Best of Peter Rhodes - March 26

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

A READER asks: "Why if you send something by road it is called a shipment, but when you send it by sea it is called cargo?"

THE Government is determined to get high-speed broadband into rural areas. And who's going to explain to the yokels that megabits aren't something you can shoot?

IT'S the sort of thing The Goons used to come up with. India's crack anti-terrorist police have been equipped with non-lethal grenades containing red-hot extract of chilli. One moment you've got the hostage and you're demanding money with menaces, the next there's a big bang, your whole world turns vindaloo and every orifice smarts. Well, goodness gracious me.

SPOT the Prime Minister's raging fury after the Budget speech? He brought in on himself by pointedly chatting with the Chancellor during Cameron's speech. The Tory leader said: "They're probably discussing what sort of charging fees they can give after the next election." Brown was suddenly, inexplicably furious. It only lasted a split-second but it was fascinating Bring on the live telly debates, eh?

ALISTAIR Darling knew he was on safe ground with his whopping hike in the alcohol duty on cider. Half of us cider drinkers seek out exquisite, single-variety vintages which are as fine as any wine. The other half buy three-litre bottles of supermarket rot-gut and scream obscenties at passers-by in the parks. Frankly, none of us payS too much attention to the price.

SO, FAREWELL, Fess Parker, the lean lanky American who woke up a whole generation of us 1950s kids to the sartorial elegance of the raccoon-skin hat. When Fess was Davy Crockett, you not only wore the hat (made by your mum) but learned the song. Hundreds of thousands of baby-boom pre-schoolers who had never been west of Aberystwyth knew that Tennessee was the greenest state in the Land of the Free and that young Davy had killed a bear when he was only three. At the time no-one asked where English mothers had found so much raccoon fur. Years later I worked out that the Davy Crockett craze coincided with one of the worst outbreaks of myxomatosis.

OUR changing language. "This session is a twilight and will begin at 4pm." (memo to tutors this week from a West Midlands council).

OKAY, I admit it. I am a fly fisherman, not a coarse angler. When I wrote about sticklebacks being eaten by kingfishers earlier this week, I was right out of my depth. A maggot-drowner from the canal banks writes: "Sticklebacks? What sticklebacks? None of us can remember seeing any in the past 30years or so."

Apparently some disease killed them off. These days, I am assured, kingfishers prey on stone loach and gudgeon which sound like a firm of undertakers but are actually some brown blobby fishes that live under rocks and keep my coarse-angling friends entertained.

WHAT they say: "It would be robustly, vigorously resisted by this Government, and we have absolutely no intention of making such compensation payments." Justice Secretary Jack Straw on the suggestion that Soham murderer Ian Huntley might seek damages for being stabbed in prison.

What they mean: "We'll do whatever the lawyers tell us."

MICHAEL Black, 62, and his gay partner 56-year-old John Morgan turned up at The Swiss Bed and Breakfast in Cookham, Berkshire. They were refused a room on the grounds that it would go against the religious convictions of the Christian owners. Our Victorian ancestors would have been horrified at the hoteliers' attitude. Back then, it was entirely normal for male friends to share beds if accommodation was tight, a tradition continued in silent movies and Morecambe and Wise sketches. It would have been the height of impertinence for any hotelier to enquire what any couple was getting up to in bed.

OF COURSE, it would solve everyone's problem if this B&B advertised itself as The Swiss Christian Bed and Breakfast. Then we'd all know what to expect.

ONE of the mysteries to us Brits is why President Obama's healthcare plan is so bitterly opposed by America's evangelist churches. I suspect it's a bums-on-pews issue. If we didn't have the NHS, we'd all pray an awful lot more.

MY HUNCH that a hot summer is on the way is shared by Positive Weather Solutions, the firm who correctly forecast the big freeze. It reckons the beginning of August could see temperatures hit 38 degs C. And that's when we will suddenly discover that if the climate really is changing we don't need solar panels, new boilers or attics stuffed a foot deep with insulation. What we will really need is a constant, reliable supply of cool drinking water. We barely have it with a population of 60 million. Another 10 million will surely wreck the system.

MY apologies.Last week I suggested the big General Election issues would be dogs and foxes. That should, of course, read dogs, foxes and babies. Rory Bremner was on Radio 5 Live when the news of the Cameron pregnancy broke. Bremner slipped straight into his Gordon Brown act to wish David and Samantha every happiness "in real terms."

WHEN presenter Alice Roberts descended into the prehistoric tunnels of Great Orme in Coast (BBC2), the passage was so narrow and tight that she had to take off her helmet. At this stage a fair number of us viewers went into the sweaty, adrenaline-pumping, yabba-dabba-do state known as claustrophobia and had to look away. Fear of confined spaces is one of the most elemental of terrors. This week comes news from Japan that a common anaesthetic injected directly into the brain can take away phobias. It sounds like great news. Unless, of course, you have a silly little phobia about hypodermic needles being shoved into your brain.

Kwik Save founder Albert Gubay is giving most of his £600 million fortune to charity. He says he has a pact with God. I advise him to read the small print very carefully. Noah thought he had a rock-solid pact with God, namely: "The waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh." Sadly, Noah did not tie the Almighty down on earthquakes, volcanoes, landslips, tsunamis and tornadoes and He's been sending them ever since.