Best of Peter Rhodes - July 3
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.
A READER calls, a tad alarmed that his local council's summer holiday activities for kids include "Fire Play" ("create your own mini fires and keep them burning"). A week later the fun includes "Fantastic Water Games." He says, in the interests of safety, should these events not be held on the same day?
THE DEPRESSING part is that nowhere in this list of summer activities is there any mention of either tennis or cricket.
OLD codger test. If you turned on the radio, heard Michael Jackson was dead, and assumed it was the general, you are one. Join the club.
DAVID Cameron says a Tory government would roll back the frontiers of the surveillance state. It's a nice idea but intrusion is a bit like the atom bomb; once you've invented it you can't simply uninvent it. And if the ID card industry believed Cameron's pledge to scrap the cards, no-one would be tendering for the government contract. But the greatest obstacle to the Cameron plan is the changing nature of the British people. There was a time when we all believed the job of the state was to create the conditions of health, education and security within which the freeborn citizen could enjoy life, liberty and happiness. These days, millions of people seem to think the citizen is a part of the state, a little nut or bolt to be oiled, tightened and monitored 24/7 for any signs of dissent. The truly frightening thing is that people seem happy with this arrangement.
THE weekend Gipsy Roma Traveller day organised by Warwickshire Police was a curious affair. It was announced only five days before it happened and was barely advertised. I went along but saw no road signs indicating the event, apart from a tiny GRT card outside the police HQ. The only gipsies attending were a group of rather bemused Slovaks bussed in from Coventry. If there were any traditional travelling folk, I didn't see them. The whole event looked like a box-ticking exercise in political correctness, shunned by the people it was aimed at. Nonetheless, the organisers have hailed it as a great success. And in these PC times, now that one force has done it, watch out for police gipsy fairs all over Britain.
AFTER rock festivals, including Glastonbury, people often leave their tents behind in the vague and well-intentioned belief that they "go to Africa" and thus Save the World. Not exactly. Some are stripped down and recycled but many are quite unusable. I had a friend who worked on clearing festival tents. He reckoned at least a third had been used as toilets before the owners left. Soil the World.
I CAN harrumph against political correctness with the best of 'em but I won't be joining the outrage against the school in Kent which has banned a performance by a team of Morris men who black their faces. "It's an age old tradition," insists one of the dancers. Not really. Morris is largely a 19th and 20th century re-invention. Blacking faces is a tradition of Border Morris, which is danced on the Welsh borders, not in Kent. And am I the only one to notice that while black-faced Morris dancers were a rarity only a few years ago, they seem to be all over the place now? It's almost as though they are making a point, heaven forbid.
ATHEISM: A non-prophet organisation.
TALKING of which, the dissection of a fully-grown elephant on Inside Nature's Giants (C4) was smilingly supervised by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins. And yet somehow, when you saw the utter pointlessness of the elephant, it was easier to believe in the Almighty than in evolution. Dawkins tells us that millions of years of natural selection have created this creature. And yet for all the concentrated efforts of evolution, an elephant can neither swim very well, nor run very fast, nor eat sensible, ground-level food. It has evolved a mighty trunk in order to rip down trees and, because its nostrils are so long, its lungs must be welded directly to its ribs in order that it can breathe. The elephant does absolutely nothing that smaller creatures cannot do much better. It is precisely the sort of thing an unelected and unaccountable Creator might well knock up as an extravagant problem-solving exercise. And because the Creator is all-wise and omnipotent, not a single archangel, angel or cherub dare look over his divine shoulder and ask the blindingly obvious question about the elephant: "Yes, God, but what's it for?"
THE ECONOMIST, of all publications, comes up with the answer to a fashion puzzle of our age - why do kids desire those perfect, snow-white teeth displayed by American movie stars but grown-ups do not?
The Economist suggests that when over-45 Brits see the Hollywood dream smile, they are instantly reminded of NHS dentures, as worn by their own parents.
The kids have no such race-memory and beg for the bleach.
I AM delighted to offer this example of exercise for the over-40s which emailed its way to my attention:
1. With a 5-lb potato bag in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides. Hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax.
2. After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-lb potato bags.
3. Then try 50-lb potato bags and then eventually try to lift a 100-lb potato bag in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute.
4. When you feel confident at this level, put a potato in each bag.
