Best of Peter Rhodes - February 6

Columnist Peter Rhodes on wine competitions, snakes, police strategy, the apostrophe, civil birth ceremonies and the number of humans that could be competing for land by 2050.

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Welcome to February. This is Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender History Month. Seriously. _________________________________________________________________

It is reported that the leader of a sex cult in Indonesia has been arrested for lewd acts "after giving sermons in his underpants." Strange place to give a sermon.

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Birmingham City Council has decided to scrap apostrophes on its street signs on the grounds that they cause confusion. The Daily Telegraph has promptly launched a campaign to rescue the apostrophe, harrumphing: "Just imagine Wren's cathedral without the apostrophe to see how ludicrous this is".

However, if you go to the official website of Wren's cathedral you will see it described as both St Paul's and St Pauls. Even the people running the place can't agree on its punctuation. There is a golden rule for newspaper campaigns. Never start one when the cause is already lost. _________________________________________________________________

Wine experts in California warn us not to pay too much attention to awards won at wine competitions because judges rarely give consistent assessments. Amen to that.

I was once invited to join a tasting panel at a beer-awards event. We worked our way through 23 ales. By the time it was over we were all pleasantly ratted. The only brands we could clearly remember were the very dark one and the very cold one, and so we solemnly awarded them a medal.

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Seen (allegedly) in a store: "Toilet out of order. Use floor below."

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More news of the credit crunch in Japan. Apparently the Ninja Bank has taken several hits but is still in the black. Bosses have rejected criticism of the Tofu Bank as "tasteless".

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Sign by an office sink: "After tea break staff should empty the teapot and stand upside-down on the draining board."

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It looks as though Iceland is to be fast-tracked into the European Union. Let us welcome them into the fold with the traditional EU greeting song: "We're coming to steal your fish, your fish / We're coming to steal your fish."

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In 1960 there were about 3,000 million humans rattling around this planet. Today there are about 6,000 million. The curious thing is that while everyone knows the world's biggest problems are caused by human activity, heaven help those who dare to suggest there are too many of us.

Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, is the latest brave soul to suggest that limiting the size of families to two children would not be a bad idea. He is promptly howled down by bishops who seem to believe environmentalism is the work of the devil and big business which needs an ever-growing number of consumers.

The Daily Express, speaking for outraged Middle England, denounces Mr Porritt as a "narrow-minded control freak." Time will tell. By 2050 there could be 9,000 million humans competing for land, water, food and work. I bet our grandchildren will wish we had paid more attention to that nice Mr Porritt.

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"They're queuing up to buy a peer." Remark allegedly made by a London cop seeing a traffic jam outside Parliament.

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Likening himself to the great artist who lived to be 90 before finishing his finest works, Gordon Brown says he's a bit of a Titian. I dare say he is half right. _________________________________________________________________

Our changing language (i): "A major snow event" (BBC Weather) means it's going to fall on London.

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Incidentally, the reason we don't see many snow ploughs these days is that they are totally banjaxed by that great aid to traffic calming, the speed hump.

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Our changing language (ii): When did " a big dump of snow" (Sky News) pass into polite usage?

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Police forces across England are investing in cardboard figures of PCs to confuse and deter criminals. It's called integrated policing. Cardboard cops fit beautifully into a criminal-justice system which also has tissue-paper courts and fresh-air prisons. _________________________________________________________________

The Children's Society latest report blames Britain's "selfish and individualistic" culture for giving children such a wretchedly unhappy time. And if all working mums were hatchet-faced corporate bitches hell-bent on smashing through the glass ceiling at all costs, we might agree. But they are not.

Most working women (like most working men) don't have careers. They have jobs. They work not for personal prestige but to maintain a decent standard of living. Many would much rather be at home looking after the kids.

The root of Britain's ills is not selfishness. It is the curious fact that, for all the soaring wealth of our nation and our planet, a working man's wage is no longer enough to support his family. And that is the result of deliberate measures by politicians who sincerely believe that everyone should work, and that raising children is the business not of mothers but of the state.

The report also calls for "civil birth ceremonies" in order that both parents may formally accept the duties of parenthood. You have to smile. We already have a similar ceremony in which both partners formally accept the duties of marriage. The failure rate is about 45 per cent. _________________________________________________________________

That admirable German-born Birmingham MP Gisela Stuart goes straight to the heart of the row over imported workers at British refineries. Portuguese and Italians are still considered to be foreigners, she says, instead of us all regarding ourselves as citizens of the EU.

She is right. The EU dream will become reality only when England and Germany play each other at Wembley and an Anglo-German crowd applaud both teams equally. Or to put it another way, when hell freezes over.

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A cynical letter to one of the London papers says all the Germans needed to do in 1940 was "wait for snow to engulf Britain and then invade". And when the entire Wehrmacht was stranded on the ungritted road up from Dover docks, who would tell the Fuhrer?_________________________________________________________________

The nurse who offered to pray for a patient and was duly suspended by her bosses has now been jumped on hard by the National Secular Society which claims to represent atheist and agnostic views.

The NSS very generously does not want her sacked. But it thunders: "We do want her to understand that she cannot use her privileged access to the homes of private individuals as a pulpit." For a bunch of unbelievers they do sound awfully preachy.

May I, as a fairly hard-boiled atheist, make this point about the NSS: Not in my name. _________________________________________________________________

Anyone else spot the decimal police in action as Auntie Beeb reported the discovery of fossilised remains of a massive snake in Colombia?

This monster serpent slithered in the swamps 60 million years ago. According to Radio 4's bulletin at 5pm, it was 42 feet long. By 10pm the offending imperial measurement had been expunged from the report. Instead they described its weight in tons. And I bet they spelt tons as tonnes.

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"There were some terrible battles among the tits this morning." A snowy February 9, 1906, as described in Edith Holden's book, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. A charming image.