Illustrative image.

Everyone is worried about online scams but occasionally it is an old-fashioned gold theft that makes the papers with the best story so far being the theft of a solid gold, 103-kilogramme toilet from Blenheim Palace.

It is an ‘art piece’ but to many modern interpretive art is just ‘S%*!’ and that might be part of the story here. It was fully functional which implies a very small participation rate of one person at a time, I hope.

There are further questions of how do four people carry a 100kg gold item easy as it doesn’t have handles and might be a bit obvious in the car park? There was not a great demand for gold toilets when I checked eBay.

It’s hard to tell who is the silliest person here, the artist, the thieves, the tourists who pop in to spend a penny, literally, or those that thought it was a real art piece.

It is also called ‘America’ which could presumably be a reflection of the amount of manure one ex-president is spreading. Old grumps like me prefer art to involve paint or marble, not gold that glistens until it is ‘stained’.

Dennis Fitzgerald,

Melbourne, Australia