Best of Peter Rhodes - Feb 29

Here's a selection of the best of the Peter Rhodes column taken from the Express & Star for the week ending February 29.

FUNNY old game. Brian Smith, Director of Rugby at London Irish, describes scrum-half Paul Hodgson: "He's more experienced than one of the scrum-halves and has more legs than the other one."

DOCTORS in Ivory Coast are worried about quack remedies to give women bigger bottoms. A national dance craze in the African state has spawned a black-market in treatments. The dance is inspired by a hit song Bobaraba, which means "big bottom" in the local language. Woman are paying for potions, creams and injections. Save your money, girls. A couple of weeks in Bilston should do the trick.

Monday. Doctors in Dusseldorf report that cat-napping during the day not only rests the body but improves the memory.

Wednesday: Doctors in New York report that cat-napping during the day could quadruple your chances of having a stroke.

A READER chose a leek at her local greengrocer's and put it on the counter. The till girl examined it closely before asking: "So is this celery?"

A REPORT on climate change by a coalition including the Women's Institute and Woodland Trust predicts a grim outlook for the traditional English way of life. In particular it suggests that our sporting traditions may be ruined as bone-dry summers wreck our cricket pitches. Cricket interrupted by the weather? Surely not.

I DON'T know why I start this sort of thing but a reader in Shropshire says she heard the first cuckoo of spring yesterday morning. She wonders whether it's climate change or just a particularly randy cuckoo.

TANNING has become such a fad in Merseyside that "tanned" (ie lightly grilled) kids fresh from the sunbed salons are ganging up and bullying paler pupils. Behold, some new shades are born: chav bronze, bully brown, cancer khaki.

IT'S an English tradition. The ground is cleared, the concrete footings go in and we nosy devils wander around the new building site, tut-tutting at the midget-sized rooms planned for the next generation of home owners. I suspect the popularity of hamsters has something to do with not being able to swing a cat in the average 21st century home. Today comes news that by 2011 all new homes will have to conform to 16 new specifications for the elderly. Now the tricky bit. Having pared down the average starter home to the size of a shoebox, where are the builders supposed to put the doors, hallways and living rooms big enough to take wheelchairs, or the staircase wide enough for a stairlift?

WHY this sudden concern for old folk? The answer is dead simple. As the population ages, the Government has absolutely no intention of providing residential care for all. Where, when you become frail, confused and incontinent, is your nearest OAP care home? You're living in it.

AFTER much agonising, our glorious MPs have come up with a plan that might make all that unseemly probing of their expenses a thing of the past. First, we give them a thumping great £20,000 rise and then . . .

Well, what were you expecting?

A GLOSSARY for the aftermath of small British earthquakes:

Earthquake survivor: One who woke up.

Earthquake hero: One who checked the neighbours were okay.

Earthquake veteran: One who remembers that one in Dudley, too.

Earthquake bore: All of the above.

MARTIN Broughton, president of the CBI, attacks the Treasury for policies "that seem to have been drawn up on the back of a fag packet." This is a gratuitous insult to the ancient British art of fag-packet planning. My father designed the Rhodes family house on the back of a packet of Player's and it was brilliant.

MOHAMMED Hamid, convicted of soliciting murder this week, talked big about terrorism and ran training sessions for 13 years but never killed a single infidel. This beats the record previously set by Dhiren Barat, jailed in 2006 and described by police as "a determined and experienced terrorist." He had been plotting for 12 years without killing (or even terrorising) anyone. Funny sort of war.

I EXPRESSED some doubts last week about a quote attributed to a rugby official. Rightly so, says a reader who warns against believing every yarn you hear. He recalls the wonderful story of the US Department of the Interior which, in the 1920s, captured and ringed thousands of birds and released them. The project was called the Washington Biological Survey and the rings carried the address of the department and the abbreviation Wash. Biol. Surv. Shortly after the birds were released, the Department received a letter from a farmer in rural Arkansas which read: "While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you, it was horrible." The only snag is that in the 80-odd years since this story first appeared, absolutely no evidence has been produced that any such letter ever existed.

AFTER six weeks of that essentially English tale, Lark Rise to Candleford (BBC1), it still hasn't rained.

* 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.