Best of Peter Rhodes - July 30

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

IT WAS almost unreported that on the first day of Glorious Goodwood this week, Frankie Dettori's horse, Film Score, broke a leg in full view of the stands and had to be destroyed. According to a House of Commons motion, more than 170 horses die or are destroyed due to racecourse injuries each year. The surprising thing is how little interest the RSPCA seems to show. Maybe they're too busy prosecuting people for drowning grey squirrels.

THIS will rock you. Britain, being one of the oldest and most developed countries in the world, has an astonishing 250,000 miles of roads. Imagine that, a quarter of a million miles of usable asphalt. Unfortunately, Olympic cycling has become such a specialised, unreal sport that it can no longer be held on mere roads. Which is why you and I have just spent £100 million providing the velodrome unveiled this week for the 2012 London Olympics. And that's on top of our road tax. We can't afford new schools but we must have a velodrome. This way lies madness.

AND now, well on the way to spending £10,000 million of our money and having paid themselves handsomely, the Olympic organisers are trying to recruit 70,000 volunteers to make the whole thing work. Unpaid, naturally.

A READER recalls a dilemma up the jungle. As a young National Service soldier in Malaya, he was puzzled to see the cook making out the week's orders which included "six-sevenths of one egg per soldier per day". He was wondering how to divide an egg into seven portions when the cook explained that "six-sevenths of one egg per soldier per day" actually meant one egg per day, but only on six days per week.

DO you raise an eyebrow at those windscreen-replacement ads? The claim is that a tiny pebble-chip in your windscreen can become a massive crack if you suddenly hit a pot-hole. Oh, yeah? I've driven about a million miles and never seen or heard of such a thing. What sort of pot-hole impact could crack a windscreen without killing the driver in the process?

SO farewell, the Asbo. It was a great concept but, like so many New Labour ideas, it was all flannel and no fist. The moment kids realised no-one got jailed for breaking an anti-social behaviour order, the Asbos became little badges of honour for the underclass. I confidently predict Asbos will be replaced with something that sounds much stricter and turns out to be as hard as marshmallow.

TORY health minister Anne Milton says doctors should stop calling people obese and use the word "fat" instead. Here's another suggestion. Why not call them EastEnders? The idea comes from this extract from Jonathan Swan's new collection of old jokes, Man Walks Into Bar (Ebury £7.99): "She's so fat that when she fell downstairs I thought EastEnders was ending."

HERE we go again. If you get anything starting like this;

"Dear HSBC customer, To protect the confidentiality of your account, your security number has been locked. To unlock your security number you will have to confirm your details with us."

Just bin it. They're not HSBC. They're crooks. They're after your identity.

A FAMILY in Shrewsbury released tagged balloons to mark the christening of their baby. It was reported this week that one balloon travelled 1,081 miles to Sweden. But what if the balloon had come to earth in a country which took a very dim view of littering? Would the local police be able to apply for a European Arrest Warrant, turn up at your doorstep and cart you off to be tried on the Continent? Mind how you go.

A READER says he keeps thinking the new boss of BP is the coolest back-beat, doo-wop singer of all time. Wrong. The BP boss is Bob Dudley. It just sounds a bit like Bo Diddley

IT was, of course, very wrong of a teenage nurse to have sex with a seriously ill patient under her care in a Birmingham hospital, as a disciplinary hearing was told this week . But the so-called Patient A was a consenting adult and a married man. To play the "vulnerable" card and complain about "the turmoil of the relationship" when the affair was discovered was cowardly and , some would say, downright ungrateful.

LAURA Dekker, a 14-year-old Dutch girl who wants to become the youngest solo sailor to circumnavigate the globe, has been given the go-ahead by a Dutch court, after the authorities first forbade it. Following this about-turn, Laura could be setting off in a matter of weeks. But how does Laura or any other solo sailor conform to the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collision at Sea which clearly state: "Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper lookout"?

Most teenagers spend half their lives asleep. I can see this ending in tears.

I SUGGESTED some time ago that if an electric car is recharged from a grid fed by conventional power stations, then it's really a coal-powered car. BMW has just encountered this problem. The Advertising Standards Authority has banned it from claiming that its new electric car has "zero C02 emissions." It's more of a nutty-slack runabout.

ANOTHER unspeakable tale of plumbing-widget cannibalism. After last week's harrowing account of installing a T-connector with a missing (presumed stolen) seal, I found myself in Homebase at the weekend where the last remaining sink pedestal trap was hanging on the display with both screwcap and rubber washer missing. They had been nicked by someone who had neatly torn a hole in the corner of the polythene bag. Any unsuspecting bodge-it-yourselfer installing this U-bend device would have flooded his bathroom. Something must be done about the ungodly who steal components from widgets in stores. I wonder what sharia law has to say.

THE Home Office Minister, Frances Maude, reveals that the total bill for detecting, convicting and jailing three generations of two street gangs in Birmingham could be almost £200 million. Most people will be horrified at the expense. But I wonder how many bean-counters do a different sum. You could argue that a relatively small amount of theft and murder generates £200 million of public-sector employment and building programmes. Ignore the suffering and crime is just another industry.

HOW to spot the silly season. "Families are doing their best to recreate that holiday feeling at home - by buying record numbers of palm trees" (Daily Mail).

A READER says his wife asked for a new bag for her birthday. Apparently the vacuum cleaner works much better now.