WHEN a 12-year-old, appearing at Teesside Crown Court this week, admitted raping his teacher in an horrific and shocking attack, his identity, rightly, was not revealed.

Yet if his, or any other, teacher had been accused of the slightest impropriety, from brushing against a pupil to hurling a piece of chalk or speaking out of turn to a troublesome student, the situation would be different.

Teachers have been suspended, their names and photographs - perhaps also those of their family - plastered all over the papers, on the strength of such allegations, or less.

Yet most of these accusations later prove to be fictitious, with three quarters of court cases against teachers ending in acquittal. By then, the damage to career, reputation and nerves has often been done. Some teachers never return to work. And how many are put off entering the profession in the first place as a result?

I AM sure the family of Thai-based North-East father Michael Swanton are delighted to discover at last that he is alive and well after missing the killer wave by minutes. But who can blame them if they also want to throttle him for not bothering to call, leaving them all assuming he was dead? They only managed to reach Michael, who owns a transport company in Thailand, recently after discovering his new mobile phone number. "He's not one to keep in touch," said his father, which is something of an understatement.

MOST of us had never heard of the word tsunami before the Boxing Day tragedy. Now it is on everyone's lips, although some have mastered it better then others. One of our neighbours came round to drum up support for the "salami appeal". We didn't have the heart to correct her. Now we all call it the salami appeal. Still, as long as the money gets to where it's needed, it hardly matters.

I FIRST came across the word tsunami in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I started reading recently having figured that, after living on the planet for more than 40 years, it was about time I found out how it works.

This week, I stumbled across the answer to a question that has bugged me for 15 years. On a holiday in Mallorca we were badly bitten by mosquitoes. Everyone else, including gangs of drunken lads and lasses intent on having a good time, was bitten too. It occurred to me that being bitten by the same mosquito was no different than sharing a needle. And I knew mosquitoes spread malaria. So could they spread HIV too?

I rang the Department of Health when I got home and was told that technically it was possible but there were "no proven cases". Which wasn't totally reassuring. Thank you then to Bill, who reveals that: "Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito's own metabolism." Perhaps someone should tell the Department of Health.

SO, Prince Harry is ignorant and foolish. But haven't we all been guilty of appalling behaviour of one sort or another when we were young? So what excuse has Germaine Greer got? This intelligent university professor likened the Big Brother house to a "fascist prison". Being paid to sit around in a centrally-heated house doing absolutely nothing, while free to walk out at any time, hardly compares. Greer's worst complaint is that she was deprived of tea and sugar for 18 hours. Forgive us if we don't set up an appeal fund.