Best of Peter Rhodes - Nov 13

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

GREAT Barr School is advertising for a maths teacher. The advert states: "Must be able to teach maths."

A READER was invited to fill in a questionnaire at her local library. It was rather longer and more searching than she expected. Question 22 at the bottom of page seven was: " Are you:

* Heterosexual/straight?

* Gay/lesbian?

* Bisexual?

Please turn over."

BY their deeds shall ye know them. Gordon Brown and his acolytes keep telling us that if we don't fight terrorists in Afghanistan we will have to fight them in England. If there is a direct threat to England then we need the means to fight it. So you might imagine that parties of well-motivated, disciplined soldiers who have trained for years and know every inch of their local territory would be a priceless asset. Apparently not. Despite the alleged U-turn on Territorial Army training, the quiet, cynical destruction of the TA continues. All over Britain, units are being scrapped or cut in size. My old mob, 67 (The Queen's Own Warwickshire & Worcestershire Yeomanry) Signal Squadron, has just been reduced to a mere troop. Fine old units with centuries of tradition are being axed by a Government which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. As it happens, I do not believe Brown's assertion that the Taliban are targetting Britain. But if they or anyone else bring open warfare to our streets, let us remember that the people who stripped us of our defences were the prime ministers who decimated the TA - Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

I ONCE attended a business dinner in Houston. The Texans were wonderfully hospitable and polite and uttered not one profane word. But at the end of the table was one of their managers, an Australian, who was effing and blinding, and worse. Why did the Texans put up with such foul language?

"Oh, it's his culture," explained one of our hosts.

At the time, this huge regard for someone else's culture was mildly amusing. But it's precisely the mind-set which allowed Major Nidal Malik Hasan to go on his lethal shooting spree at Fort Hood. It was known that Hasan was a devout Muslim who hated US foreign policy and once declared that non-believers should be beheaded. No-one reported him because no-one wanted to be seen as anti-Muslim. It's his culture, innit?

Weep for the dead. Weep for common sense.

NOT so much an exam howler as a case of bad typing. A retired teacher swears that one student produced a history paper explaining how "the Ancient Britons transported the bluestones from South Wales to Stonehenge by floating them up the Bristol Channel on enormous farts". Rafts, apparently.

THIS on the other hand, is a genuine howler:

Q. What is the fibula?

A. A small lie.

I CAN'T help noticing that one member of the Liverpool syndicate which scooped £45 million on EuroMillions is called Donna Rhodes.

"Dear Cousin Donna, you may not remember me but . . . "

A WORRIED reader points out that in 2007, the Chinese Year of the Chicken, bird flu erupted in Asia. In 2008, the Year of the Horse, the Australian racing industry was hit by equine influenza. This year is the Year of the Pig, and we get swine flu. Next year? It's the Year of the Cock. What could possibly go wrong?

THANKS for your memories of the Berlin Wall coming down 20 years ago. I loved the letter from a reader whose local radio station on November 10, 1989 devoted most of its news bulletin to a phone-in on the sacking of the local football manager. The suggestions for a replacement included a player who had died some years before. Only when this parish-pump blather was utterly exhausted did the newsreader mention that the Berlin Wall had come down. Priceless.

BUT I was moved by another letter, from a former British Army soldier who spent years patrolling the West German border. On his days off he had visited a number of the old Nazi death camps. Twenty years ago this week he took a phone call from an old friend, a German who was thrilled that the Wall was down and her divided country, East and West, would soon be one state again. The old soldier did not share her happiness at the prospect of a united Germany. Indeed, he tells me this was the only phone call he has ever taken that left him shaking with fear for the future. But then he is Jewish. "I don't worry about Germany now," he says. "There is a new generation and they have learned their lesson. But 20 years ago there were still plenty of Germans around who had served in the SS. It was a scary moment."

THE think-tank Demos says "tough love" is the right approach to parenting and urges us: "Always keep your promises and carry out threatened sanctions." This gets a mite tricky if your most recent threat was to chop your little horrors into pieces and feed them to the goblins.

SENDING the Prince of Wales to Quebec is rather like sending Louis XVI to the local guillotine factory. It is bound to end in tears. French Canadians have done rather well out of modern Canada. Their language is taught in schools and appears on every official sign and document across that huge land, even in areas where no-one speaks French. But anti-Britishness runs through the veins of every true Quebecois, as does that 18th century desire to chop the head off anyone in possession of a crown. They also have a very French sense of melodrama, hence the ludicrous banners at this week's demo proclaiming "cultural genocide." If the prince had decided not to visit Quebec the locals would probably have gone off in a big Gallic sulk. You simply cannot please some people, as Louis probably remarked on his way to the scaffold.

AND yet more exam howlers:

Q. What does the word 'benign' mean?

A. What you will be after you are eight

Q. What is a turbine?

A. Something a sheik wears on his head

DID I really hear Gordon Brown during Prime Minister's Questions proudly claiming that he had done a great deal to "help people out of work"?