Peter Rhodes: Wait - a lifesaving word

BT has come up with the most irritating replacement for the word "Christmas" since Birmingham councillors famously gave us "Winterval." The BT website invites us all to enjoy "Merry Giftmas." I don't know who is responsible but it's a great shame that public horsewhipping has gone out of fashion. Harrumph.

CHRIS Boardman is leading a campaign by British Cycling to change the right-of-way rules at junctions. The Road Haulage Association says it will cause more accidents. I'm with the truckers on this one.

ONE of the proposed changes is that vehicles turning left should give way to cyclists coming up on the inside who want to go straight ahead. Think this through. The lights turn from red to green. A lorry driver, planning to turn left, sees in his mirror a cyclist approaching on his left-hand side. He duly gives way. The cyclist goes straight ahead – and is promptly taken out by a vehicle coming in the opposite direction and turning right - and whose view of the cyclist was obstructed by the lorry. Junctions would be much safer for everybody if cyclists simply avoided overtaking on the inside and did what every other responsible road user does. Wait.

WILL it never end? Police in Northern Ireland are reviewing all killings during the 30 years of the Troubles, including those carried out by "state personnel". Although the police insist there is no "bespoke inquiry" into deaths attributed to the British Army, it us hard not to share the anxiety of the Tory MP and former army officer Johnny Mercer who warns of "a brand new witch hunt." If combat killings from the 1960s and 1970s are to be dissected by teams of lawyers with the ever-lurking threat of prosecution, why stop there? In any war, terrible things are done. In his excellent book First Light, published when he was 80, the wartime fighter pilot Geoffrey Wellum describes how he and another Spitfire pilot crept unseen behind two German fighters and blew them out of the sky. He wrote: "This was just about as callous and as calculating as you can get, just plain cold-blooded murder." Mr Wellum is now 95. How long before some idiot suggests dragging him and other heroes of the Second World War before the courts?

THERE is, however, some good news for soldiers and former soldiers. Phil Shiner, the lawyer who brought hundreds of false claims of brutality against British troops in Iraq, admits that his legal career is over and he will be struck off for acting "without integrity." A Christmas present for warriors everywhere.

ONE puzzle about Shiner was his curious choice of spectacles. He was usually seen in a small, rather sinister, red frames, as favoured by screen villains of the 1930s. Maybe Specsavers has a special designer range: National Hate Figure.

A NEW Channel 4 series following OAP couples as they prepare to get married is entitled "I Do at 92." It may rhyme nicely but the Hollywood response "I do" is rarely heard in English wedding ceremonies. Traditionally, the priest asks the couple "Will you . . ?" to which the only possible answer is "I will."

A FRENCH singer has made it into the BBC's 100 Women season, apparently for pushing back the boundaries by declaring herself to be pansexual. I will never look at pans in the same way again.