Peter Rhodes on a baby's colour, a free asteroid and the quiet passing of national treasures

Great ironies of our time. The Japanese sent a space probe billions of miles to bring fragments of a distant asteroid to earth. The samples arrived by parachute in Australia three months ago. Cost: £100 billion. A few days ago, an asteroid entered the earth's atmosphere with a bang and a flash and the next morning people in the Cotswold village of Winchcombe found similar asteroid fragments on their front drive. Cost: nothing.

I wrote yesterday about the military historian Richard Holmes, a regular on television documentaries who died of cancer in almost 20 years ago. He joined that undersung band of national treasures who were with us and then were gone, with nowhere near enough recognition of their passing. Holmes vanished from the limelight quietly and suddenly, like Victoria Wood, Tim Pigott-Smith and Richard Griffiths. I dare say you can think of a few more.

The problem with Meghan's account of someone's alleged comment about Archie's skin colour is that we don't know what was said, or who said it and we don't know when (Meghan says it was when she was pregnant but Harry suggests it was much earlier). But crucially, we don't know how it was said.

So a little honesty, please. When Harry and Meghan announced Archie was on the way, I bet there wasn't a single family in Britain or America , black, white or mixed-race, that did not speculate on the baby's likely appearance. There is no earthly reason why people should not discuss such things. It may be idle gossip. It may be what Meghan's father described as "a dumb question." But it only becomes racist if it is spoken with malice. If there was an ounce of malice in the alleged Palace discussion then, clearly, a head should roll. But we're not there yet and, as the Queen put it in her statement, "some recollections may vary."

The Guardian, with its endless gift for misjudging this nation, declared in December 2017: "From Victoria and Abdul to Harry and Meghan Markle, our society is still obsessed with ‘purity’ and is shocked that a royal could marry a person of colour." That's not the Britain I recognise. The country I know, in the early days of this affair, took Meghan to its heart in the belief that a mixed-race princess was the best possible thing that could happen to the Royal Family, creating a dual-heritage branch of the Windsor dynasty and reflecting our mixed-race society. Never has so much goodwill turned to ashes.

A Daily Telegraph reader reports that a foreign student was puzzled when an English bus driver announced : "Animals first" as passengers boarded his vehicle. Turned out to be "any more fares?"

That mis-hearing took me back to my time on the Coventry Evening Telegraph whose last edition of the day was the City Final. Two old chaps sold newspapers from kiosks outside the press hall, yelling: "Ian Haygarf" and "Seedy Fennel."