Best of Peter Rhodes - April 9

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

EDINBURGH is to host the first Festival of One-Liners this summer. I realised I was dyslexic when I went to a toga party dressed as a goat.

FOR years we non-experts have looked at the experts' graphs showing a massive rise in car ownership in the 21st century and asked a very simple question: who's going to drive them all? We are a nation of 60 million. Just about everyone who wants a car has one. Sure enough this week, for the first time in 65 years, the number of cars on the roads has fallen. Told you so. Now, about those air-travel predictions. . . .

REACHING weird depths of creepiness, Nike's latest advert features a chastened Tiger Woods apparently in conversation with his dead father. The aim, obviously, is to draw a line under all that sex-and-betrayal stuff and present the golf star as a fine role model. Tiger's dad says from beyond the grave: "I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?" Frankly, if Tiger has learned anything, it must surely be to ignore Nike's most famous sales slogan: "Just do it". Just doing it is what caused all the trouble in the first place.

JUDI James is a body-language expert whose microscopic dissection of Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg on Sky News was a five-minute delight. I loved her explanation of why David Cameron rolled his sleeves quite so far up his arms before one of his meet-the-public sessions. Most of us put just a turn or two in our cuffs but the Tory leader's shirtsleeves were well above the elbow. Judi James explained that the higher the sleeve is rolled, the more the politician is trying to be a geezer.

TALKING of which, years ago as a young TA officer I encountered a pair of pretty Navy officers on a course who introduced themselves as psychologists.

"Body language and all that?" I asked.

"You're doing it now," said one, reproachfully. Meeting a body-language expert is a bit like being wired up to a lie detector.

AS for Gordon Brown's body language, Judi James noted his cuff-tugging and hair-wiping. She says the television debates could be a problem for Brown rather than the other leaders: "All real emotions will have been liposuctioned out of them before the debate and only Brown will have the potential to go off-piste if he gets rattled or annoyed."

COME to think of it, I've seen Brown off-piste on a couple of occasions. Or something like that.

THERE are two rules for success. Firstly, don't reveal all you know.

CURIOUSLY enough, Election Day, May 6, happens to be Saint Prudence Day in France when, according to legend, if the wind blows, the sheep dance. We'll be watching.

THE harrowing video footage of a US helicopter gunship killing innocent civilians in Baghdad in 2007 may have caused a huge political row this week but it's nothing new. As I reported some months ago, if you go on YouTube you will find plenty of gun-camera evidence of Americans killing "insurgents" on some very shaky evidence. If a couple of Iraqis happen to be unloading a van at night, they may be considered fair game. Wounded survivors are routinely "smoked." But once evidence is on the internet, it is there for ever. I would not be surprised, 10 or even 20 years from now, to hear of some ex-US airgunner being arrested at an airport and hauled off to The Hague to face trial as a war criminal.

TWO women are accused of trying to take a dead man on to a flight from Liverpool Airport. A reader asks: "Is that why they call it a terminal?"

ACTUALLY, having shared some flights with noisy, fat, pushy, fidgety, live fellow passengers, the idea of a stiff in the next seat is strangely attractive. Plus, you get an extra packet of nuts.

WHEN a school discovers it has children who speak dozens of different languages, the usual procedure is to make it look like A Good Thing. The kids are paraded in the playground, all waving their national flags. The teachers enthuse about the great and glorious benefits of multilingualism. Any teacher or parent who questions the received wisdom or dares to utter the phrase "Tower of Babel" is condemned as a racist. And then this week we learn that Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust has more than 70 nationalities among its staff and is now obliged to offer lessons in basic English. Among the phrases some members of staff don't understand are "nil by mouth" and "doing the rounds". We may like the idea of a multilingual Britain. We may celebrate it. We may actually be dying for it.

READING of the above, I found myself thinking of the old seaside postcard with the patient in agony, steam pouring from his bed, and Matron shouting: " "No, nurse! I said prick his boil."

HERE we go again. A General Election is announced and two parties who offer pretty much the same will be pretending to offer something radically different from each other. It's all a big deception. The wisest words ever penned on British politics were by Hilaire Belloc when, in 1906, a Liberal landslide swept away the Conservative government. As Belloc put it:

"The accursed power which stands on Privilege,

(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge),

Broke - and Democracy resumed her reign,

(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne)."

VISA, the credit-card firm, clearly has a vested interest in a cashless society. Even so, its survey showing that 20 per cent of youngsters throw away copper coins raises an interesting question. Who needs the 1p and 2p pieces any more? If we scrapped all the copper coins tomorrow, life would go on much as usual except that our pocket linings would last for ever.

ANOTHER one-liner (many thanks and keep 'em coming): A hangover is the wrath of grapes.