Here’s a selection of the best of the Peter Rhodes column taken from the Express & Star for the week ending June 6.

YOU KNOW how it is. A saxophone is belting out a jolly waltz in the precinct and you drop a quid in the tin. And then you notice he’s collecting for the Dogs Trust, that purveyor of sickly, sentimental adverts for unwanted pooches. They may look like unreformed baby-savagers and car-chasers but the Trust invites us to adopt them on the promise that they have “so much love to give” and they’ll write us a letter every month. You might imagine that a literate dog could earn its own way in the world. Anyway, for the record, my £1 was for live music, not some wretched animal charity.

MICROSOFT is working on a touch-screen system to replace the computer mouse. One report says the system will make users “repeatedly lift their arms.” I smell stress. I smell lawyers.

THE Government wants to create an Infrastructure Planning Commission to push through major schemes such as motorways and nuclear power stations without all that silly, time-wasting democratic stuff. But Infrastructure Planning Commission is an awfully long name. What’s wrong with good old-fashioned Politburo?

“WHY Jonathan Ross is Worth the Money,” declares the headline on a column defending Auntie Beeb’s decision to give £18 million of our hard-earned licence money to Wossy. Blimey. In these cash-strapped times, who can possibly stand up for such profligacy? Aha, all is explained. The column is penned by one Michael Lyons. He is chairman of the BBC and he gives new meaning to that old expression “a minority of one.”

SO IF we are all issued with annual carbon credits and a politician runs up £4,000 on taxi bills, who has to deduct all that carbon from their account – the politician or the cabbies?

ANOTHER week, another new law. The teacher from Redditch who is currently Home Secretary wants a law to enable police to arrest children who routinely drink in public. To hear all this stern, schoolmarmy stuff from Jacqui Smith you might imagine that 1,000 years of English law-making has left the police utterly powerless. Not at all. There is a vast raft of ye olde offences, such as being drunk and disorderly, or behaviour liable to lead to a breach of the peace. All it takes is political will. If ministers enforced the existing laws instead of posturing about new ones, this would be a much happier country.

I HAVE never understood why people become special constables. There’s no money in it and why risk a thumping on a Friday night for nothing when Pcs and community service officers get paid for the privilege? And then I read the case of the murdered special, Nisha Patel-Nasri. She found a novel use for her police warrant card, trying to enforce a civil debt owed to her husband’s firm. When the victim called the police, Patel-Nasri told an experienced sergeant: “You don’t know who you’ re ****ing with”. She said her friends in Scotland Yard would get the sergeant fired. For this grossest of gross misconduct, Patel-Nasri was formally given “words of advice.” Does no-one get the sack any more?

I RECENTLY rubbished a suggestion that the Queen could sack a prime minister which, inevitably, leads one reader to ask: “”So who can get rid of him?”
His doctor.

A READER asks, does a Russian pony trotsky?

“IS it a crime to go shopping?” asks Grace Mugabe, wife of the Butcher of Zimbabwe, currently staying five-star in Rome while hubby attends a food conference and his people starve. I dare say Madam Ceausescu of Romania asked much the same thing. All the way to the firing squad.

AN American and his wife accused of earning a million dollars a week from smuggling had countless Rolex watches and lived in a massive mansion in New Jersey complete with a dance floor, 30-seat cinema and a dozen plasma televisions. According to police, the neighbours thought he was a plumber.

AS AN experiment in parts of London, cyclists will be allowed to travel the wrong way in one-way streets. And the difference will be . . . ?

* Has this whetted your appetite for more of Peter’s gems? Make sure you read his column every day by picking up a copy of the Express & Star.