Best of Peter Rhodes - Oct 23

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

A CONCERNED mother seeks my advice about her son who appears to be in love with his two school bags. She's worried he may be bi-satchel.

MY HEART goes out to Andrew and Gail Wallbank, the couple forced to sell their Warwickshire home which came with an old clause making them liable for 200,000 of church repairs. They never dreamed that the Church would enforce the ancient covenant on Aston Cantlow church. They were wrong. After an 18-year court battle, they have sold up. Mr Wallbank, a life-long Christian, is said to be "saddened" by the way the Church had gone about asking for the money. I bet. And yet there is a moral here. When it comes to ye olde covenants on property, never assume anything. Years ago, Mrs Rhodes and I bought the coach house to an old vicarage. In the deeds, we found ourselves responsible for supplying a quantity of furze kids each winter for the heating of the church. We didn't even know what furze kids were (faggots for fires, apparently), let alone where we could find any. The curious thing was that the clause was still legally binding - even though the church had been demolished 50 years earlier.

I GET a curious sense of deja-vu about some of the claims from you lot. Like the one by the reader who says he asked at the video shop if he could rent Batman Forever and they told him: "No, you'll have to bring it back tomorrow."

POPPY wearing gets earlier every year. It occurs to me that I haven't actually seen any poppies on sale yet. How many early wearers simply recycle last year's poppies?

RESEARCHERS in Washington got a clown, wearing a red nose and a purple and yellow shirt, to ride a monocycle around a university campus to see how many mobile-phone users noticed him. More than two-thirds simply ignored him. The researchers blame this on "attentional blindness" caused by mobiles. Really? And would you make eye contact with the loonie on the monocycle?

WE know that Brussels is desperate to get the UK fully handcuffed to Europe. So, it seems, are the Yanks. Hillary Clinton has warned David Cameron that any "special relationship" between the White House and Downing Street depends on Britain being at the heart of Europe. So if a future Tory government dared to challenge the Lisbon Treaty, President Obama would not be pleased. A reader rang to suggest that if Obama is so damn iffy about us Brits, maybe he should ask his new friends in Europe to send their troops to Afghanistan instead of ours.

READ all about it - Pope steals our Church. His Holiness has approved a new legal structure which will enable groups of Church of England worshippers, or even whole parishes, to convert to Roman Catholicism.

Interesting tactics. The Spanish Armada fails and 400 years later they send in the lawyers.

SO FAREWELL, Ludovic Kennedy. He was a great journalist and a great campaigner. He was also a great embarrassment to a pal of mine who was working with him on a documentary. He took the great man for lunch in a packed pub. He was mortified when Ludo, then in his 70s, spent the entire meal discussing, at the top of his voice, his sex life.

JACK McPherson, 17-year-old son of the Chief Constable of Norfolk, was invited to play the part of a rioter in a police training exercise. His brief was to antagonise and wind-up the riot cops. So with the bright imagination of a teenager, he unfurled a banner suggesting that all police women were lesbians. The bobbies promptly threw their teddies out of the pram, the Chief Constable was summoned and both he and his lad apologised to the assembled cops. After much grave discussion, both the Crown Prosecution Service and the Independent Police Complaints Commission have decided not to bring charges. Mind how you go.

A READER tells me about a family from the Basque region of Spain who were visiting England and foolishly rushed into the revolving doors at a big department store. The doors were jammed and the family had to be released by the fire brigade. The moral is not to put all your Basques in one exit

FROM Macclesfield comes news of Daniel Walton, a 15-year-old who has been suspended from his school for refusing to stand up when the headmaster enters the classroom. Daniel's father , 40, says: "I teach my kids that respect is earned." He offers no idea of how long the head might have to work at gaining his lad's respect. It doesn't stop there. Mr Walton also says his daughter will defy a school rule not to wear make-up: "If they tell her to take off her make-up, she will get her coat." Apparently, a quarter of all head-teacher vacancies in England are unfilled. I think we understand why.

"THE middle classes need to read the small print of the welfare state," declares a spokesman for the think-tank, Reform. The problem is that, with opticians' prices being what they are, millions of folk find it pretty damn hard to read the small print of anything. So here, in normal-size print is Reform's bright idea for the future of state benefits: Scrap 'em. Or at least scrap 'em for anyone showing any signs of income or savings. Scrapping winter-fuel payments and free TV licences for elderly folk deemed to be middle class could save the state more than 3,000 million a year. The snag, as we all know, is that this money would then be showered on feckless single mums, feral kids, drug addicts and anyone who thinks they have a human right to produce a dozen children. So here' s a better idea. If the winter-fuel handout is really intended to keep old folk warm, then issue it in the form of fuel vouchers. This would make sure the money is spent properly. It would also protect Gran from being bullied into spending her fuel payments on Christmas presents for ungrateful grandkids. As for the TV licence, that should have been scrapped years ago.

TOLD you so. I was horrified last week at the piffling 15,000 auctioneer's value put on the last surviving Union Jack from the Battle of Trafalgar . Sure enough, this magnificent relic fetched a cool 320,000 this week. The auctioneer says he is "lost for words" so here are a few: pride, glory, patriotism, remembrance.

PATIENT: "I'm frightened of lapels."

Doctor: "You've got cholera.'