Best of Peter Rhodes - May 8

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

MET Office forecasters are predicting a hot, dry summer. An umbrella, I fancy.

ACTUALLY, watch this summer closely. The experts say there are no unusual climate-affecting currents in the oceans, so this year might give us an indication of the sort of summer we can expect in a normal year if global warming happens. I suspect we will rather enjoy it.

IF THE name fits. The financial spokesman for Cadbury is Rollo Head.

POLITICIANS rarely understand the people. When the history of this Government comes to be written, it will record that New Labour MPs, quietly convinced that the Great British Public was inherently racist, failed to understand how the people could suddenly become rather fond of a few thousand little chaps from Nepal.

SKY News and the BBC both carried the report that Communities Secretary Hazel Blears had attacked the Government's "lamentable failure" to communicate. The difference was that Sky pronounced it "laMENtable" while Auntie went for "LAMentable". Auntie's version is correct but as with so many words, the traditional English stress on the first syllable is giving way to the American practice of stressing the second syllable. I say CONtroversy, you say conTROversy. Let's call the whole thing off.

HAVING slagged off new technology recently, one of the benefits of it is that we hacks can write pieces like the above, switching from lower-case to capital letters, without some kindly old printer "correcting" it. In ye olden times, on another newspaper far, far away, several of my brilliantly amusing essays, in which the joke hung on a single word or punctuation point, were rendered utterly pointless by the printers. They always insisted it was done with the best of intentions. To which I would ask, if these were always genuine mistakes, how come "lonely" so often appeared as "lovely" in the In Memoriam column?

"The angels came and took you,

They simply called your name.

It's lovely here without you,

Life can never be the same."

I REFERRED last week to the shocking advice in one national newspaper that if you think a £1 coin is counterfeit, you can "test" it in a vending machine. A reader writes to confess he did this with the quiz machine in a pub. The good news is that he won the jackpot. The bad news is that most of the coins look a bit iffy.

MY EYE strayed to the agony column in a magazine where a woman of 26 wanted a baby but feared that her boyfriend of 29 might clear off and leave her as a single mum. In a tedious, politically-correct answer, the agony aunt advised waiting a little longer and perhaps consulting Relate. At no stage did she dare to suggest that if you want to breed off your boyfriend, you might first consider marrying him. Try using the M-word, love. If he scarpers, he's not the bloke you want fathering your kids.

TV CHEF Phil Vickery says a gluten-free diet has helped his wife, Fern Britton, shed the pounds. Oh, please. Fern revealed in June last year that she'd had a gastric band fitted. After radical surgery like that she could probably have lost weight on a Mars Bar, burger and dripping diet.

A READER tells me he was very wary of genetically-modified food but has just enjoyed a delicious leg of salmon.

REJOICE, for the world is to be saved by Anacondas. These snake-like rubber tubes are filled with water and placed in the sea. As the water moves in the tubes, it generates clean, green, carbon-zero energy. What could be simpler? The BBC's science correspondent Christine McGourty is positively gushing over the Anaconda, forecasting hundreds of offshore units. A boffin at the Open University says the inventors "could be on to a winner". For those of us of a certain age, two words spring to mind: Nodding ducks. Remember them? They were unveiled on Tomorrow's World, that Sargasso Sea of great ideas, way back in the 1970s. Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University showed how wave energy could be harnessed by duck-shaped floats driving air through turbines. Thirty years on, the ducks are still at the experimental stage with a piffling little installation off the Scottish island of Islay. So when will all these wonderful ducks, anacondas and other pollution-free energy sources become a reality? When we have burned the last drop of oil, of course.

I HAVE had my credit cards skimmed three times in as many years by organised criminals, causing some inconvenience and irritation. So why would I want one of Jacqui Smith's shiny new national ID cards and risk having my entire identity stolen? The software is foolproof? They told us that about credit cards.

YET another survey (how would we manage without them all?) tells us that the Australians are not the great neighbourhood entertainers we imagine. Only three per cent of the average Oz citizen's time is spent entertaining his neighbours, the lowest of 30 countries surveyed. Chuck another urban myth on the barbie, sport.