Judging from my mailbag many of you are fascinated by the origins of place names so today I am having

Judging from my mailbag, many of you are fascinated by the origins of place names, so today I am having a one-off linguistic surgery to deal with your baffling toponyms Q. I was always taught that the Welsh word Aber meant "the mouth of a river", so that Aberwystwyth means the mouth of the River Wystwyth, Aberdovey the mouth of the River Dyfi and so on. He told his teacher and they are now the subject of a classroom project I have never felt so old More from Christina Patterson. She recently told her six-year-old about our childhood games.

My best friend and I spent hours, days, months, years, dreaming up imaginary worlds. For some reason, they often involved assembling piles of furniture. For the people of Bangladesh, climate change threatens their very lives The impact is being felt now. The mangrove swamps are dying because the sea level is rising and the salt water is poisoning them. People are being displaced because of rising sea levels, caused in part by the dramatic melting of the Arctic icecaps, caused in turn by climate change.. What is going on? How much further can we go in destroying what should be for young people, years of carefree pleasure, untroubled freedoms and thrilling experiments with what it means to be alive. A Citizens Advice report revealed that young people between the ages of 21 and 25 are finding it hard to get on the property ladder, and once there are likely to struggle to keep up with the mortgage payments.

Their lives, too, it seems are being groomed into the conformity that is the death of inspiration and, in the end, of culture. What, I wonder, are they doing even wanting to be on the property ladder? Is this now the height of youthful ambition, to join the rat race and commit to a life of grinding repayments before the bloom is scarcely off your cheek? Whatever happened to those reckless days of wandering, of meeting and mating, of unworried drifting through days that so nourished the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the modest background that created space for the original thinking of Michael Faraday, the time Charles Darwin spent vacillating, undecided as to whether to be a clergyman or a doctor before, almost by chance happening on his true calling as a naturalist?All such were young once too, came together with their peers to talk and argue, some of them causing mayhem as they explored with passion and daring what was new to them. My parents, like all the other parents on the estate where I grew up, reached the peculiar decision that they didn't have to devote their every waking moment to their children's education.In the evenings, they took it in turn to babysit - sometimes in a virtual arrangement that didn't involve leaving the house - but in the daytime we were free. We had meals around a table - roast chicken on Sundays!- but my mother was no stranger to the culinary shortcut.We also had time. Or, perhaps, given the current stirrings of a ceasefire, it has already started.* Like many adults of my generation, I was brought up on Findus beefburgers and Angel Delight. It wasn't reported because it happened only in my dream.Yes, I know we're all meant to dream about the Queen, but when you start dreaming about politicians you knowsomething really is awry.In spite of a rash of studies about the differences between men and women - men like a war, women like a chat, etc - women struggle to believe that men with such big brains can be so breathtakingly puerile.Perhaps the answer is the one being mooted by the WAGs of Colombian gangleaders - a sex strike. And literature, and life, will be much, much more boring.Has Cherie gone on a sex strike?Last weekend, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took a long train journey together.

They chatted like the best of friends, but it wasn't reported. That's not necessarily a disaster, but it changes the rules.Future generations may wonder at the innocence of those who left relationships, and procreation, to random encounters They will ask about this thing called "a spark". Some have found lust, some have found company, but only one has found love.One of the chief attributes of romantic love is surely surprise. One minute, according to the troubadours (and my parents) you're wandering down the street and the next you're struck helpless by Cupid's arrow. This may or may not be the best start to an enduring relationship, but in any soulmate-seeking activitity it is, by definition, absent. Online dating is the largest portion of paid content on the web. Dating Direct has more than 3 million members in the UK alone That's a bloody big pool.