Things people don't know.

My phone pinged me a text message at 8.30 this morning. It was my eldest granddaughter, on her way to work on the tram. She had just overheard a couple talking about the Beatles. (Goodness knows where she gets the habit of earwigging on other people's conversations. I rather suspect it might be from me!) At one point they named them:

"John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and ... Harrison Ford".

She's a very music-savvy young lady, our granddaughter, and found this rather amusing. She just had to share it and so she texted me and her mum. I should think that, despite his own fame in the acting field, Harrison Ford would be quite flattered to be taken for one of the Fab Four. It''s not everyone who gets mistaken for guitar-great George Harrison.

I should not mock. I am one of those who mixes up the names of the famous all the time. Or else I simply forget their names totally. I know exactly who I mean. I can picture the star concerned. On a good day I can tell you which films they were in, although it does have to be a good day. But can I recall the name? Not until hours later! This has little to do with old age and decrepitude. I have always been like this. Neither is it helped by having a husband with total recall, one who heard a song and tells you who first recorded it and in which year.

At least the couple who misremembered the Beatles' names did not do so in the presence of the massed press. Unlike Press Secretary Spice with his faux pas about Hitler not using chemical weapons. I could almost feel sorry for him. He is rather like a very faithful, over-eager puppy, working hard to justify his master's actions. He would have done better to say nothing at all in that regard. Instead he showed probably not a surprising level of ignorance - surely he knows about the concentration camps, although he did refer to oddly them later as holocaust centres - so much as a level of thoughtlessness. His tongue clearly worked faster than his brain! I am not convinced, however, that he should be accused of anti-semitism. It was a silly comparison to make but it wasn't really holocaust denial.

He should watch The West Wing and take lessons from C.J. on how to be a good Press Secretary.

And here are some people who don't know what's going on in their lives. A Dutch man and a Spanish woman have lived all their adult lives, indeed one of them from the age of three, in Britain. They have two children, 15 and 12, born and brought up in the UK. The two children have Spanish passports but their first language is English. They both go to school here. Nobody thought there was a problem until Brexit came along and the parents decided it would be a good idea to apply for permanent residency for their children. The Home Office has turned down their application because there is not sufficient proof that the children have lived permanently with their parents. This is a hard one; children don't have employment records and tax returns. But surely there are school records and medical histories.

Who knows?