Earlier this week I went to Gap and bought a coat (for me to wear) and a pair of tiny fleecy mittens (not for me to wear). I took the mittens to their wearer and wore the coat. This morning, as I was waiting for a bus, a bus I was not waiting for pulled up and a woman in it began making faces at me through the window. She was pointing to my left hand side.

I looked down at my left foot. There was nothing there - other than my shoe, foot inside. Nothing on the leg either, other than its jean. She waved her arms about - the bus was edging away. Something on my coat? Yes, yes! she mouthed. The shop!

On my coat? What? I looked, and saw. The plastic security tag hadn't been taken off and, lumpen and knobbly and bright white as it was, I had not noticed it. Nor, until the woman on the bus began gesticulating, had anyone else.

Now I would have to go back to Gap and ask them to remove it. The security tag had surely become evident to everyone (I thought), so I  must conceal it under my hand, or hang a bag over it lest passers-by accuse me, or at least suspect me of walking about in a purloined Gap garment.

I went back to Gap, and said to the very young south Asian lad behind the till, 'I have a problem. I bought this coat yesterday but you, or someone, forgot to remove the tag,' handing him the coat as I spoke. He very reasonably asked if I had the receipt. I said I didn't because the tag had only just been pointed out to me; the receipt was at home (lies, lies. I had binned it). But I could show him my bank statement on my smart phone. He removed the tag with a wonderful series of expressions passing over his face.

1. This woman with her coat/no receipt/tag story is not, erm, very young. She has a posh voice. She is trustworthy.

2. This woman with the posh voice who ought to be trustworthy is in fact an accomplished shop-lifter who relies (look how successfully!) on her age/voice/appearance to fool young salesmen like me. 

3. If I question her trustworthiness and she is kosher, I am for it.

4. If I don't question her untrustworthiness and she isn't kosher, I am for it.

I left the shop. Hope he's okay.

Peace is not the absence of war. A ceasefire is, for today…or tomorrow. The current one in Gaza was brokered by Egypt’s President Mursi, who got feathers in his cap in western eyes as a result – and instantly blew them away by awarding himself so many powers that his people are out on the streets again, protesting again. He’s given himself even more power than the military had last year.

Mursi has become Mubarak, and in the same vein as that departed leader he’s insisting that this is what has to happen to ensure that Egypt can make the transition to democracy. It goes like this: you need democracy, O my people? You want it? Good! Well, trust me. For you to get what you want (eventually,) I need to be a lot more powerful for…as long as it takes. Because I am the guarantor of democracy and all opposition. And will be so - probably for rather a long time.

Meanwhile experts, Zionist and anti-Zionist are ranged against one another in TV studios to rake over the Gaza affair: The Palestinians were bombed because they lobbed rockets into Israel, targeting civilians. And Palestinians in Gaza (civilians) were killed in large numbers by Israeli aerial bombing because Hamas was using civilians as human shields.

But given that Gaza is so densely populated, and given that Israel controls not only the land borders but the seashore as well, where were the Palestinians civilians supposed to run to? You’d be a human shield simply by living there, wouldn’t you?

Some time ago, like three years or something, I wrote an article about the difference between typing a piece of prose and using voice recognition to do it. I ended, I think, by wondering what would be going on neurologically that might distinguish the two.

Yesterday I found myself having wires stuck into various muscles to try and find out why some of them seem not to be working as they should (the effects of childhood Polio). While I wouldn't recommend this as a pastime it did give me the chance to put my wonderings to the wire-wielding neurologist.

He was rather taken up with typing up the report on what he had just learned about my useless muscles but he did manage to point out that typing is a motor activity which involves the cerebellum and motor strip (which made me think of parking lots). Speech, meanwhile, sits in the temporal region of the brain. And although these bits aren't geographically that close (in brain-distance terms) there are so many connections between them that this doesn't matter. Apparently.

Nice to know but not quite what I was asking. So if any passing neurologist happens to read this, might s/he explain - very simply, please - whether the thinking involved when one is typing (not the actual typing itself) and the thinking that precedes using voice recognition are one and the same. After all, the voice recognition software gets hysterical if you pause for thought, while when you are typing you can pause as long as you want/have time for.

Barack Obama has won (hooray) because women, Latinos and blacks voted for him. Straight white men apparently didn't - or not enough of them. Is there a danger that  one of those may pick up a gun and take a pot shot at the President to put him out of their misery?

Meanwhile it looks as if we may lose (all) our ash trees to a weird new  wind-blown spore-carried disease. A third of all trees in the UK are ash - at least I believe that is the statistic. If these trees die, so will the creatures that live on, around and under them. Believe me, resentful Republicans, this is much sadder than your loss.

In the past (and still in some parts of the world) people thought/think that earthquakes, the eruptions of volcanoes, floods and drought were the visitations of an angry deity in vengeful or at least punishing mode. 

Then people (some) began to understand that earthquakes, and the resulting tsunamis (if the earthquakes were under the sea) were caused by the crunching of tectonic plates stolidly and impassively on the move. Ditto volcanoes: the build-up of boiling magma deep underground demanding release...(NB author's anthropomorphic and sloppy writing there.)

But floods and droughts? Natural disasters, yes. But is their frequency, is their severity partly caused by humankind? With or without god, are we coming full circle? Heaven forfend.