Best of Peter Rhodes - August 20

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

MEDICAL-based definitions for our time:

* Lymph. To walk unsteadily

* Microbes. Small dressing gowns

WE columnists who attempt to weave the stuff of life into something vaguely amusing face some stiff competition from the news columns. A reader sends this message: "There was a report on Tuesday about some bloke threatening to jump off a railway bridge. They sent along 34 cops, four of them armed, two police dogs and two helicopters. I haven't laughed so much in ages. Much funnier than your column."

THE leader of Australia's Labor party, Welsh-born Julia Gillard, says that when the Queen dies it would be "the appropriate time" for Oz to become a republic. Some Australians genuinely believe this is a huge issue of pride for us Brits. Some of them, I grieve to report, think that abandoning the Crown would be a fair dinkum way of sticking two fingers up at those whinging Poms. So let us spell it out once again for the benefit of our friends Down Under. Most of us Brits don't even know what a republic is. Some of us thought Australia already was one. And frankly we don't give a dingo's dungpile what you do, so long as you keep sending the lager. Incidentally, why can't you lot spell Labour properly?

IT Is reported by Ofcom that the average Briton spends almost half his waking life using media and communications. And because they watch telly, surf the net and blather on their mobile phones at the same time, they actually squeeze about nine hours of communication into seven hours. In theory, this should produce a population of hugely confident communicators with a wide knowledge of world events. The reality is a sub-nation of multi-tasking mumblers who can barely string two words together and seem to know nothing about anything.

IT IS hard to say who is the sillier, Lancashire pub landlord Jamie Hardie who dressed up as an SS officer, complete with swastika armband, for a wartime pageant, or the politically-correct police officers who warned him that his outfit might "incite racial tension." The real offence has nothing to do with racism. It is that so many folk seem to regard the Second World War, which killed 50 million people, as a rather jolly musical event, to be celebrated with endless knees-ups and mindless choruses of "We'll Meet Again." Yuk.

A READER points out acidly that, while spending three solid weeks watching the Tour de France, he didn't spot a single pot hole. In his own street, however . . . .

WHEN the sun shines, out come those prosperous posses of sixty and seventysomethings, hale and hearty and tanned like old wallets, showing off their money in shiny convertibles. There is a name for the sensation we feel on seeing people just a little older than ourselves enjoying the sort of pensions that we will never have. It is called jealousy. Do we not have the technology to clock their number plates, trace these conspicuous old consumers and quietly take them off the list for winter fuel payments?

IF private car clamping is made illegal as the Government promises, how will landowners protect themselves from maverick parkers? Simple. You have A3 sized posters printed saying: "Please do not park here". You stick one on each offender's windscreen. With superglue.

A 36-year-old benefits cheat in Telford obtained £15,000 by telling the authorities she was living as a single parent. But her Facebook website proclaims: "I've been with my hubby for 16 years and we're still very much in love." She was duly prosecuted. But before we write her off as a dope, consider this. She has had £15,000 of our money and her only punishment is a 12-month community order. So who are the dopes?

I WAS intrigued by a financial whizz-kid on the radio yesterday describing the global credit crisis as "a black swan event." Have you ever heard the term? Me neither. APPARENTLY the expression dates back hundreds of years to a time when any non-existent thing was described as being "as rare as a black swan." When black swans were then discovered in Australia, the saying fell out of use. It is now used to describe the theory that most major historical events are, like Oz's black swan, entirely unexpected and unpredictable. And yet the whizz-kid on the radio admitted that the only reason no-one saw the US property crash coming was that, in drawing up the figures for projected growth in house prices, no-one looked far enough back in history to see that house prices sometimes collapse. So it wasn't really a black-swan event. It was a blithering-idiot event.

MARIELLA Frostrup says blondes have suffered sexism for at least the past 70 years. The television presenter is 47 and has been dying her hair blonde since she was 16. As her BBC2 documentary, Blonde on Blonde, is launched, Mariella wails: "If I'd known then what my shade of choice suggested to the world, I might have thought twice." Hang on. If being blonde is so terrible, why does Ms Frostrup not take up another bottle and go brunette? Or is she too blonde to figure that out?

A FAG end is visible, offensive and definitely a form of litter. Cigarette ash, on the other hand, is thin, sterile and virtually invisible. It is not clear whether 70-year-old Sheila Martin of Oldbury has been threatened with a £2,500 fine for dropping ash (as she claims) or a nub end (as a councillor suggests.) If we have really reached the stage where wardens are nicking pensioners for smoking in the streets, it will bring some joy to people like the red-faced emailer who thundered: "Excuse me, but if you drop ANYTHING on the floor, then it is litter." Anything? God help anyone with dandruff.

AN American study which set out to find whether being an only child was a handicap has discovered that children with no brothers or sisters have the same social skills as those with siblings. And yet you know the experts will carry on looking for problems. This sort of research is driven by the deep-rooted belief among parents of two or more kids that those of us who settle for one child have not suffered enough.