Best of Peter Rhodes - March 5

The best of this week's Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.

BEAUTIFUL images from the Paris pret-a-porter fashion show this week where flared, tight-waisted dresses echo the glamorous New Look of the 1950s. A waist? It's something women used to have. In the old days.

WHY such secrecy over the reasons for returning Jamie Bulger's killer, Jon Venables, to prison? Probably because of the embarrassing fact that 17 years of the most expensive and intensive rehabilitation ever lavished on a British child have produced a vicious, foul-tempered drug user. Justice Secretary Jack Straw says it is "not in the public interest" to give details. Yeah, right.

I WAS attempting to download a new virus scanner into my computer when the download suddenly stopped with the message: "Something bad happened in the application." Something bad? What sort of pre-school gibberish is this? If a computer program is going to talk to me like a four-year-old, by golly I will treat it like a four-year-old. I made it sit on the naughty step (aka the recycle bin) for three days, after which it installed itself perfectly. Firm but fair.

BURNING question of our age: are reversing sensors on cars the soft-close loo seats of the motoring world? I have a theory that soft-close loo seats are creating a generation of citizens who automatically drop the loo seat without thinking of the consequences. These infernal devices may ultimately cause a global pandemic of cracked pans. In the same way, reversing sensors on cars make drivers lazy. A Freedom of Information request to Cambridgeshire Police on how many cop cars had been involved in collisions revealed this sad little incident: " Police officer reversed into another police vehicle. It is alleged that the parking sensors failed."

JOHN Prescott was one of the Gang of Four who stood up last week to assure us that Gordon Brown was not a bully. This week it was revealed in the Commons that 13 complaints of bullying and harassment had been made from Prescott's former department. Prezza is best known to us newspaper folk for his comments to a Welsh reporter during the 2005 General Election. He told the hack: "Bugger off - get on your bus, you amateur." What a charmer.

THINGS worrying Daily Telegraph letter writers this week

1. Worm casts sticking to the lawn mower

2. Leaves on the lawn

3. Rooms getting smaller through repeated layers of paint and wallpaper.

Early retirement has a lot to answer for.

SCIENTISTS in Brisbane, Australia, have been watching skateboarders to discover something we males have always known. When beautiful women appear, we show off. The testosterone level rises and two things happen. Firstly, the poor lad thinks his skateboard has wings. Secondly, he gets it into his head that, if he can only pull off a double backward flip, the beautiful female will bear his children. A million years of evolution have given us blokes some very strange ideas. The scientists noted a lot of "crash landings" when women were around. Not to mention crushed egos.

A REPORT by the Government's "rural tsar" Stuart Burgess says 200,000 youngsters are deserting the countryside every year. He blames a lack of affordable housing and a dire shortage of broadband internet connections. Come off it. Kids were fleeing their villages for the cities long before house prices soared or anyone had heard of the internet. There is no mystery to it. Cities are amazing, buzzy and brilliant and full of exciting, free-thinking people. Villages are toe-curlingly boring and stuffed to their worm-riddled attics with pompous incomers, feudal hearties and inbred peasants with an unhealthy interest in killing things. As the First World War song put it: "How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And that was 90-odd years ago.

AND back at the radio quiz:

Q. What's 11 times 11?

A. I don't know.

Q. I'll give you a clue. It's two ones with a two in the middle.

A. Five?

RIGHT. So you've been selected for a place in the studio audience at one of the three pre-election debates between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. The rules strictly forbid any clapping or booing. Clearly, this is a moment to use your imagination. I look forward to sceptical choruses of long, noisy and very wet raspberries.

I COULD never have voted for him but I would never want to live in a country which did not produce people like him. Farewell, Michael Foot.

IN GEORGE Orwell's novel Animal Farm, the farmyard creatures are brainwashed with the chant: "Four legs good, two legs bad." But when the ruling pigs forge an alliance with men, the chant suddenly becomes: "Four legs good, two legs better." The animals accept it without question and carry on grazing. I was reminded of that this week when two pieces of age-old medical advice were suddenly turned on their head. Coffee, long blamed for heart palpitations, is suddenly thought to protect the heart. Aspirin, studiously taken by thousands to ward off heart attacks, is now denounced for causing internal bleeding. Last week it was coffee bad, aspirin good.This week it's coffee good, aspirin bad. Don't ask questions, just keep on grazing.

GREAT Britain sent a team of 52 athletes to the Winter Olympics. It cost the taxpayer £6.5 million and our boys and girls won precisely one medal. This has prompted that great Olympic hero Sir Steve Redgrave to suggest creating Britain's first long-track speed skating venue. Here's another, much better, idea. Don't throw good money after bad.

MIND you, £6.5 million per medal is a snip. If Team GB hits its target of 35 medals at the £8.8 billion 2012 London Olympics, that'll be a shade over £251 million per medal. No, I didn't vote for it either.

I AM sure we all wish every success to Dr Tahir ul-Qadri, an Islamic scholar from Pakistan who claims that his new 600-page fatwa completely dismantles the case for al-Qaeda's campaign of suicide bombings. But some of us wearily recall the 1970s when priests and pundits queued up to declare that IRA murders were incompatible with the Catholic faith. No-one could argue with the logic and yet the IRA carried on killing for another 25 years. The sad lesson of history is that religion is much better at starting mayhem than stopping it.

WOMEN can be so ungrateful. A reader moans: "I booked a table for our 50th wedding anniversary and then my wife told me she hates snooker."

OUR changing language. A new poll reveals the term for an employee having a private breakdown in the loo. A bog shaker.