Best of Peter Rhodes - January 16

Peter Rhodes on passports, noisy train passengers, graduates, DVD clubs, adoption and a groundbreaking new study by the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious.

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Continuing the theme of beverage rip-offs, a reader reports paying £3.98 for two small glasses of cola at Center Parcs for his 11 and 12-year-olds. "It came from a dispenser and the trade prices must have been pennies," he says. _________________________________________________________________

Another stealth tax on our offspring. A reader has just had to renew the passports of his children aged nine and 12. Both will expire when they reach 16. The total cost of facilitating a few foreign trips over the next four or seven years, including "secure posting" was £105.

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Another reader suspects some sort of subliminal message in the cartoon in the Change4Life TV advert. As the "comfy car" goes past it is passed by a "more comfy bus." He asks: "Is our nanny-state Government trying to brainwash us into using public transport?" Perish the thought. _________________________________________________________________

And yet another reader (some days this column writes itself) points out that there are an awful lot of comparison websites these days. He wonders whether I know of any comparison websites for comparison websites.

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Prat-on-the-train alert. The Aberystwth train from Birmingham was packed so badly that if we had been pigs rather than humans, the RSPCA would have intervened.

Adding to our joy was a whining, loud-mouthed Scouser in a baseball cap. He was bellyaching about how you'd expect the men to give up their seats for the women and it was a ****ing disgrace and it did his ***ing 'ead in and how many millions in profit were the ****ing railway companies making anyway?

Here was a classic case of a man behaving badly while expecting other men to behave better. If he had asked politely someone might have given up their seat for his wife (although she seemed young and fit enough to cope perfectly well).

But from the moment he started effing and blinding, there was absolutely no question of anyone giving him an inch. He was one of those blokes who goes through life rubbing people up the wrong way and then wondering why life has dealt him such a bad hand.

I was reminded of the patient explaining his problem to his GP: "Doctor, I just can't make friends with people, you bastard." _________________________________________________________________

Spare a thought for the generation conned into believing that if they paid £20,000 for a degree from a modern university it would get them a dream job.

The jobs have dried up and 300,000 graduates will leave college this summer and join the end of a dole queue of three million.

The Government hopes to encourage employers to take on graduates as trainees on pitiful wages. The promise is that having completed the course, they will be more employable.

Remember Thatcher's Britain when ministers came up with scores of local job-creation initiatives designed to soak up kids and keep them off the dole? They were called universities.

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I can understand it when confused old duffers of my generation look into a digital camera or mobile phone and say something stupid. After all, we grew up in an age when the usual means of recording us was the box Brownie, and we all put on our best smile for that.

Today's kids inhabit a world of Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter. They know from birth that every thoughtless word they utter, every silly face they pull, can be recorded for eternity and may spread like microbes in cyberspace.

So what in the name of sanity possessed Prince Harry, while shooting a video, to refer to an Asian brother officer as "Paki". And what, if anything, is going on between the ears of Matt Lewis, a member of Conservative Future? Lewis thought it was a great hoot to dress up in blonde wig and pyjamas and go to a fancy dress party as the missing toddler Madeleine McCann.

The sheer stupidity is awesome. Did this politically-minded university student not realise that for all time he will be known as the prat who dressed up as Madeleine, and that this will blight his personal life, his career and any political ambitions he may have cherished?

They say youth is wasted on the young. So are brains.

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Damien and Charlotte Hall have been turned down as adoptive parents by Leeds City Council because Mr Hall is deemed to be too fat.

With a body-mass index of 42, he is two points over the limit set by the British Association for Adoption & Fostering. The fear is that he may suffer some obesity-related illness such as diabetes or stroke.

Now the curious part. The BAAF's own leaflet for adoptive parents says: "Disabled people are not excluded and sometimes experience of disability will be positively welcomed."

Damien Hall is fit and well. Maybe he'd stand a better chance of adopting if he was in a wheelchair.

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A friend has joined a DVD club with access to just about every movie ever made. Thus at the weekend we came to watch and re-watch Mike Leigh's gloriously rich story of Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy Turvy, starring Jim Broadbent.

It was released 10 years ago and had nothing like the acclaim it deserves. It improves with age and I suspect it will eventually be recognised as one of the best British films of all time. _________________________________________________________________

Meanwhile, an old movie buff tells me: "I've seen films from all over the world and I've been through open-heart surgery, but I've never seen anything as bad as this. I went clammy and faint. I couldn't watch it to the end." An ingrowing-toenail operation on YouTube, since you ask.

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The great thing about the internet is the helpline staffed with highly-qualified experts ready to answer your every query.

A reader tells me his neighbour rang his service provider to ask whether it was safe to use a wireless router if he had a pacemaker fitted.

"This pacemaker," inquired the helpline lad, "is it fitted on a wall?"

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And yet more research from the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious. Scientists in Texas have been studying good-looking females.

Their conclusion is: "Highly attractive women are probably able to capitalise on their desirability and continually acquire valuable resources and a higher quality long-term mate when the opportunity arises."

I wonder if these researchers have ever hear the words "gold" and "digger".

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Labour MP Graham Stringer has caused a furore by describing dyslexia as "a cruel fiction". I wonder how many dyslexics think he was referring to daily sex.

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* Has this whetted your appetite for more of Peter's gems? Make sure you read his column every day by picking up a copy of the Express & Star.