE are two minor points I would like to clarify in Geraldine Bedell's sympathetic article on me ("The woman priest who wants gay marriages", 19 November). First, it is not accurate to say that there are "very few congregations" in the Diocese of Guildford willing to accept women priests. In fact, at this time the employment prospects for women priests in this diocese are as good as in most other dioceses and considerably better than in some. Second, I applied the term "theological sophistry" to just two sentences in Issues in Human Sexuality, not to the entire document, which elsewhere contains much to commend.Revd Cristina SumnersHaslemere, Surrey.