Best of Peter Rhodes - October 10

Here’s a selection of the best of the Peter Rhodes column taken from the Express & Star for the week ending October 10.

AN INVESTIGATION has been launched into student initiation ceremonies at Gloucestershire University where youngsters have been forced to strip off, drink too much and vomit publicly. I’m sure we all wish the investigators well. But I doubt if they will come up with any answer other than the obvious one. When a bunch of young people are taken away from their homes and put in a new place, they often descend to the lowest common level. Throw in a few bullies and perverts and things can get fairly unpleasant. It is no surprise to learn that some of the nastiest initiations involve university sports clubs. There is a common misconception that organised sport builds great character. The truth is that it often gives full rein to some characters who are barely house-trained.

A FIFTH of teachers questioned by the Times Educational Supplement say they would welcome the return of the cane. Oh, really? Times have changed since the days when teenagers meekly submitted to a walloping. If a teacher in the average inner-city comprehensive caned a gang member of the Year Ten Massive, his life expectancy would be measured in hours, innit?

ADVICE to old folk fearing the cold this winter:
1. Wait until your thicko grandchild gets his free £200 laptop from the Government
2. Give him a fiver for it
3. Switch on
4. Warm hands over battery

MORE mis-heard lyrics. A colleague who attended a school at a place called Eve Hill recalls how the kids recited the Lord’s Prayer and assumed the line “deliver us from Eve Hill” had been written especially for them. A reader reports another religious misunderstanding, this time from the hymn Gentle Jesus. As a child, she was puzzled over why small rodents needed to be pitied, as in the line “pity mice implicitly.’

IT OCCURS to me that if you are worried about your investments you could always send your money (cash only, used tenners preferred) to BancoRhodeso. Your account number is 1 and my assets are, of course, entirely underwritten by the Government of Iceland.

THE German sense of humour is celebrated in a new state-sponsored museum in Frankfurt. Curator Achim Frenz says: “We have only just opened the museum because until now we didn’t have enough comedy to put in it.” I understand the same problem was encountered by the publishers of The Italian Book of War Heroes.

AND while we’re taking cheap shots at our continental cousins, let us not forget the French who this week announced that mounted police would be patrolling some of their more violent school campuses. Cheval, eh? I bet the dinner ladies are already sharpening their knives.

MEANWHILE, back at the church bulletin board: “The Associate Minister unveiled the church’s new tithing-campaign slogan last Sunday: ‘I upped my pledge - Up yours’.”

A READER encountered a group of medical professionals in a village hall and realised there is no collective noun for a number of such people. She suggests “a glottal of speech therapists.”

INCIDENTALLY, my brilliant reader who some years ago came up with the collective noun “a wunch of bankers” has been proved dead right, hasn’t he?

I NOTED last week that nicknames were a thing of the past. Your letters suggest they were certainly more original in ye olden days. A reader recalls three lads in his native village in Wales, all called Dick Jones, who started work on the same day in the 1900s. The first was logged on the works register as Jones. The second was renamed Baglan, after his village. The foreman took one look at the third, a strapping six-footer, and said the lad needed a substantial nickname. From that moment until the day he died he was known as Dick Substantial.

A COLLEAGUE cheerfully signed a friend’s application form for a Criminal Records Bureau check, only to learn later that journalists are not accepted by the authorities as trusted professionals. But estate agents are.

LIKE you, I rage with anger as amoral, stony-faced City slickers make yet another killing on a market in disarray, plundering like jackals regardless of the pain and hardship their snivelling deeds cause. With one obvious exception. If the slickers in question are working for my pension fund and raking in the loot they are, of course, national treasures and a credit to their profession, Gawd bless ’em.

PRODUCTION of haggis is threatened because of an outbreak of lung worm in sheep. This seems very odd. If you are prepared to consume a delicacy made of minced intestines stuffed into a second-hand sheep stomach, how could you possibly object to a lung worm or two?

THIS is a rather sad mis-heard song lyric. A reader in the Midlands grew up convinced he was living in the coolest town in England. Why else would the great blues-rock star George Thorogood sing about it? In later life he discovered the lines were actually:
“I’m goin’ back to Wentzville
Have myself a really good time.”
Not Wednesfield, apparently.

* Has this whetted your appetite for more of Peter’s gems? Make sure you read his column every day by picking up a copy of the Express & Star.