Best of Peter Rhodes - July 2

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

WHY do bluebottles breed so easily yet honey bees appear to be dying out? Can it be beyond the wit of man to find an empty RAF hangar, fill it with nests and nutrients and breed billions of bees to be released for pollination duties in spring and summer? By all means keep Britain's dotty but endearing cottage industry of bee hives but let's industralise the system, too. If we can farm salmon we can surely farm bees.

THE luminously lovely face of Anna Chapman, one of the alleged Russian spies detained in America, pouted from a billion newspapers and TV screens this week. When you go to Russia you can't help noticing that the place is full of such young stunners. But after the age of 30 they mysteriously transmogrify into fat, ferocious old matrons who could bump-start a T-54 tank.

DEEP in the forests of central France, a medieval castle is under construction. The Chateau de Guedelon was started in 1998 by a local landowner Michel Guyot. He decided to build from scratch, using only contemporary tools and materials. It is reported this week that the great hall is almost finished. Why can't we do the same sort of thing over here? Probably because the English army of jobsworths with clipboards would descend, imposing 21st century Building Regulations on a Middle Ages fantasy. Sorry, sir, but we can't possibly allow that drawbridge. And what about a handrail on those battlements? Elf 'n' safety, innit?

MIND you, at least we Brits aren't subject to a new law across the Channel which forbids French couples from insulting each other's appearance. The crime is called "psychological violence" and carries a maximum £60,000 fine or three years in prison. I was discussing this the other night with Mrs Rhodes, reflecting that in Britain it is considered polite to insult each other. Names such as Wrinklearse, Fishface, Thunder Thighs and You Raddled Old Git are usually terms of endearment. And the Old Trout agreed.

MANY thanks for a huge haul of World Cup jokes. One reader writes: " "I can't believe we only managed a draw against a rubbish team we should easily have beaten. I'm ashamed to call myself Algerian."

EIGHTEEN months ago in this column I recalled the wise words of an old hand at Greenpeace: "There's nothing as green as a recession." Sure enough, it was reported yesterday that Britain will meet its carbon-emissions target - but only because we're in a recession.

CURIOUS, isn't it, that the only complaint about Simon Burns MP calling the Speaker of the Commons John Bercow a "stupid, sanctimonious dwarf" has come from a charity for dwarfism?

ARTIST Fiona Banner has suspended a Sea Harrier in a hall at Tate Modern. In an adjoining gallery, a Jaguar bomber lies belly-up on the floor. Banner has been fascinated with warplanes ever since a childhood stroll with her father in Wales when a Harrier jump-jet roared past and "completely ripped up the sky."

She recalls: "We were left with the words knocked out of us, wondering how something that was such a monster could be so beautiful."

It is a puzzle. The Spitfire was as graceful as a ballerina, the Hawker Hunter as sleek as a cheetah and the Victor V-bomber had the gentle curves of an airborne Venus de Milo. And all to help our young men kill their fellow humans as efficiently as possible. The Jaguar in Banner's exhibition is stripped of its paint and highly polished. Your face is reflected as if in a mirror, answering the most fundamental question of all concerning warfare: In whose name? In my name. In your name. Some critics say this exhibition isn't really art. But If the purpose of art is to make us think, it certainly is.

STILL on war, it takes the British Army 14 weeks of basic training to turn raw recruits into qualified soldiers. After three months of special training, they are ready for combat in Afghanistan. Yet we have been training the Afghan army since 2001 and US commanders reported this week that some Afghan army units are still incapable of fighting on their own. Gets more like Vietnam every day, doesn't it?

IRISH newspaper headline: "Woman in sumo wrestler suit assaulted her ex-girlfriend in gay pub." Don't you sometimes feel life is passing you by?

HAVE you noticed how all those little England flags on cars and vans have shredded themselves into tiny red and white fragments, long before the World Cup finals? You know, it's almost as though they were never designed to last the full month. . . .

I LAUGHED out loud at the name of the police crackdown on drug dealers in West Bromwich this week: Operation Eliminate. Oh, please. We have been waging the war on the drugs industry for a century and it defies elimination. You can still buy any substance you want in any town in the land. Still, at least Operation Eliminate is shorter than Operation Nick 'Em And Watch The Courts Let 'Em Off With Community Punishments They Never Attend Or Fines They Never Pay.

A READER writes: "Have you noticed that since the change of Government we have not heard that MI5 has thwarted a single terrorist threat?" He suggests either that MI5 is losing its touch or Labour quite liked to keep the population "in a general state of unease." Tut, tut. Such cynicism.