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

A READER raises this profoundly philosophical point: “If a man speaks in the wood, and his wife doesn’t hear, is he still wrong?

AS there was nothing but rubbish on all the channels a few nights ago, we watched a DVD of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). This week, of course, marked the 40th anniversary of our currency going decimal. In the film,  Richard Burton who is undercover as an £11-a-week librarian, buys his groceries in the corner shop. His loaf of bread, marmalade, tomato soup and corned beef come to four shillings and sixpence (23p) and, after some haggling, he gets credit until Friday.

INCIDENTALLY,  the only reason I can accurately report the above is that some earnest movie-geek has copied all the subtitles from the film and put them on the internet. Bizarre.

I MAY not be a great fan of quangos but what this country really needs is The B****cks Commission. Its brief would be to consider applications from mass murderers to vote, paedophiles to be taken off the sex-offender register, and health-and-safety zealots to ban conkers. No case would take more than five minutes and the Commission’s rulings would be delivered  with a large rubber stamp marked ” B****cks”. Sorted

THIS may be a unique moment in my career for I find myself in bed with Roy Hattersley. He rages against his own Labour Party for allowing online gambling to be advertised on television. Hattersley and I share a rather old-fashioned Northern Methodist view that gambling is a social evil which should be controlled, not promoted. But the gambling industry seduced New Labour and the result is a staggering  450,000 problem gamblers, a  50 per cent rise. This is social misery on a vast scale. Hattersley wants Labour “now a party of principle again” to demand tougher controls.
As we say Oop North:  want on, lad.

BLOWED if I can understand the national outpouring of fondness for the Forestry Commission. I would rather see Britain’s forests handed over to charities and tree-hugging trusts than left with a Commission which has despoiled vast areas of Scotland with sterile ranks of alien conifers. But the people revolted, David Cameron has backed down and Whitehall  is now looking at new ways of “increasing biodiversity and public access”. This is balderdash piled upon bunkum. Biodiversity is what you get when Homo sapiens is kept well away. While we humans may feel a Disneyish sort of kinship with little fluffy and feathery things, animals are petrified of us and our dogs. The best way to drive wildlife out of a forest is to let humans in.  The greatest explosion of biodiversity I have ever witnessed  came in 2001 when the farm where we live suddenly became home to muntjac, roe deer and buzzards. That was the year of foot-and-mouth disease when all the footpaths were closed. When the humans returned, the deer vanished.

WHAT have the products of  the Forestry Commission in common with Camilla’s performance on The Archers this week? Wooden.

GOING through some old papers, a reader found this headline from Picture Post of  October 12,  1946: “Is a footballer worth £12 per week?”

IN the debate over sergeant-majors being sacked from the Army by email, one voice was hardly heard. It was the authentic voice of the squaddie who sees the job cuts as the prelude to withdrawing from Afghanistan, and is not particularly happy about it. This, from a soldier in a chatroom this week:
” Why do people keep trying to get us out of Afghan? I’m due to deploy in March, and I need the £5,000 op bonus. The Army don’t pay  private soldiers enough so we go on ops to earn enough money to support our families.”
Lest we forget, many soldiers are happy to serve on the front line, doing the job they have trained for and making good money, too.

THIS,  from the personal ads: “Male 49, 6ft tall, slim build, considered attractive, dresses smart casual with no ties.”

SIMON Cremer caught an employee stealing £845 at his flooring business in Essex. He promptly put a “thief ” sign around the crook’s  neck and marched him to the nearest police. You will not be surprised to learn that the thief  got  off with a caution while Mr Cremer has been forced to pay him £5,000 compensation  plus £8,000 costs in an out-of-court settlement  for “trauma and distress”. Mr Cremer says he now has no faith in the justice system. Join the club. Your membership number is 60 million.

AM I alone in detecting not a shred of interest in the forthcoming royal wedding? To judge from the Kate ‘n’ Wills hysteria in the media, we are a nation in raptures. But in real life I have yet to meet a single person who is the slightest bit interested. If I’m wrong, do let me know.

A BUS user writes: ” We affectionately call our local service the Banana Route. They arrive in bunches and some are really rotten.”