Well, hands up who knew there was a British Leafy Salads Association? Not me. But there they were, last week, centre stage thanks to the current ‘vegetable crisis’.

For, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about, what with impending nuclear doom and the considerably more drawn out, yet equally final, threat to the world of global warming, now we must worry where the next iceberg is coming from – which seems strangely ironic. In so many ways.

Yes, this latest crisis started with the apparent shortage of iceberg lettuce, thanks to bad weather in Spain which, according to the British Leafy Salads Association, has caused ‘availability issues’. Which puts me in mind of one or two of the men I’ve had the misfortune to know over the years – all now, thankfully, someone else’s problem.

This lack of availability in the leafy salads department, prompted a ‘three icebergs per person’ directive from Tesco. Which, if we’re being pedantic, suggests six per couple. But never mind that. Three?! Good grief! I know we only number two in our household, but even on a heavy salad-eating week, we’re hard pushed to make our way through one of these before it’s drying out, turning brown and sliming its way towards the compost bin. I suspect we have worst threats to our continued survival.

Spam, spam, spam. In fact. Spamalot.

Oh for those innocent, childhood days, when the only ‘spam’ I ever encountered came in a tin. Served up sliced and fried with beans by my mother, thickly-buttered bread on the side, as a Friday tea-time treat. The ‘perfect post-nuclear holocaust survival food’ too, incidentally, though you might want to drop the bread and butter: doesn’t keep well.

Now we have internet ‘spam’ – which the OED attributes entirely to the 1970 Monty Python sketch, set in a café in which every item on the menu featured SPAM. And which, presumably, will cease to exist post-nuclear holocaust, unlike the tinned variety. Then again. Depends who’s in the bunker, I guess.

Anyway, is it just me or have fellow Mac Mail users noticed a sudden upsurge in the delivery of junk mail? Combined with a completely ineffective junk mail filter – which appears to have either forgotten, or be stubbornly ignoring, everything I’ve previously taught it – it’s clogging up my inbox to the point it has become increasingly difficult to recognise genuine emails.

Thanks to this torrent of spam, the mail I really want to see is daily flooded out by women going crazy for something ‘HOT’, any number of helpful young men variously advising me how best to rid myself of herpes, toe nail fungus and fat, how to stay firm in the willy department, get the blood flowing (ditto) and/or save my marriage with a pill (ditto ditto).

These people alone, it seems, can keep my brain young – no, wait, overcome Alzheimer’s completely – stop cellulite from ruining my life (at the very least, banish it from my butt), END diabetes entirely, and cure my erectile dysfunction (ditto ditto ditto).

I confess I’m a little worried about Arthur Reed’s assertion that I should get rid of ‘my pupa’. What? But hey! Tom – ‘a severely obese patient’ – has Arthur to thank for the ‘recipe’ that saved his life. ‘I was pronounced dead by the doctors beacuase of my weight,’ [sic] said Tom. Oh please. Anything so poorly spelled cannot possibly be true. Ask Donald.

Christine Jackson claims to have been jailed – jailed! – for discovering a hearing loss remedy. ‘Get thin in days!’ says another, clearly having no idea who she’s talking to.

Anyway, I have now, very laboriously, taken to creating a very long list of specific filters for words such as ‘harder’, ‘manhood’, ‘butt’, ‘pump’, ‘sex’ and ‘herpes’ – which, now I come to think of it, sounds like the makings of a particularly retributory game of Consequences.

Uses for an iPhone

Meanwhile, news from Manchester, that an ‘obsessed husband’ had tracked his estranged wife’s movements by hiding an iPhone under the bonnet of her Renault Clio. He’d taken the trouble to download a tracking app first, then forgotten to flick the silent button. His wife and daughter were so baffled by the sound of a ringtone coming from the car, they took it to a local garage who discovered the phone near the engine. Oh to have been a fly on THAT wall.

The report doesn’t say how long the woman endured the mystery noise before plucking up the courage to report it to a garage but I assume it was some time, given that the husband was allegedly using an iPad to track her whereabouts and would regularly turn up to places she visited. Nor does it say how old the iPhone was.

What I want to know is this.

One: How on earth did he keep the phone charged up? Is a USB socket now fitted as standard under the Clio bonnet?

Two: Why did it not melt or overheat? According to Macworld, the iPhone is designed ‘to operate correctly in areas where the temperature is between 0º and 35ºC’. Not generally a problem in the UK, I think you’ll agree. Their advice is not to leave your phone ‘in a parked car in the height of summer’ as this may ‘push the temperature outside of its operating norm’. That’s overheat, to you and me. They don’t say anything about strapping it under the car bonnet but then most people would have more sense than to try – not least because it might occur to them that the running temperature of an engine is considerably higher than 35ºC (generally between 90-110ºC, if my research is to be trusted).

Three: Did her washer bottle not run out during this time? Not once? In Greater Manchester? Maybe she doesn’t use the M60. I speak from long experience of both the M60 and a Renault Clio with a very needy washer reservoir. Under the bonnet.

And last, but most importantly, four: What was the ringtone?

Iceberg lettuces © Nevinates. Dreamstime.com