Best of Peter Rhodes - Sept 4

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

GORDON Brown refuses to tell us when the next General Election will be. I wonder if he's told the Libyans?

THE Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says Britain suffers from "a cycle of low aspiration". I had one of those. The saddle kept coming off.

NO, I don't know what happened to swine fever, either. It was there and suddenly it was not there. However, having mysteriously flared up with 100,000 cases in the first week of the school holidays, swine flu will perhaps reappear just in in time for the first week of the school term. Cynical? Moi?

AN UNHAPPY young reader accuses this column of using "bad jokes". Look, sonny, these are not bad jokes. They are terrible jokes. How do you fish in a Spanish river? Castanet.

LAURA Dekker, a 13-year-old Dutch girl, has been put under the care of the state. She wants to sail around the world single-handed. Her parents want her to go. Psychologists argue that she is too young. I'm with the parents on this. If you have ever had a 13-year-old daughter mooching around the house, there are times when putting them on a boat and casting them far out to sea seems a brilliant idea.

IN 1936 a 15-year-old schoolboy, Patrick McConville, wrote a poem, "The Joy of England." It poses a series of beautifully-observed questions about this little island of ours. The closing lines are:

"Have you heard the dark trees murmur all your secrets to the breeze,

And laugh at all your hopes and fears, and seem to chide and tease?

Have you watched the cows wind homeward as the shadows slowly grow,

And western skies assuming of a wondrous rosy glow?

For if to these you answer 'yes,' and you answer thus aright,

You must have lived an English day, and felt an English night."

Seventy-three years on, This England magazine is using this poem to invite today's pupils to write their own poems in praise of England.

Fat chance. Most of today's teenagers can barely string a sentence together, let alone write poetry. Any affection they may have had for England has been hammered out of them by generations of woolly dimwit teachers who think loving your country is a form of racism.

Nothing brings the dumbing-down of English schools into focus quite so sharply as reading a child's poem from the 1930s, and seeing how well we educated them back then.

A GOVERNMENT department in India is offering a £12,500 prize for "the most innovative idea to pluck coconuts while standing on the ground." This news item brings back memories for a reader who, as a young National Serviceman, was sent to Christmas Island in 1957 to witness Britain's nuclear-bomb tests. He says when it comes to coconuts, a hydrogen bomb does the trick every time.

"Try dropping an H-bomb at approximately 20,000 feet, 30 miles away," he advises the Indians. "While awaiting the bomb drop we were told to take cover in a coconut plantation. Then, before the blast came, we had to run for our lives before all the coconuts were blasted off the trees."

AS DAME Vera Lynn takes the album charts by storm at the age of 92, spare a thought for the extraordinary success of one of her greatest hits. From the moment they heard it in 1942, Britons took The White Cliffs of Dover to their heart. It became the anthem of British wartime resolve. Which is remarkable, given that it's about as British as baseball and pretzels.

It was written in 1941 by two Americans, Walter Kent and Nat Burton, who knew a lot about music but nothing about Britain.

They began their song with "There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover" because the American bluebird is a symbol of happiness. And no-one ever told them that there are no bluebirds in Britain.

For reasons that have never been fully explained, the Brits accepted the bluebird lyrics without question.

STILL airborne, remember that time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.

HERE's a puzzle. You might imagine that a world living in terror of global warming would be horrified at any discovery which would add to the global bonfire. BP has signed a £500 million oil deal with Libya and has also discovered massive reserves of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone seems to think this is all wonderful news. Very odd.

THE UK population has passed 61 million. Border and Immigration Minister Phil Woolas says: "The British people can be confident that immigration is under control."

Of course it is, dear boy. Of course it is.

SOMETHING called the Catholic Truth Society has published a booklet urging married couples to pray together before they have sex in order to "purify their intentions" and to ask God "to clothe us in true dignity and take to yourself our shared aspirations". We atheists simply put the cat out.