Best of Peter Rhodes - Nov 6

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

THE classic definition of an intellectual is a man who, on being left alone with a tea cosy, does not put it on his head. In the bathroom, I may have discovered another definition. It is a man who, on being handed a sink plunger, does not pretend to be a Dalek.

FERN Britton who famously lost weight with a gastric band, is to host a Sunday chat show on religious affairs. With absolutely zero imagination, the show is entitled Fern Britton Meets. Why not Band of Hope?

AND yet another exam howler:

Q. What is a terminal illness?

A. When you are sick at the airport.

AN AUSTRALIAN student threw his shoe at former Oz premier John Howard during a speech at Cambridge University this week - and missed by a mile. The unruffled event organiser, Jonathan Laurence declared: "It was the weakest throw in the world. It shows why you lot lost the Ashes."

NEXT week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In popular history this was the moment when freedom-loving West Berlin embraced its enslaved neighbours from the East. As a wrinkled old Cold War hack, let me tell you it wasn't quite like that. West Berlin was deep within communist East Germany and West Germans had to be persuaded to settle there. One of the attractions for young people was that West Berlin residents were exempt from national service. So the divided city became home to more than its share of draft-dodgers and pacifists whose commitment to Western values was shaky, to say the least. So how did Berliners view the Nato forces which protected their city from the Soviet Union? I once had the privilege of hitching a lift with a convoy of British Chieftain tanks returning to their barracks after a Sovereign's Day parade in West Berlin. As they thundered down the streets, old Berliners who remembered the war, and the mass rape by the Red Army, and the hungry days of the Airlift, smiled and waved at the British squaddies. In contrast, young Berliners scowled at us and gave us the finger. Ungrateful little toads.

HEAVEN knows what made David Cameron promise a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. He must have known that time was running out. Now, with the Czech signature on this wretched document, it's too late. Cameron has managed to achieve the rare distinction of breaking an election promise before getting elected.

A READER points out the that the Lisbon Treaty diminishes democracy in the UK. As it was being ratified, five British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. My reader's question is this. Why are we spending millions denying ourselves democracy within the European Union but spending more millions trying to give democracy to Afghans who clearly don't want it? The only answer he can offer is that mad-cow disease, far from vanishing, is endemic and is busy chewing up brains in high places.

SO THE Rooney babe is named Kai . What sort of name is that? I'll tell you. It is the sort of name that, within 50 miles of Birmingham, will be pronounced Koi. It may seem a cool name today but in years to come people will wonder why the neighbours named their son after a carp.

"IN the end you vote out of desperation," says Sir Michael Caine, explaining his decision to switch from Labour to Conservative at the next election. "You just have to have someone new and see what happens." He is right. The willingness of the British people to vote out one bunch of shysters and replace them with the other lot is the enduring proof of our great national optimism.

ALWAYS read the small print. A colleague admits he was drawn by the big sign proclaiming "Reduced" on the wine shelf in his local supermarket. On closer inspection the wine was down from £4.98 a bottle to £4.97.

RESEARCH by an economist in South Carolina suggests that women lawyers have better career prospects if they have one of those forenames that can be either male or female. Thus, Andrea does better as Andy and Cameron has better prospects than Susan. I wonder whatever happened to the offspring of an old colleague of mine. He christened his offspring Hilary and Beverly. Both were boys.

THE journal Psychological Science reports new research suggesting that the wider a person's face, the more aggressive they are. Casting my mind back over hundreds of interviews in the past 40 years, there was only one person with a visage so strikingly wide that I described it as "the bold face of a prizefighter". It was Danny La Rue and he was utterly charming.

THEY call it the world's biggest cruise ship. But doesn't there come a stage in design when a ship looks so unshiplike that it shouldn't even be called a ship? The bizarrely-named Oasis of the Seas looks like a floating version of Tower Hamlets.

THIS new leviathan is hailed as the greenest liner ever, on the grounds that it recycles all its water and does not dump any sewage at sea. This raises an obvious question, especially for those on the lower decks. Where do they keep it all? No, sir, don't go through that door. . .