TO die suddenly and needlessly is tragic. But why is a train more tragic than a car? The train crash at the weekend was dreadful, made worse by the fact that it was probably caused by a someone bent on suicide, so desperate to die that he gave no thought to the others he took with him.

The coverage of the crash and the eight deaths has understandably been great; our shock immense.But then a man who lives in Oxford told me that he'd given up commuting by train because of other crashes and now drove into London every day, and I realised we've lost our sense of proportion.

For as a small paragraph in The Times pointed out on Monday, at least ten people were killed on the roads over the weekend, ten lives ended just as suddenly and needlessly. Nearly every day, in fact, ten people are killed on our roads, more than 300 a year.Yet these deaths are rarely front page news.

There are virtually never camera crews outside hospitals, or reporters looking concerned and sympathetic when the victims are killed in car accidents. Yet the waste is just as great, the shock as bad, the families just as distraught.We have become so immune to those deaths that most of them will barely rate a paragraph. Do we not care any more, or do we merely shrug our shoulders and accept that this is the acceptable price we pay for the comfort and convenience of the car?

SO newly single women in their 50s are apparently going out and about and - shock horror - drinking in wine bars and hoping to meet new people, maybe even a man or two, according to research for Lloyds TSB.This is news?Actually, women in their 50s have been in wine bars all along - ever since we were in our twenties.

And no-one seems to have noticed - maybe because they were expecting us to be there in our slippers and cardis.Meanwhile, men are apparently the new Bridget Joneses. According to researchers at the University of Edinburgh, single men in their 30s and 40s were more likely to have fewer friends, poorer diets, suffer from depression and have to be taken shopping by their mothers.Well yes, maybe newly divorced men might, understandably really, be in that state.

But not the rest. Whether gay or straight, most of the men I've known who have lived on their own have had immaculate households and ordered lives, were quite capable of shopping expertly and cooking well, and had plenty of friends and plenty of time for them - as well as time for themselves. Quite the opposite, in fact, from our happily married but ramshackle household.

Why kids should stay in the classroom

IT'S always seemed odd that in the run up to exams, just when students panic, finally want to work and need all the help they can get, schools send them home on study leave.Now Schools Minister David Miliband wants to end this practice after schools in Kent showed that GCSE results soared - especially among boys - when they kept them in school working instead of letting them loose.

Study leave has always been a dubious idea. Conscientious students are in danger of overdoing it and making themselves ill, while the idle look upon it as a way of leaving school six weeks early.And the ones in the middle get their books out and then spend hours drawing ever more complicated revision timetables in pretty colour pens - in between sunbathing, shopping, watching videos and ringing their friends to see how much work they haven't done either.Get them back in school. However little they do, it's probably a lot more than they'd do at home.

THE major fireworks display in Darlington was in South Park on Saturday evening. On Saturday morning, Father Christmas had paraded through town to take up residence in his grotto at the Cornmill Centre.Bad enough that the TV Christmas ads coincide with harvest festival, but when Santa arrives before Guy Fawkes, then surely the world is out of joint.THE director general of the CBI has said that in another generation, there will be no more unskilled jobs.

Depends what he means by unskilled, I suppose.But however high-flying people are, however skilled and talented, they still need cleaners, bin men, people to iron their clothes, sweep their pavements, wash their windows, assemble their ready meals. And I've yet to see a robot that can change a baby's nappy or wash a frail old lady.

But in another generation, are we sure we'll still need a director general of the CBI?LOOK at those young soldiers in Iraq, frightened but determined to do their duty. Think of all the thousands of others that went before them in the battlefields of the world in the last century. Many of them are still living with the legacy - physical and mental - of those battles.You have bought your poppy, haven't you?

CONGRATULATIONS to Paula Radcliffe and her triumph in the New York marathon, above. After her failure even to finish at the Athens Olympics, winning in New York must have been so much sweeter - and an awful lot harder.Winning when you're doing well is wonderful, but winning so soon after total disaster is a sign of real determination - and of a champion.

Dear Sharon,WHEN my brother and his friend were about eight years old, they climbed in through the tiny back window of our local newsagents and started helping themselves to sweets. They were discovered by the shopkeeper, who promptly locked them in a store room in the dark, while he went to fetch my father from the next street.My brother was terrified of the dark but my father was unsympathetic.

"That's what you get when you go where you're not meant to," he said.The police weren't involved. My father and the other parents paid for the damaged and eaten stock and the boys went without pocket money for a long time and never attempted any further break-ins.It was simple, straightforward justice.

The shopkeeper didn't lose out and my brother and his friend learnt their lesson.These days, the shopkeeper would probably be arrested and the boys treated as poor little victims. It would cost everyone a great deal of money and the only lesson the boys would learn would be that crime does pay.Mrs S. Brown, Darlington

Published: 10/11/2004