Best of Peter Rhodes - July 15

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

SUNDAY: schmoozing with Nicole Kidman in sunny Hollywood. Tuesday: washing RAF socks in bloody Anglesey. A thoroughly modern princess.

ISN'T it wretched to see the Metropolitan Police being harassed in the phone-hacking affair?The Met may not be the squeaky-cleanest of organisations but hacking is hardly a hanging offence. The suggestion that the Met, at a time when suicide bombers were targetting London, should have thrown men and resources at what is no more than the electronic equivalent of peeking into someone's desk diary is ludicrous.

MEANWHILE, are you playing spot-the-prat as the great and good queue up to take a pop at the Met and Rupert Murdoch ? Yes, there they all are: the flasher, the pervert, the warmonger, the perjurer, the procurer, the thief and more adulterers and expenses fiddlers than you can shake a stick at. Welcome to the immoral high ground.

A CofE vicar keeps emailing me to arrange a discussion, preferably with me in "reflective mode," following my recent piece on coal-fired plants in China whose sulphur emissions, it is claimed, are actually contributing to global cooling.

He wants to ensure "the blunter of your readers did not interpret your words as meaning the sulphur-cooling effect was actually some kind of panacea for the major changes underway."

As far as I am aware this column has no blunt readers. They all seem alarmingly sharp. They are also quite capable of making up their own minds. As for the offer of a discussion, no thanks. We mortals have spent the past 2,000 years listening to God-botherers who think they have some great wisdom to impart, only to discover otherwise.

According to some senior clerics this week, ageing congregations mean the Church of England will collapse over the next 20 years. It is already being replaced by the new religion of global warming with the same old threat of hellfire and the promise of salvation, if only we recycle our kitchen slops.

GIVE thanks for the curious fact that there is no standard for women's clothes sizes. A size 12 frock from one maker can be three inches wider than one from a rival. This explains why, according to a report this week, two-thirds of women buying online will order at least two sizes, returning the one that doesn't fit. The total cost of sending stuff back is about £19 million. If clothes sizes were ever standardised, would the Post Office collapse?

THE world's oldest football rulebook, dating from 1858, came on the market this week. It is a fascinating insight into the days when matches lasted for two hours and 40 players took part. However, the greatest puzzle for those of us born without the football gene is that in more than 150 years of kicking the bladder about, no-one has decided how big the pitch should be.

YET another useful law for life: A closed mouth gathers no feet.

THAT Beckham baby name again. A reader of a certain age suggests that Harper might be associated with the old expression to harp on which one dictionary defines as:"To talk or write about to an excessive and tedious degree; to dwell on."

A SENIOR judge, Sir Paul Coleridge, makes the point that the "form-filling exercise" for getting a divorce is now easier than obtaining a driving licence. Historians will look back on the 20th century and wonder how generations of politicians of all parties got it into their thick heads that the best way to build a better Britain was by making divorce easier and alcohol cheaper.

THERE was a young mother of Oldham (on second thoughts, let's not do this as a limerick) who wanted to breast-feed her baby in the town hall but was ordered to stop with the words: "This is a multicultural building." This is a gift for estate agents who specialise in endowing bricks and mortar with human qualities. In my time I have read the brochures of properties which were claimed to have deceptive space, rewarding gardens and even a thoughtful alcove. A multicultural feature is presumably one suitable for all creeds. A deceptively spacious atrium leads via a thoughtful corridor into the satisfyingly multicultural loo.

RESEARCHERS working for a group of cosmetic-surgery clinics estimate that in the course of a lifetime the average woman spends more than £24,000 getting rid of wrinkles. So where do they go?