As good as a towel: Peter Rhodes on box files, a peer's resignation and millennial misery

Even in this computer age, with half my documents in the cloud and the rest on memory sticks and chips, the humble £3 box file is as indispensable as Ford Prefect's towel in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ("about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.") Granted, you cannot dry yourself on a box file or lie on it in the sun but you can round up all those important letters cluttering up your drawers and mantelpiece and know they are safe and secure in one place. Three quid well spent.

THE crucial thing is not to lose your box file. I keep mine with the towels.

DING, dong, the dreadful peer has gone. Lord Andrew Adonis, the unelected, unaccountable despoiler of the English countryside, has resigned as head of the Government's Infrastructure Commission. Excellent.

ADONIS wants to be free to campaign for a second EU referendum. He thinks remaining in the EU is a good idea. Mind you, he also thinks HS2 is a good idea. His solution to Britain's transport problem is to pour thousands more commuters into London each day by driving a new railway 100 yards wide through some of the most beautiful English countryside, demolishing properties and farms and blighting thousands of homes. And to what end? To cut 20 minutes off the time from London to Brum. The Adonis cure for our housing shortage is equally brutal, to concrete over half of southern England, plonking a million new homes in a vast arc from Oxford to Cambridge. He is one of those people who is entirely driven by the notion of "growth," who genuinely cannot understand that most of us would rather spend 20 minutes longer on the train than rip up a single ancient forest. The "growth" brigade's only strategy is to lay more concrete, erect more buildings and allow Britain's population to grow to 80 or 100 million. There has to be a better way.

SOME accuse Adonis of self-importance. I couldn't resist counting the length of his resignation letter. It took him just under 1,000 words to say goodbye.

MEANWHILE, Theresa May's New Year cabinet reshuffle makes no mention of a minister for population. It is the single biggest issue facing the UK, yet no-one dares mention it.

ONE of my New Year resolutions is to be kinder to the generation usually described as millennials, hipsters or snowflakes. But I'm putting it on hold for a while, having stumbled across a report on an assortment of twentysomethings moaning about how they cannot afford to get on the property ladder. One is described as "a part-time writer and illustrator" while another says she is a "marketing and lifestyle blogger." Listen, kids. These are not jobs. They are, at best, hobbies. This explains why the building society manager's eyes do not light up when he gets your mortgage-application form. Get a proper, full-time job, put in all the overtime you can, save a few grand and try again.