Here’s the good news. Catching the common cold protects you against Covid-19. The bad news? If you recover from the cold and you come into contact with a carrier a couple of weeks later you’ll likely still catch it.

Some clever scientists at Glasgow University discovered this in their labs, infecting cells with rhinovirus – that’s the cold, I’m pretty sure – and with Covid.

Using some cunning jiggery-pokery too difficult for me to understand, they showed that the cold beats the coronavirus in a square go. So, the more colds and dripping noses, the lower the R rate, reducing the number of new cases.

I don’t know what this does in the fight against the pandemic but I’m pretty sure it’s excellent news for the makers of Kleenex.

Kiss this guy

Now I know what a mondegreen is. It’s when you mishear a word or phrase that makes sense to you, but is totally incorrect. For years, I thought Jimi Hendrix in Purple Haze sang: “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” Disappointingly, he kisses the sky.

Mondegreen was coined in 1954 by an American writer called Sylvia Wright. When she was young, her mother would read to her from the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Her favourite verse began with the lines, “Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands / Oh, where hae ye been? / They hae slain the Earl Amurray, / And Lady Mondegreen.” Except the lady survived. It was the poor earl “laid him on the green.”

So, it’s “money for nothin’ and chips for free”, as Dire Straits should have put it and just to continue the mondegreen munchies, “We built this city on sausage rolls”.

During the week, vaguely listening to the radio, I heard someone saying that we needed more psychopaths in Scotland. What? It took a few seconds to realise the discussion was actually about the lack of dedicated cycle routes.

There’s also the reverse mondegreen, when the person saying it gets the word wrong and the audience is so cowed in the presence of greatness that they’re afraid to question or correct. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida taught for almost 20 years at the University of California Irvine (which I’ve visited, but that’s another yarn) and as English wasn’t his first language there was sometimes confusion. In one lecture to a devoted and reverent audience he spoke for an hour about cows, while the students in the seats took copious notes.

There was a short break while Derrida went behind the scenes, returning just to say: “I’m told it is pronounced ‘chaos’.”

He was the father of deconstructionism so perhaps this was an active example. Or it could be an apocryphal story.

Watched to Death

IN lists of the best Scottish films, or films made in Scotland, the usual suspects always pop up. Braveheart, Gregory’s Girl, Trainspotting and, going much further back, Whisky Galore and The Wicker Man. But there is never any mention of one of the most thoughtful and intelligent – and star-packed – films almost entirely shot in Glasgow. Death Watch. It has Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Max von Sydow and it was made by the masterful French director Bertrand Tavernier in 1979 in a blighted and grim city.

It’s a hard watch, a kind of sci-fi movie about the last days of a terminally-ill woman, Schneider, who is followed around by a man, Keitel, who has, unknown to her, a chip implanted in his head and is filming her every move. And it’s being broadcast to a TV-watching public, a foreshadowing of future reality TV shows.

It also has a young Robbie Coltrane, too, in his first real film role, and a fleeting and uncredited appearance from one of the coolest and most watchable actors on the planet, Bill Nighy. Reason enough to watch it.

Pass the test of time

WHAT is the fuss about a vaccine passport? For years you’ve needed proof of vaccinations against diseases such as yellow fever, rubella and cholera to visit some countries and there’s so much information held on us – date of birth, National Insurance number and the rest – that another bit or byte isn’t going to herald in a police state.

You need a licence to drive a car, hire a chainsaw, show ID for your supermarket delivery if it includes booze, or, if you’re lucky enough to be young and feel like a drink when they reopen, you’ll need to show Government-issued credentials to prove you’re of age in the pub.

I’m much more concerned about the new blue, French-designed, Polish-printed, carbon-neutral British passport. I have a propensity for losing and/or destroying items. There was the iPhone I dropped into the toilet, and the other one I put through the washing machine after returning from a French beach.

On Thursday, I put a pair of trousers and other items through a 90-minute wash cycle at 40 degrees forgetting, until it dropped out of a pocket when I emptied the machine, that I had included my burgundy-coloured EU passport which I had needed for the Morrisons delivery. It was rather damp and slightly bent but nothing was erased, and it all remained as was after a bit of ironing.

Will the blue one survive the test? We need to know.

Black and white TV

Russia entered the Scottish election last week when our state broadcaster, the BBC, decided the news line was that Alex Salmond and George Galloway couldn’t be fit to stand because they worked for RT, the Russian state broadcaster.

Foreign affairs are, of course, a reserved matter to the UK Parliament, but never mind.

The BBC’s state-ness was confirmed when I switched on at the sad news of Prince Philip’s death, to catch not just wall-to-wall Nicholas Witchell but all of the presenters and reporters dressed in black. They’re meant to be journalists, not state mourners.

On the offence

He was a witty and relaxed public speaker when he was allowed to be, and he would have made a decent if controversial stand up comedian The late Prince Philip was funny as well as offensive, and isn’t that what comics are supposed to be?

“It looks like a tart’s bedroom,” he said, when shown plans for Andy and Fergie’s house in Sunninghill Park. About his daughter Anne, the Princess Royal, he quipped, “If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she’s not interested”.

If you’ve ever been in Oban you’ll recognise the truth in this comment to a local driving instructor. “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?”

And when he said to the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, “It’s a pleasant change to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people” he was, perhaps, trying to be ironic? Naw, probably not.

His acerbic comment on marriage is rightly in Wikiquotes “When a man opens a car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife”.

Of his role as consort to the monarch he said, “Constitutionally I don’t exist.” Neither does he now physically. Although as he claimed that he wanted to be reincarnated as a particularly deadly virus we may not have had the last of him.