Peter Rhodes: A tuneless nation

BACK in the days of churchgoing, assemblies, sing-songs in the pub and sea shanties around the school piano, we learned how to hold a tune in our heads. The Brits could sing. This week, in the massive media overkill that marked David Bowie's passing, some TV and radio reporters invited members of the public to sing their favourite Bowie hits. And what a dire, off-key caterwauling ensued. What a tuneless nation we have become.

A READER points out that although the immensely entertaining Dickensian (BBC1) is set in the deep mid-winter with snow crunching under foot, no-one has frosted breath.

YOU can say the weather is soft. You can say things are looking lush and green. You can use the old Scots word dreich. But it is a golden rule of being Scottish that you must never admit it rains anywhere north of the border. The Duchess of Argyll explained this week how her family pile, Inverary Castle, was chosen to appear in the Christmas edition of Downton Abbey because the producers visited at a particularly pretty time and were greatly impressed. In a masterclass of dodging the R-word , the duchess declared: "There were amazing rainbows that day." Neatly done, ma'am.

YOU may recall that as the male-dominated columns of migrants poured into Europe last summer, some of us remarked that they looked more like an advancing army than a band of refugees. We were promptly denounced as uncaring bigots. After the New Year's mass sex attacks in Cologne and other European cities, it is simply not enough to point out the obvious truth that the vast majority of the migrants are genuinely seeking safety. Of course they are; they deserve sympathy and help. But it is the sheer scale of the migration, and the lack of proper checks, that threaten disaster. Germany has admitted one million migrants in the past year. If only one in every 1,000 are criminals or terrorist sympathisers, that's a potential fifth column of 1,000 angry young men, right in the heart of Europe. And there is no point in denying that some of the norms of the Middle East sit uneasily with our society. You don't settle smoothly into 21st century western Europe if your attitude toward women is stuck in the 10th century.

A READER asks, why do we persist in using the old-fashioned and achingly coy term "sleeping with" to describe sex? Good point. Time for a new euphemism for our age? Over to you.

ONE of the strangest things to emerge after the Government's latest advice on safe drinking is the BBC Health calculator called What's Your Drinking Nationality? Just type in the number of units of alcohol you consume and it tells you which nationality in the whole world you most resemble. My booze intake, zut alors, makes me an honorary Frenchman where 10 glasses of wine per week is the average. My wife never touches a drop which makes her spiritual home, in booze terms, Kuwait. Now the curious bit which the health experts have yet to explain. The boozy French have an average life expectancy of 82.57 years. In stone-cold sober Kuwait, life expectancy is just 74.36 years.

MEANWHILE, in order to get my intake in line with the two booze-free days per week suggested by Whitehall, I have decided not to have a drink until the Chilcot Report is published. Only kidding.