Best of Peter Rhodes - Oct 16

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

THE state pension is to rise by £2.40 next April. Don't spend it all in one shop.

ESPECIALLY in the shop where one flabbergasted reader found a pair of designer jeans, torn to shreds and apparently spattered in paint. A snip at £369.

A READER complains that his local RSPCA office is so small you couldn't swing a cat.

AS I may have said before, we are two nations, the wired and the unwired. If you're lucky enough to be on the internet, you can save money on everything from groceries to insurance. But how much? The latest research by the Government's Digital Inclusion Champion (do we call her DIC?) Martha Lane Fox, suggests the figure is £560 a year, or just over £10 a week. Puts the pensioners' £2.40 rise into context, doesn't it?

HERE'S a nasty little sting, spotted in the small print of a car dealer's website: "NB - An additional £56 admin fee is charged on all used cars and vans." What? So you buy an old banger and then have to pay an extra £56 for the privilege? Car sales are down. Any wonder?

IN THE eternal quest to answer all the mysteries of the universe, a reader asks whether bees cast their votes in a pollen station.

QUELLE horreur! An outbreak of scabies has been reported at France's fabulous Elysee Palace. However, French is a beautiful language and the French for scabies sounds nowhere near as scabrous as the English word. It is gale, pronounced gal, which sounds altogether nicer. This, remember, is

the nation that gave us (in the literary sense) the romantic sounding "papillons d'amour" (butterflies of love). We dreadful Anglo-Saxons call them pubic lice.

A READER asks: "If you inflated a balloon in the high street, pricked it with a pin and dropped it, you'd be nicked for littering. So why do so many civic and showbiz celebrations start with the release of thousands of balloons, and no-one gives a damn?"

THE family-law expert Baroness Deech says it's time that pre-nuptial agreements were recognised by the law. If that happens, and rich old blokes sign a form to protect their assets from gold-diggers, they will discover exactly how attractive they really are.

THEN there was the chap who rang his girlfriend to tell her he'd got a job in a bowling alley. "Ten pin?" "No, it's permanent."

A READER tells me how he gave a homeless person £50. He says: " My thinking at the time was, I've got a job, a roof over my head and food on the table, and all he had was a machete."

A WOMAN reader makes the point that all the celebrating about Mike Tyson's forthcoming trip to Britain for a series of "An Evening with Mike Tyson" is being generated by men. She says: "I know he has served his sentence but a British person with a conviction like that wouldn't even be allowed to visit America. I am offended and I can't believe I am the only one". Well, is she?

A READER inquires whether a frog breaking the law is Kermitting a crime.

AND YET another reader, deeply concerned about life, the universe and everything asks in an agitated state: "What if the Hokey Cokey really is what it's all about?"

AH, THE Mother of Parliaments. Such dignity. Such authority. Such grandeur. Glenys Kinnock has just been dropped as minister for Europe and replaced by Chris Bryan, the MP still best known for posing in his Y-fronts on a gay-dating website. This tectonic move in the affairs of the United Kingdom was announced by Mr Y-fronts - on Twitter. Lord knows what Sir Humphrey would make of it.

HAS the allegedly Euro-sceptic Polish president won some special EU deal for his nation by signing the Lisbon Treaty? Or is it just that his name, Kaczynski, sounds uncommonly like the noise a till makes – kerching!

RADIO 1's Newsbeat was suckered into inviting "two young guys who are members of the BNP" on to the programme. They turned out to be senior BNP officials. Having given them a platform to air their views, the show is predictably under attack. Not from me. As I have said before, an awful lot of the BNP manifesto (capital punishment, withdrawal from the EU, an end to mass immigration) is sweet music to a lot of Brits. And when the BNP's Cambridge-educated leader Nick Griffin talks, he can sound seductively reasonable. So it's good to see his lieutenants letting their jackboots show and reminding us that the BNP is still viscerally opposed to the mixing of the races and the "mongrelisation" of the white race. This is good old eugenic, Nazi, Aryan-supremacy stuff, unchanged since the beer halls of Munich. And it's still mainstream BNP policy. Well done, Newsbeat, for bringing it into the open.

CHERIE Blair told a literary festival she was repeatedly snubbed by the Ulster foghorn Ian (No Surrender!) Paisley, declaring: "From beginning to end Ian Paisley never shook my hand . . . because I was Catholic." Oh, come off it, Cherie. Paisley is an MP. He has shaken thousands of hands, Catholic and Protestant alike. Maybe he didn't shake your hand because he doesn't like you.

ONCE in a lifetime we hacks get to write an unforgettable intro. It was the turn of a writer on the Dailly Mail recently and here it is: "A gay man tried to poison his lesbian neighbours by putting slug pellets into their curry after he was accused of kidnapping their three-legged cat." Perfect.

ON THE front of the tube: "Polycell multi-purpose NO SANDING Polyfilla." On the back of the tube: "If necessary, sand down when fully dry."

AND yet another exam howler: "The ancient Britons lived in mud huts and had rough mating on the floor."