Best of Peter Rhodes - May 23

Here's a selection of the best of the Peter Rhodes column taken from the Express & Star for the week ending May 23.

A FRIEND, fresh back from a production of Othello, says it's very moreish.

THERE are a number of precautions you can take if a horde of Glaswegian alcoholics is preparing to descend on your neat English city. For instance:

1. Re-form the yeomanry and order them to sharpen their sabres

2. Cancel all trains from Glasgow

3. Plant land mines on all approaches

4. Ring the entire city with barbed wire.

Possibly the daftest thing you can do is set up a number of large TV screens so the Rangers fans have an even greater incentive to turn up. I cannot begin to imagine what goes on in the head of someone whose idea of a good time is to queue for a jam-packed train, stand in an open park from 7am drinking tinned beer and watching footie on a very big TV. But they are clearly not rational people. Did no-one in Manchester ask what might happen if a screen broke or, heaven forbid, Rangers got stuffed?

According to one witness, as a terrified girl sat in her car while the vehicle was trashed by a posse of fans, one hero of the hour explained: "It's what we Scots do."

What we English do is pay for the damage and try to convince ourselves that it was just a tiny minority. Again.

INCIDENTALLY, where are all the armed youth of Manchester when you need them?

EXPRESSIONS for our time:

* "I'm thinking very green these days" = I'm skint.

* "We're getting out of property until the market improves" = We've been evicted

NATURAL England worries me. This quango, was cobbled together in 2006 through the merger of English Nature and the Countryside Agency. Its brief is to "conserve and enhance the natural environment." Last October its director of policy, Andrew Wood, announced that he considers big bits of England's Green Belt to be "comparatively boring". This week Natural England's chief executive, Dr Helen Phillips, described the Green Belt as "neglected and of poor quality" and suggested finding "better use" for it, which sounds like good news for bulldozer drivers. What we clearly need is another quango to keep a very close eye on this quango.

A READER sees a curious thing. The binmen inspect his green wheelie bin which, quite correctly, is full of garden waste, and then upend it, tipping the contents into his grey (non-recyclable) bin. Now, what's that all about?

ADDITIVE time. A mum gets on the train and hands out a garish selection of red and blue junk-food snacks to her three children. Ten minutes later the kids are out of control, screaming blue murder for better seats. They still don't get it, do they?

THIS statute-obsessed Government wants to pass yet another law, this time to make it an offence to insult members of the armed forces in uniform. How dare they? Suspicion of the army is a fine old British tradition. It dates back to an age when the Royal Navy defended our shores and large armies were viewed as a continental luxury and a threat to our freedoms. Britain is not the United States. We are not a flag-waving, soldier-worshipping nation. Tony Blair promised a Third Way. Trying to impose respect by law looks more like the Third Reich.

ETIQUETTE, dear boys, etiquette. As an Australian team won a gold award at the Chelsea Flower Show, those frightful colonials leaped in the air yelling: "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!" A horrified, Panama-hatted Brit was heard to exclaim: "Oh, my God." God is, of course, an Englishman. And He probably wears a Panama.

LORD knows, I can harrumph with the best of them but I cannot get worked up at the prospect of single women and lesbians having test-tube babies without a "role model" man being involved. IVF babies, by definition, are created thoughtfully. Half of Britain's problems are caused by feral kids conceived in the traditional, thoughtless way.

JAMIE Parker tells the Daily Mail that he and his wife have emigrated to Spain because he's fed up with crime in Britain. Mr Parker was a policeman.

"JUST as male presenters are acquiring grey hair and 'gravitas' females are acquiring their P45," wails one showbiz writer bemoaning the terrible ageism facing women on telly. If you want to see ageism, lady, take a look at the obituary columns. The greatest privilege in this world is to be alive. And women stay alive, on average, five years longer than men. Don't talk to us about unfairness.

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