Peter Rhodes: Pistols drawn

DID any of us read the headline: "Middle class may pay more for the TV licence" without recalling the words of John Prescott: "We're all middle-class now"? I bet we all end up paying through the nose.

ANOTHER voice from the past echoed in my head as I watched the TV reports of ramblers launching their campaign to reclaim England's footpaths. Ramblers are generally regarded as national treasures, to be cherished . So it always surprised me when that great countryman, and former colleague, Phil Drabble used to snarl about them as "the woolly-hatted, go anywhere, pay nothing brigade." Not a great fan of ramblers was our Phil.

I HAVE been working in Jersey this week which sounds deeply unconvincing but is the truth. It involved doing something I do every two or three years which never fails to surprise – swimming. Back in ye olden times, me and my gang were never out of the swimming pool. We were water babies, spending the holidays endlessly diving, torpedoing, bombing and chatting up the girls. Years later, floundering from one side of the pool to the other , gasping for air and dragging my knackered old body ashore like a harpooned seal, I remember the one thing I never learned to do in the pool. I can still dive, torpedo, and bomb. But actually swim? Useless.

A YORKSHIRE terrier has been savaged to death by gulls in a Cornish village, prompting calls for what can only be described as a gull cull. In Jersey the herring gulls (Grabbus chippus) are not quite so audacious as their English cousins but one careless diner on the hotel sun terrace lost a leg of chicken to one the other night. Outside diners have now been issued with water pistols. Seriously.

PEDANT'S corner. Notice how I avoided using the world "seagull" in the above item? As any twitcher will tell you there is no such thing.

MUCH anger in the Nottinghamshire town of Bingham where the mayor asked a Queen tribute band to play the hit Fat Bottomed Girls - "for all the girls of Bingham." The local women are apparently not amused. In his book Jersey: Not Quite British, David Le Feuvre recalls the views of R C F Maugham, a British migrant who wrote The Island of Jersey Today, published in 1939. In it, Maugham remarked that the women of Jersey "tended, like the men, towards 'steatopygy,' which is to say, big behinds." I can only report that today's Jerseyfolk are positively sylphlike compared to the lumpen Brits. Tattoos are rarer, too. That looks like a palindrome but it isn't .

MY recent reference to that vanishing household item, the coal bunker, reminds a reader of the Christmas (have your hankies ready) when no present arrived from dear old Uncle Denis in London. It was not until February that the present was unearthed and the mystery solved. In a few fateful minutes when her mother was out, the postman had popped the parcel in the coal bunker and the coalman came along and buried it under half a ton of nutty slack. It was a jigsaw puzzle of horses galloping on a beach. Memories, eh?

GARETH Neame, executive producer of Downton Abbey says he is amazed how female audiences have loved the show's "chaste" relationships. Chaste? Are we supposed to have forgotten Lady Mary's bedroom encounter in the first series with the dashing Turkish bloke who promised her: "You'll still be a virgin for your husband." Doesn't sound terribly chaste, does it?