Best of Peter Rhodes - July 9

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

A READER asks: "If the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, what is the speed of dark?"

AIR travel has shrunk our planet to the size of a village and we tend to assume we understand it all. And then we kiss in the street and get jailed in Dubai. Or we take a dip in an Australian creek and get eaten by a crocodile. Or, like Cheryl Cole, we pop over to Africa for a few days, and get malaria. Her illness is a reminder that some parts of this world are distinctly dodgy and best handled with extreme care. I write from sad experience. A few years ago the 19-year-old daughter of friends came back from Africa, fell ill and was dead of malaria in a matter of hours. By all means enjoy the glossy travel brochures. But never forget the words of an old West African hand, as reported by the great Victorian writer and explorer Mary Kingsley: "When you have made up your mind to go to West Africa, the very best thing you can do is get it unmade again, and go to Scotland instead."

BEST put-down of the week came after Bob Reitemeyer, chief executive of the Children's Society and a fervent anti-smacker, wailed: "Children are the only group of people in this country who can be legally hit on a regular basis by others with little protection in law."

Family researcher Patricia Morgan responded: "Children are the only people who can be legally sent to bed by others. Does that make it wrong?"

THE strangest thing about the tram disaster on Coronation Street scheduled for December is that the local transport company, Metrolink, has been co-operating with the programme makers in the tram-crash scene. As one emailer puts it: " Can't understand why Metrolink have been working with the soap on the story line. They get enough bad publicity in real life."

AS the news was announced, the strains of the Corrie theme tune echoed around the office and reminded me of an incident years ago. A feature writer presented a piece which began: "Da da da da da da da da."

"What the hell is this?" I asked.

"It's the Coronation Street theme tune," she said.

"No, it isn't. It's just a load of da-das."

"Oh, you're reading it all wrong," she exploded, snatching away her deathless prose and flouncing off.

AN asphalt path has been laid part-way up Snowdon, prompting that great rambler Janet Street-Porter to complain: "Snowdon is being tamed and turned into a Welsh version of Disneyland." This seems a harsh judgment on what looks like no more than an aid for walkers. Pendle Hill in Lancashire was thoughtfully equipped with stone steps many years ago and there are steps, too, on the Devon coastal walk from Beer to Branscombe. As the years pass and the knees creak, it sometimes occurs to me that what we really need on some of our more majestic peaks is not paths or steps. It is Stannah stairlifts.

SCIENTISTS as Portsmouth University say effluent from anti-depressant tablets used by humans may be influencing the behaviour of sealife. Come to think of it, when did you last see a dolphin that wasn't smiling?

OUR lads are pulling out of Sangin province and handing that benighted slice of Afghanistan over to the US Army. Wonder if the Yanks might be interested in the Falklands?

MANY thanks to those of you who got in touch to explain why hotel chambermaids fold the end of the toilet paper into a point. It is apparently a little sign to show the room has been cleaned. Mind you, if they've cleaned the place properly, we wouldn't need a coded message, would we? One reader tells me he got into the habit, on a recent cruise, of folding his own toilet paper into a point every time he used the loo. He reports: "On the 10th day I had a visit from sick bay. The cabin boy had reported that I hadn't been to the toilet for nearly a fortnight."

A READER who signs himself "One of Britain's many amateur, unpaid refuse collectors" tells how, fed up with trying to stuff garden waste into plastic bags, he crammed it into his wheelie bin, loaded it in the car and drove to the tip. The tip men refused to admit him on the grounds that only the council is authorised to collect wheelie bins. After much begging and pleading, he was graciously allowed to empty his wheelie bins "just this once." Oh, come the revolution. . . .

I THINK it was Oliver Cromwell who declared that nothing is so powerful as an idea that has reached its time. He might have added that nothing is so dismal as an idea whose time has passed. Am I the only one getting just a little fed up with the Compare the Market meerkats and the Go Compare tenor?