Best of Peter Rhodes - December 17

The best of this week's Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.

CILLA Black, 67, says she doesn't want to live beyond 75. Let's see how she feels at 74.

THIS is amusing, unless you happen to live in Ludlow. A colleague researching a piece on an art collection in Shropshire ran a computer spell-check. It picked up the suspect word in a website address "Ludlowassemblyrooms" and suggested "lumpenproletariat" instead.

THE Washington Post has a long-running competition inviting readers to invent new words by changing letters in existing words. And thus we get:

* Giraffiti. Vandalism spray-painted very high

* Reintarnation. Belief that you'll come back to life as a hillbilly

* Caterpallor. Your complexion after finding half a grub in your apple.

A READER admits he was confused by the commentary from the snooker championships at Telford. He says he distinctly heard someone refer to a local character called Marc de Boeuf .

Later he realised the actual commentary was: "Telford marked the birth of the Industrial Revolution."

MORE comment masquerading as fact from Auntie Beeb. A BBC report on the shipwreck of would-be immigrants to Australia at Christmas Island piously informs us: "The illegal arrivals have caused anxiety, stoked by alarmist tabloid headlines and opposition calls to 'stop the boats'."

And who is to say that the "alarmist headlines" are not in the least alarmist but fairly and accurately reflect the anxieties of most Australians?

The more holier-than-thou a broadcaster gets, the less it serves real people, and the less believable it becomes.

"I WAS born ages ago and my mum and dad were nice but poor but then I got a lucky break and now I'm on TV and everything, and here is a picture of me on our honeymoon in the Maldives."

The average celebrity book, mercilessly distilled by John Harris in the Guardian.

DO we really have a civil right to take our grievances on to the streets? Are marches an important part of a modern democracy or just a noisy ritual left over from the 19th century? Is the right to march, like the possession of handguns, a right which is not worth defending? The problem, as student organisers in London must have realised by now, is that it is impossible to hold a march without attracting idiots, smack-heads, anarchists and feral street gangs whose idea of a perfect day is to put a cop in hospital or wreck the Cenotaph. In this 24/7 media age, no-one needs to block a city centre to make a point. Rallies can be held in parks or stadiums. Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, says he is considering seeking powers to ban future marches. As far as most people are concerned, he is pushing at an open door, and not before time.

A FRIEND lives in a conservation area in a Victorian town house with a south-facing roof that is perfect for the solar-energy age. The experts assure him that panels on this roof would generate enough electricity for the entire house, plus a surplus he could sell to the national grid. Sadly, the planners at the local council say solar panels on the south-facing roof would be "visually detrimental". However, they have no objections to the panels being installed on his north-facing roof. Seriously.

UR changing language. A finance buff on the radio gives us a wonderfully vivid term for a sudden glut in sales, as expected before January's rise in VAT. It's a pig-in-a-python event. Consulting the oracles, I discover that pig-in-a-python events often result in headless-chicken scenarios.

BEATRICE Bolton, branded a "neighbour from hell," chewed gum during her trial. When she was convicted of a fairly minor offence under the Dangerous Dogs Act, she fled the court yelling: "It's a ****ing travesty!"

Just an everyday story of chavs and their vicious dogs? Not exactly. Beatrice Bolton is a long-serving and well respected circuit judge. Strangely enough, earlier this year she was presiding over another "neighbours from hell" case involving a couple whose noisy sex session prompted complaints. Quite why Judge Bolton flipped at Carlisle magistrates' court this week is anyone's guess but it may have something to do with the enormous fines imposed by some JPs for piffling offences. In this case Bolton's alsatian nipped a neighbour. The fine, costs and compensation came to £3,720. The going rate for shoplifting is an £80 fixed penalty.

FIND a quiet time, log on to YouTube and enjoy Tim Minchin's yuletide song, White Wine in the Sun, about spending Christmas with his mum and dad in Australia. It's an intelligent, atheist view of the great event and if it doesn't make you blub just a little, there is something seriously wrong with you.

MY daughter and a friend spent an evening drinking hot Vimto. Apparently, it's the modern take on mulled wine. Oh, the depravity of youth.

WE all know what we mean by the term "white Christmas". It is a snowfall which begins just after we get home from work on Christmas Eve, produces a winter wonderland on Christmas Day and considerately vanishes by Boxing Day. When the weather experts (another oxymoron) predict a white Christmas which is just one perishing cold day in a run of three perishing cold weeks, it doesn't count. Wrong kind of snow.