Peter Rhodes: The gift that keeps on shrinking

IT'S the time of year when pubs start selling "Christmas ales" which are marketed as rich, full-bodied, warming, fruity and all-round plumptious. The two I have sampled so far tasted like very old, very thin mild. Are the breweries recycling the contents of the drip trays?

IT'S also the time of year when pensioners and those on benefits suddenly get an extra £10 from the Government. This Christmas bonus has been £10 ever since it was introduced by Ted Heath in 1972. Back then, it was a real bonanza; £10 was more than a week's state pension and Ted's Xmas Tenner would easily cover the cost of the Christmas dinner. Unchanged over 43 years, it has been eroded by inflation and overtaken by big pension rises and the £100 winter fuel allowance. And yet it staggers on. Politicians are too tight-fisted to increase it, too scared of being called Scrooge to scrap it.

IF you qualify, you'll find the Xmas Bonus, paid by the Department of Work and Pensions, on your bank statement with a Dalek-speak message that even Ebenezer Scrooge would have considered cold and impersonal. The bonus is merrily identified as "DWP XB."

WHAT to buy with it? Ten quid will get you a really big tin of humbugs.

HOW warranties work. The original guarantee on our washing machine has just expired. Another two years' cover for repair or replacement will cost £60 if we pay by direct debit. So what sort of reduction would you expect for payment up front? Dream on. If you pay for the warranty in advance it actually costs £70. Why so much more? Because businesses love direct debits. Once they've got you signed up to one, they've probably got you for life.

JEREMY Corbyn took some flak for attending a fund-raising dinner for the Stop the War Coalition. Yet no-one seems to have challenged the description of the event. If the Coalition were a genuine, grass-roots, working-class movement, they would know that dinner is the meal you have in the middle of the day (the one that posh people call lunch). Any authentic horny-handed son of toil (me, for example) could have told them that a meal in the evening is either tea or supper.

SILLY me. Wrong again. In June last year when it was announced that, for reasons of national security, a terrorism trial in London would be held behind closed doors. I asked: "What is the big secret?" I suggested it might be that the alleged "plot" was perhaps started by MI5 as a means of flushing out likely terrorists. This is one of my favourite conspiracy theories; it explains why the authorities have such a magnificent success rate in "foiling" so-called "plots." If this trial threatened to expose MI5's methods, you could understand why it would be held in secret. Yet from what little has emerged, it seems there was no such shady operation. It was the usual stuff about suspects being in possession of material associated with terrorism. And yet there was one unusual feature. One of the defendants, describing the very rich company he kept, told the court that part of his social circle were "sons of a minister in Azerbaijan, good friends with Prince William and Harry." Is that the big secret? If so, it would be good to know who in the British Establishment doesn't understand the difference between a threat to national security and embarrassment at the Palace.

AFTER the ground-breaking elections, women in Saudi Arabia can now sit as local councillors. Assuming their husbands will drive them to the meetings.