Peter Rhodes: Never take honesty for granted

SCOTCH eggs for tea. Can anyone explain how wrapping an egg in sausage meat and orange breadcrumbs imparts Scottishness?

PEDANT corner. Grantchester (ITV) is set in the 1950s. In the latest episode the detective Geordie (Robson Green) suggests contacting the MoD. But the Ministry of Defence did not come into existence until 1964. In the 1950s it was still the War Office. I ought to get out more.

RESEARCH at the University of Nottingham suggests that the British are more honest than most. Some 2,500 people were invited to roll a dice and record their scores, knowing they would be paid for high scores. Unknown to them, their actual scores were caught on camera. The Brits proved to be among the most honest, with Swedes and Germans. At the bottom of the honesty pile were people from Morocco, Vietnam and Cambodia. The researchers concluded that honesty, or the lack of it, depends on the behaviour of a country's leaders. If the president, government, judges and cops are corrupt, the people will follow their example. An incorruptible system is at the heart of British life, and we should be proud of it. But it's not perfect and we should never take it for granted. Which is why bent cops, sleazy politicians, corrupt councillors and "community leaders" who stuff ballot boxes with stolen votes should go to prison and be excised from society like the cancers they are.

THINGS we believed as kids. A reader writes: "My daughter tells me that whenever she saw a woman put on a hat she thought the hatpin went straight through her head."

I HAVE been reading Kipling. His 1893 poem, the Deep-Sea Cables, is a hymn of praise to new technology. Three miles deep on the ocean bed "where the blind white sea-snakes are," Kipling fancies he hears the new-laid telegraph cables whispering : "Let us be one!" The dream, back in those optimistic times, was that the more the people of the world talked to each other, the more that understanding and empathy would spread. More than a century later, Islamic State uses the internet to spread videos of beheadings and in rural Africa mobile phones are used to organise the public stoning of witches. Bang goes the dream.

IN all my many years in this game I have never had a letter, or an email, or a phone conversation, or a chat in a pub, club, office, library, bus queue or anywhere else on the allegedly burning issue which was raised in Parliament last week. Nor can I imagine any normal human telling their MP : "It's the shops, sir. They just aren't open long enough for me to get my Sunday shopping done." Giving councils the power to extend Sunday opening is not a burning issue. I doubt if it is any sort of issue unless, of course, you happen to own a large number of shops. The MPs allegedly speaking for "the people" in the debate sounded as though they were speaking for big business. When the motion was defeated and Sunday was saved from becoming just another day, the nation silently cheered. There is more to life than profit.

THE images of a flying baseball bat slapping into a crowd in Florida show how Shaun Cunningham reacted in a split-second to shield his startled eight-year-old son, Landon. The snaps also show that Landon was busy with his smartphone when the drama began. It is somehow reassuring to know there is still something in this world that can make a smartphone user look up.