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

AFTER reading some travel guides I posed the question, why are fishing villages always sleepy? A reader responds: “For the same reason that small hotels are always friendly.”

GREAT moment on Bondi Vet (Sky 1) when animal-doctor Chris Brown announced that a peregrine falcon had a thrush infection.

A READER writes: “I notice that builders at a local site  are part of the Considerate Constructors Scheme. Does this include no wolf whistling women, no bum cleavage , and no terrible singing?”
I  fear it does. Considerate Constructors is one of those schemes (Investors in People, Quality Assurance, etc) that firms like to stick on their letterheads and notice boards. On building sites, the Considerate Constructors code of practice demands: “Respectable and safe standards of dress should  be maintained at all times. Lewd or derogatory behaviour and language should not be tolerated, under threat of severe disciplinary action.”
So that’s no more builder’s bum and no more cries of “Oi, darlin! Get ‘em aht for the lads.”
And thus, another precious  little slice of English culture is lost.

MISRATA, the third-largest city in Libya, is at risk of being overrun by Gaddafi’s murder squads. Under a similar siege from 1992-96, Sarajevo survived. Its Bosnian defenders were outgunned and outnumbered but they protected  their city with vast fields of  anti-personnel land mines. And then kind-hearted Princess Diana got these mines banned. Her campaign was hailed as a great victory for humanity but try explaining that to the people of Misrata.

SEVEN big, daft hares in the meadow watched me pass by on the way to work. The correct term for a group of hares is, of course, a toupee.

WE SHOULD not be surprised at  this week’s  evidence showing the Blair government discussed exploiting  Iraqi oil long before it joined the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Three years ago,  Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, declared: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Over to you, Tone.

IN MY misspent youth I was with a pal and his girlfriend in a pub when they started kissing. The landlord told them to pack it in or leave. New to the ways of pubs, we kids were horrified at this appalling restriction. But a wise old drinker told me later: “It is a public house. It is not your house. Pubs have rules”
So they do. And when the gay couple Jonathan Williams and James Bull began kissing on their first date in a Soho pub recently and were asked to pack it in or leave, they were being treated exactly as any over-amorous straight couple would be treated. Williams and Bull are petulantly complaining that their rights have been abused. They should be celebrating a great blow for the principle of equal treatment for all.

COLIN  Atkinson, 64, is a Christian working for a  housing association in Wakefield. He displays his faith with a small palm-leaf cross on his van dashboard. For refusing to remove it, he has been threatened with the sack.
Interestingly, Mr Atkinson’s manager is allowed to display a poster of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, on his office wall, along with “several quotations” from Che.
I wonder if these quotations include Guevara’s infamous views  on black people: “The  black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink.” Probably not.
The world has moved on. Guevara may make a great  poster but he is not the cool, liberal Robin Hood we all imagined 40 years ago. Guevara was a vicious Marxist who took a sickening pleasure in killing people. He wrote with psychotic coolness about putting a bullet in a traitor’s head.  He talked of atom-bombing New York.
I would be far more concerned about a manager with a poster of Che on the wall than any God-botherer with a cross in his van.

MORE airport-security cobblers. A reader describes how security staff confiscated his son’s hair gel, presumably considering it to be a deadly weapon. The irritated family then sat down for breakfast in the airport cafe.  He reports: “We had metal forks and knives and then – having no further checks – boarded the plane.”

“HE was immeasurably superior to Piers Morgan by the simple expedient of not being Piers Morgan.” Reviewer Benji Wilson on David Hasselhoff as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent.