Peter Rhodes: The colourful Mr Castro

A READER who was half-listening to the news was surprised that a man recovering from hip-replacement surgery was being taken to a hip-switch hospital. Turned out to be Ipswich.

BARONESS Chakrabarti, best known for producing the celebrated report clearing the Labour Party of anti-semitism, told 200 students at the Oxford Union that: "I don't believe that Labour is much worse than any other party." That's not the point, is it? The point is that Labour is supposed to be better than the other parties.

IN fact, the Left wing of politics is invariably assumed to be better than the Right. Which is why so many people regard Nigel Farage as the devil incarnate but the late Fidel Castro, patron saint of firing squads, as colourful.

AS that lifelong Marxist Alexei Sayle explained a few days ago in his excellent Imaginary Sandwich Bar (Radio 4), the Left of politics always claims the moral high ground - even when they do terrible things. The Communists may occasionally resort to torture, famine, gulags and wholesale terror but, as Sayle put it, "we do mean well."

THE BBC illustrates a report on Britain's housing crisis with a graph showing the decline in the percentage of owner/occupiers in our big cities. The lines slope sharply, reflecting the inability of people to buy their own homes. Yet is there not a missing part to this graph? If we have too few homes, we probably have too many people concentrated in too few places. The population of London, now at about nine million, is bigger than it has ever been, and is growing at 100,000 a year. Other cities have seen their populations swell by tens of thousands. Above every minister and civil servants' desk should be a plaque declaring: "If you allow the population of a small, crowded island to grow by 20 million in the space of a single lifetime and do not expect problems, you are unfit to hold public office." It was Tony Blair who, 10 years ago, unashamedly told the Commons that his government had no population policy. No change there, then.

I ADMIT to the sin of pride when I boasted some days ago about having attracted a great spotted woodpecker, all bright chested and bouncy, to our bird table. Not exactly team players, are they? You think you've attracted the court jester and he turns out to be the school bully.

AFTER last week's item on the TV subtitles announcing a Shy Kovsky concert, a reader recalls visiting a music shop years ago to order a recording of Sibelius. The girl behind the counter duly wrote down "Sir Bayliss."

NEWS reaches me, too, of a young member of the audience at a concert featuring Fauré's Requiem who innocently asked: "Those Four As, are they a group?"

SCIENTISTS at Cambridge report that drinking a large glass of red wine a day could reduce the risk of strokes. I am pleased to report that last night I reduced the risk of three strokes.