Best of Peter Rhodes - August 13

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

A READER who regularly feeds the urban fox in his garden by putting out table scraps in a baking tray has decided enough is enough. Darned fox has nicked the baking tray.

AS TONY Blair launches his new book amid wild scenes of adulation from well-wishers (I made that bit up), his previous book is not doing too well. Change We Choose, the former prime minister's collection of speeches from 2007-2009, is ranked at number 262,956 in Amazon's bestseller list. I would sneer a little more were it not for the embarrassing fact that my new book, For A Shilling A Day, is currently at number 335,891. Blair's book is a pile of self-serving piffle. Mine is a fine collection of 200 interviews with some marvellous old soldiers describing warfare from 1885 - 2009. Another difference is that, while Tony Blair declines to be photographed with the punters or even write a personal message in their copy, I will gladly sign your copy of my book while tap-dancing naked to the tune of Swanee River. I exaggerate a little but when you're at number 335,891, pride is the first casualty.

HOW to lose friends and alienate people. A reader and his wife took their disabled son each week to the cafe of a supermarket where they were regular customers. They are not tea drinkers so, while the lad enjoyed a pot for one, Mum and Dad had a glass of water. Until this week, that is, when the waitress announced she was no longer allowed to serve a full glass of water but "only enough to take tablets with."

Needless to say, they are customers no more.

THE World Sauna Championships involve contestants sitting in the sort of temperatures usually associated with cooking. At the weekend, one hopeful, Vladimir Ladyzhensky, died after six minutes at 110degs C which is hotter than boiling water. I fear we can expect further tragedies at the annual Javelin-Catching Games, the Discus-Heading Festival and the Banging Yourself on the Head with a Sledgehammer Championships.

THE only good thing about this new superbug from India is that it doesn't appear to be fatal. But isn't it wry that it seems to have spread as a result of people popping over there for cosmetic surgery? Who knows what nasties will come next? Some species are wiped out by meteorites, others by volcanic eruptions. Homo sapiens may vanish thanks to a botched nose-job in Delhi, going out not with a whimper but with an adenoidal sniffle. Vadity, vadity, all is vadity.

OUR changing language. More definitions for a less-than-literate age:

* Duodenum. Couple both wearing jeans.

* Enema. Not a friend.

* Impotent. Distinguished or well-known

* Lactose. Person without digits on the foot.

MIND you, the edukashun crisis is nothing new. A former personnel officer recalls wearily wading through a pile of job applications. In the section inviting applicants to describe their current employment, one hopeful had written: "Litoracy Consultant."

STUDENTS at University College London have produced a formula describing the ideal method for skimming stones. That'll look good on the CV.

SPEEDING, you may be surprised to hear, is not a crime of the aristocracy or the working class. According to Cambridgeshire's outgoing chief constable Julie Spence: "Speeding is middle-class anti-social behaviour." The silliness of the speed-camera culture is easier to understand when you see the silliness of some of the people running it.

THIS made me smile. It's a tart little exchange on a BBC website, on the attractions of emigrating to Australia:

A. "She (a cousin) moved abroad to avoid paying back her student loan and has absolutely no regrets."

B. "Australia still welcomes crooks, then?"

A READER, fresh back from a fortnight in Barmouth, believes he may have the perfect plan to turn Britain's soft prisons into places of real punishment. Welsh television in every cell.

HARROW Council is considering supplying religiously slaughtered halal meat to some schools in the town. Parents of non-Muslim children are said to be outraged. But it raises a fascinating issue, coming so soon after the RSPCA prosecuted a man for drowning a grey squirrel. If the authorities consider halal slaughter, performed with a single cut to the animal's throat, to be humane, is it an acceptable way of killing grey squirrels? If not, why not?

AS our leaders rub the crystal ball and prepare to cut the Army, Navy and RAF to meet "our future requirements," remember the words of Churchill when he was asked what qualities a politician needed: "The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year – and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen."