Best of Peter Rhodes - August 5

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

THIS has to be the quote of the year so far: "Come on, Sooty, give it some welly!" Paul Daniels, just before the glove puppet whacked him in the eye with a pizza, landing him in hospital.

MY PIECE this week on the amazing speed of today's enormous combine harvesters brings this wistful memory from a reader: "When my father went to work on a farm of around 1,000 acres in 1965, there were 14 full-time and five part-time workers. By the time he was made redundant in 1982, there was one full-timer and one part-timer left."

AN EARLIER item on the Pin-number urban myth brought a rich crop of responses. The myth, you may recall, is that if a robber tries to make you take money from a cash machine, you simply type in your number in reverse (so 1234 becomes 4321) and police are automatically dispatched to the scene. It is nonsense but it's the sort of stuff that gets repeated a million times a day by people who don't stop to think before spreading disinformation and clogging up your emails. A number of readers make the very obvious point that their Pin numbers (4334, 3553, 2112 and so on) are the same forwards or backwards and yet the cops never turn up.

HEART failure is a terrifying condition and we must all be rooting for 40-year-old father Matthew Green who is being kept alive by a £100,000 artificial heart until a donor organ can be found.

But whenever I see such devices, I wonder how much joined-up thinking is going on.

Heart surgeons know a lot about pumping liquids. But so do central-heating engineers. We are told Mr Green's artificial heart is expected to last three years. The average central-heating pump goes on for a decade or more.

Do medics and industrial engineers ever talk to each other? It worries me that the ultimate artificial heart may already be with us, on the shelf at your local plumbers' merchant at £29.99, simply waiting to be recognised.

STILL on hearts, the British Heart Foundation's kiss-of-life campaign reveals that one married couple in five goes a whole week without kissing. I can believe that. I have seen couples in the countryside negotiating those swing gates without even a token brushing of the lips. If you don't kiss in a kissing gate, you probably don't kiss at all.

A CHRISTIAN midwife went to an employment tribunal because she was ordered to wear trousers at work. She claimed the Bible forbids the wearing of men's clothing. As Deuteronomy tells us: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment." However, this midwife was being asked to wear a female uniform, not some bloke's trousers. There is no challenge to faith, no insult, no dilemma. Verily, the Blessed Eddie of Izzard, cross-dressing comedian and national treasure, hath made it abundantly clear: "I do not wear women's clothes. I wear my clothes."

ACCORDING to an article in the current New Scientist, the best way to reach the age of 90 is, from the age of 30, to adopt a "stone-age diet" of seafood, fruit, nuts and vegetables. Really? Whenever anyone recommends the cave-man diet, remember that the average caveman lived to a ripe old 35. And I bet he'd have loved a Big Mac.

CRIMESTOPPERS this week named Britain's 10 most wanted fraudsters. You couldn't help noticing that at least half of them, involved in scams totalling more than £200 million, had slipped through the remarkably leaky sieve that is the English bail system. Two absconded before or during their trials, two failed to answer bail and one decided not to turn up at court. Who seriously imagined that a Mr Big, especially one with a foreign name and probably a foreign passport, would hang around to be banged up in Strangeways when he could be relaxing by the pool a thousand miles away?

ON THE other hand, the old warning "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime" lost its sting this week when the former MP Jim Devine was released from prison just four months into a 16-month sentence for fiddling his expenses. Under something called the home detention curfew scheme (no, I don't remember voting for it either), crooks can serve just one-quarter of their term before being released with a tag. Makes you proud to be British.

A READER, unable to sleep on these warm, sticky nights, tells me he has given up counting sheep and now counts celebrities instead. His most successful nodding-off so far went:

" Lord Sugar, Tracey Emin, Fiona Bruce, Steve Coogan, Ed Miliband, Zoe Ball, that ex-copper out of the jungle, Fern Britzzzzzzzzzzzzz."

JONATHAN May-Bowles, the man who attacked Rupert Murdoch with a pie, was sentenced to six weeks in jail. One of my more educated readers says 3.142 weeks would be more appropriate (3.142 = pi. It's that rarest of things, a mathematical joke).