Best of Peter Rhodes - April 24
The best of this week's Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.
The best of this week's Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.
I AM convinced the BBC has a department whose sole job is to give us columnists something to harrumph about. A programme on learning new skills explained how to change a tyre. But before even a nut could be loosened, BBC managers insisted on a paramedic and a first-aider being in attendance with their ambulance. Health and safety, innit? But the most harrumph-making part of this story is that the demonstration of how to change a tyre was being recorded by Radio Essex. So that's what a car jack sounds like.
ZUT alors, as the French hardly ever say. The champagne cork, whose pop has heralded the pouring of bubbly for more than 300 years, may soon be silenced. One Champagne house is preparing to market bottles fitted with a revolutionary metal cap. Bad news for cork growers. Bad news, too, for that dedicated band of optical surgeons who spend every Christmas on call for the steady stream of unfortunates whacked in the eye by flying corks. Some people are blinded in such incidents although, like people whose arms are broken by swans, you never actually seem to meet one.
HOW many police officers got past the first interviews for the job by claiming to be gay, lesbian or bisexual? After all, police forces have their quotas to fill and no-one asks for any proof of an applicant's sexuality. If you consider this a terribly cynical view, take a look at the response when Strathclyde Police recently asked its workforce for their religious beliefs. Eight officers and two civilian staff claimed to be Jedi knights.
"A DANGEROUS beast with a story to tell." Columnist Andrew Pierce describing Gordon Brown's sacked spin-doctor Damian McBride.
ANOTHER bank holiday, another traveller invasion. Last year it was gipsy families taking over a field near the Warwickshire home of the Olympic minister Tessa Jowell. This Easter weekend a field near Blackmore in Essex was asphalted and taken over by six families. And why not? After all, Ms Jowell's neighbours have been given permission by a government inspector to stay until 2013. Why should the Essex crew not get the same gentle treatment? We have a situation where ordinary law-abiding English families queue patiently for official approval for dormer windows and garden sheds but travellers can create entire hamlets in the Green Belt and are untouchable. This is preference by ethicity. It is racism, pure and simple. It is made possible by the idiocy of a planning system which allows retrospective approval. It is high time the law was changed to make any development illegal unless planning permission has first been granted. It would take five minutes in Parliament. What on earth are they waiting for?
THE good news is that the British Government has just pledged £100 million of taxpayers' money to upgrade 3,000 miles of road and 400 miles of rail track. The not-so-good news is that it's all being spent on roads in Southern Africa. Just keep on dodging those potholes.
IRADA Zeinanlova, a Russian journalist working in London, says surveillance in Britain is worse than it was during the Soviet era in Russia. Brave lady. The rest of us just mind our own business and never look directly at the CCTV cameras. Watch your back, comrade.
A HEALTH-conscious reader just back from a week in Scotland tells me he fancied the kippers for breakfast but wondered whether they contained artificial colouring. So he asked the waitress: "Are these kippers dyed?" The waitress (Thai) consulted the head waiter (Lithuanian) who brought in the restaurant manager (Polish) who solemnly explained that, as far as he knew, the kippers had died about seven weeks ago and then been cooked and put in little plastic bag to be reheated.
CLOWNS are sinister, embarrassing and rarely funny but Valerik Kashkin, a clown with the Moscow State Circus, did something faintly amusing last week. Wearing enormous size-18 clown shoes, he fell off a high wire in Liverpool and hurt his foot. Hohohoho. The circus management have now told him to wear normal shoes. Spoilsports.
THE phone rings and a total stranger asks whether you are the homeowner, if you have a mortgage and who your mobile-phone company is. A tip: at this stage you should ask whether the caller has had a bowel movement that day. If he's not going to answer personal questions, why should you?
THE definition of an intellectual is one who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, does not try it on. But what if you were left alone in the throne room at Buckingham Palace with no-one to see you? In a court hearing this week, a police officer from the Royal protection squad was condemned by a QC for being "entirely disrespectful to the Queen" by sitting on the throne. So would you, given the chance, do the same? I think I would, and this is why. One of the differences between a constitutional monarchy and a republic is that we subjects are all in line for the throne. By the vagaries of bloodlines, you may be only 40 millionth in line but it is still a tiny entitlement and you are only going to sit on the throne for a few seconds. (And if you felt the need to wear a tea cosy in lieu of a crown, good luck to you).
THE HOSPITAL (C4) ended its run by showing how a surgical gastric band can help fat working-class women lose weight. So far there is no known cure for that horrified, tut-tutting noise coming from the slim middle classes.
