Best of Peter Rhodes - August 21

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

ANXIOUS archers. Do they quiver?

OH, JOY. Female boxing is to be on the programme at the 2012 London Olympics. So as well as being forced to pay £10,000 million to endure the usual running and jumping, we are now paying young women to smash each other in the face. Perfect.

FUNNY place, America. At first sight, compared to Britain, it looks like a solid, unified nation. We Brits are busy carving the UK apart. We shuffle around during the National Anthem. We can't even fly the Union Jack the right way up. In the States the flag is treated like a sacred shroud. At the first chord of The Star Spangled Banner, an American football crowd will rise as one, hands over hearts. Every morning in state schools, little Americans recite the Oath of Allegiance, pledging themselves to be " one Nation under God, indivisible". Gee, those Yanks just look so goshdarned neighborly. And yet, as the current debate reminds us, when it comes to health care it's the disunited Brits who invented the National Health Service while the Yanks see health care as every man for himself. If you've got insurance you're fine. If you haven't, then it ain't none of my business, pardner.

MIND you, the NHS can seem very old-fashioned compared to the US health system, as seen on TV dramas. How often have you switched on Casualty1909 and assumed it was Casualty?

A LEAKED memo by an unnamed American officer has accused British troops in Afghanistan of poor personal hygiene. So what's new? The Brits and the Yanks have always had a different approach to living in the field. In his wonderful memoir of the war in Burma, George MacDonald Fraser (creator of the Flashman novels) recalls the reaction, in broad Cumberland accents, of his men to the arrival of American K-rations. The ration packs were found to contain three sheets of toilet paper "which drew Rabelaisian comments from the section who wondered if them Yank boogers ed nivver 'eard o' grass."

AS A general rule in the Third World, the more a regime claims to be liberal, popular or democratic, the more beastly it is. Meanwhile in gentle olde England, Portsmouth Council has given its wardens tape measures so they can impose £70 fines on any vehicles parked more than 50cm from the kerb. The council is run by people who call themselves Liberal Democrats.

IN CHOCOLATE factories the workers were traditionally allowed to eat as much as they wished. In time, they got fed up with the stuff and took only a reasonable amount. A similar rule seems to apply in the City where bankers help themselves to vast amounts of the product they work with. Unfortunately, none of them ever seems to get fed up with money. And when you use the expression "a reasonable amount," they look at you as though you are mad. Chancellor Alistair Darling says he will pass new laws to reduce City bonuses. Not a hope.

FIXED-penalty fine for shoplifting in England - £80. Maximum penalty for feeding seagulls in Aldeburgh, Suffolk - £2,500. "Seagulls are a serious problem," a council spokesman explained this week.

A NUMBER of readers ask the same question. How can I get a place in a really nice nursing home with the state paying all my care and medication bills, and with no-one asking embarrassing questions about my assets?

The answer is simple. First, rob a mail train.

"There are circumstances in which it is justifiable." Foreign Secretary David Miliband on terrorism, August 16.

"We pay tribute to their courage." Mr Miliband on the latest British troops killed by terrorists in Afghanistan, August 17.

THE Reader's Digest, under threat of bankruptcy in the States this week, used to drop into the Rhodes household every month in the 1960s. Without it I would never have encountered the curious world of Daniel P. Mannix who wrote about life in a travelling sideshow in small-town 1930s America. One of the star turns was the Human Ostrich who swallowed anything, including goldfish and rats which he knocked unconscious with cigar smoke and regurgitated alive after the show was over. During one act, the rat awoke prematurely in his stomach. With great presence of mind, Mannix handed the performer a pitcher of water. The Human Ostrich drank it and then emptied his stomach in a hideous fountain of water, goldfish and rat. Most of the audience fled in horror but one old farmer said it was the best damn act he'd seen for years. When you read this sort of stuff at the age of 12, you never forget it.

EVERY medicine comes with warnings about possible side effects but one reader reckons this takes the biscuit. It was among three sheets of A4 accompanying some sleeping pills: "If you experience sleepwalking or do other things in your sleep that you don't remember the next day, speak to your doctor. " One of the possible side-effects referred to in passing was "sleep driving."

ANOTHER great headline, from the days when Labour didn't know quite what to do about that troublesome territory in the South Atlantic: "British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands".

OUR changing language. A business guru on the radio was explaining the benefits of school leavers being chucked into jobs and left to learn from their mistakes. It's called sheep-dipping.

IS A woman who sets fire to her gas bill called Bernadette?