IT struck me as curious, the tale of Terry and Bert, which we covered earlier this week.

Both are homeless. Both have been living rough for some time now.

They sleep under the bridge at the Wyvern theatre and share whatever they have, snuggling up at night to keep each other warm.

Terry has nothing, but would go to the pound shop to get Bert whatever he needed.

In return, Bert made it his job to wake Terry up of a morning.

Together they forged an existence. It may not have been ideal, but there was a friendship there, and love.

But Bert wasn’t looking so well. He was getting on a bit and his eyesight was failing.

It didn’t go unnoticed - alarm bells were rung and rescuers came to find him a home and get him off the streets once and for all.

“He was sat on the gravel having a cuddle with Terry when we got there,” said one of the women who swooped in to help.

The pair are now separated for good. Bert is hoping to find permanent accommodation. Terry, meanwhile, remains homeless and heading into another winter in Swindon.

What’s curious about this? Bert is a cat. People came to save him.

Terry is human. No one came to save him.

RICH BEYOND MY WILDEST DREAMS

I’VE been enjoying a few whimsical daydreams of late about how I will spend my forgotten fortune.

A fancy car? A posh holiday? A new wardrobe of fabulous clothes... shoes, after all, you can never have too many shoes.... Ooh! I know, a dream house.

All this materialistic nonsense has been inspired by a letter from a bank (with whom I’ve never banked) informing me there was a mysterious account, of which I had no knowledge. Get in.

Clearly, the account was oozing with gold bullion and the bank wanted me to access it simply because they had no room for it all in their vaults.

Anyway, I’m not very good with money and I promptly forgot about my quest for my missing millions - until this week, when a strange thing happened.

I volunteer for a charity just around the corner from where I live and had popped in to do some, well, volunteering. And behold! There was a letter for me at said charity, addressed to me at my home address but nonetheless delivered to the wrong address... which was a handy wrong address because it’s somewhere I go to quite often.

Anyway. Such serendipity made me quite hopeful that the letter would be Good News.

And indeed - the envelope revealed a letter from the bank announcing that if I did not access my funds soon they would be transferred to the Reclaim Fund, which apparently means my fortune will be used for good causes.

At this point I decided charity might want to be at home and so I read on eagerly to see how much I’d accumulated over the years... and I can honestly say I was astounded.

It turns out I have never closed my first ever building society account, opened for me by my mum in about 1978, and had long since forgotten about it - and now it contains... 64p.

Of course if I could time travel back to 1978, my 64p would be worth a lot more than it is now. I could buy five pints of milk and still have 9p left over. Or two loaves of bread and have 8p left over.

Or I could save 21,000 times my 64p and buy a house outright. Saving 64p a day, it would take me 57 years - most of a lifetime - to own my own gaff. Sounds like a lot, huh?

But today, I would have to save it 335,000 over to buy a house. Which would take me 916 years.

And they say we’ve never been better off?

On a happier note, if I’d withdrawn my 64p in 1978 I could have bought 128 sweets from Anderton’s newsagents in the village where I grew up. Though of course, these days, I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to the dentist to deal with the damage...

MESSING WITH YOUR MIND

ANYONE who read about Oxford Phd student Laurie Pycroft’s predictions this week will still be having nightmares.

Laurie, who is beavering away in Oxford’s neuroscience department, has conjured up a terrifying spectre - and given Hollywood producers their next big blockbuster - brainjacking.

Doctors have the ability to pop implants in our heads to do all sorts of good - much like a pacemaker for the heart, these devices can be used to soothe illnesses such as Parkinson’s and possibly in the future help with depression and Tourette’s.

But what if this technology fell into the hands of the baddies? What if they were hackable by people with only evil in their hearts?

As Laurie says, it sounds like the stuff of sci-fi but science fiction is starting to appear less strange than truth. It’s no longer so far-fetched that hackers could use brain implants to create an army of automata.

Of course, there is the opposite view - that the goodies could get hold of the technology and take over the brains of all the warmongers, psychopaths, murderers and rapists in the world and bring about behavioural changes which would rid this world of all that is bad. Now imagine that.