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

“DROUGHT will raise food prices, warn farmers” (headline this week). Didn’t take long, did it?

LOOK at the tender loving care some people lavish on their car, their boat, their hi-fi system, their super-dooper Italian coffee maker and all the other must-have gizmos of our consumer age. They love them, cherish them, clean them and maintain them. A  letter signed by politicians, nurses, academics and charities complains that some elderly  patients are “treated like objects”. If only they were so lucky.

A TERRIBLE drought will happen unless we get several weeks of prolonged heavy rain. It may be time to invoke the ultimate rain-making spell. Put out the garden furniture.

THE latest official advice is to fight the drought by showering for no more than four minutes. This is based on ye ancient folklore that showers use much less water than baths. But some of today’s power showers could drown a hippo.  The average bath contains about 80 litres while a power shower can deliver 16 litres a minutes, or 64 litres in four minutes. The benefits may be minimal and that warm glow of virtue you get in the shower is probably just a warm glow.

I APPEAR to have opened a throbbing vein of bile in my request for suitable music for our daughter’s wedding later this year. First out of the postbag are:

* Fight the Good Fight

* God Rescue the Perishing

* Don’t Wanna Be Under Your Thumb Forever

One reader recommended a piece by Sir Arthur Bliss but said he was damned if he could see any connection between marriage and bliss.

SOME of the best creative minds on telly are producing not programmes but adverts. The latest Halifax home-insurance commercial, filmed entirely in slow-motion, is a gem. A football hurtles towards a window. Assorted humans try, and fail, to stop it. And then the family dog steps forward. Perfect.

I WROTE some time ago, as the Milly Dowler “false hope” allegations fell apart, that the sooner the News of the World was back, the better. Now comes the launch of the Sun on Sunday which will probably be much the same thing. I wish it well. One of the depressing aspects of the Leveson Inquiry has been the number of characters crawling out of the woodwork who consider themselves to be educated liberals but who would rejoice at the closing of any newspaper they don’t like. If you really believe in a free press, you have to put up with the insufferable self-righteousness of the Guardian, the pomposity of the Independent, the crudeness of the Star and the daily diet of bonkers headlines in the Express. You do it because you believe that the more papers there are, digging for news in every stratum of society from the ivory-tower heights to the sewer depths, the more we will come to understand what is going on in the world. But I will be glad to see the Sun on Sunday  on the shelves because variety is the spice of English life and because, once in a while, like the News of the World, it will uncover something genuinely important that the rest of the pack have missed.

“BECAUSE I did not want to go that way.” Maureen Darvell, 83, explaining to police why she drove seven miles north on the southbound lane of the M3, instead of turning around. Mrs Darvell told Folkestone magistrates she had since sold her  15-year-old Nissan Micra and would “upgrade to a mobility scooter.”

MERE figures can be deceptive. The week’s claim that the excellent Call the Midwife (BBC1) attracted 8.7 million viewers hardly justifies the claim that it is “bigger than Downton.” The only valid test would be screening the midwives at the same time as Downton Abbey. And having tried that with Spooks and taking a ratings pasting,   Auntie Beeb would never risk  a Downton run-in with Call the Midwife.

WE MAY solemnly express our pan-European sympathy but, hand on heart, does anyone believe that being unemployed on  a Greek island is anything like being unemployed in some grotty, shivery English inner-city?