Best of Peter Rhodes - November 12

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

DEFINITIONS for our time: Balderdash - a rapidly receding hairline.

IT is a fact universally acknowledged that a single woman being used as Anton du Beke's vacuum cleaner is in want of a speedy exit. Go, Ann. Just go.

CONGRATULATING his favourite supermarket on its £332 million profits, a customer emails: "Well done Sainsbury's. You can tell when you go into Sainsbury's what a better type of clientele shop there. None of your Asda and Morrisons rabble."

Sorry to disappoint you, pal, but it is a well-known fact that the chief purpose of Sainsbury's is to keep the riff-raff away from Waitrose.

GENESIS star Phil Collins says "I don't want to sound like a weirdo" but reckons, in a previous life, he fought at the Battle of the Alamo. That's the amazing thing about previous lives. We all did great, famous things. We were all Red Indian chiefs or ancient Egyptian princesses. If we fought in battles, they were big, significant battles like Waterloo, Culloden or the Alamo. How much more impressive it would be if Collins felt some past-life affinity with the almost-forgotten Penobscot Expedition. It happened in 1779 when Britain was fighting America in the Revolutionary War. The Yanks sent 900 men and 37 ships against a British force of 700 with just three ships. It ended with the Americans losing half their men and all their ships, their worst naval disaster until Pearl Harbor in 1941. In the spirit of "don't mention the war," we Brits rarely mention Penobscot but author Bernard Cornwell, best known for his Sharpe novels, sets his new book, The Fort, in that illustrious little campaign. Are you sure you weren't at Penobscot, Phil?

A PALINDROME is a sentence which reads the same backwards or forwards. The best-known is probably Napoleon's alleged lament on being exiled to a small island: ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA. But that clever seven-worder pales beside the monstrous palindrome created by the brilliant codebreaker Professor Peter Hilton whose death at 87 was announced this week. In a sleepless night during the war he wrote this: DOC, NOTE: I DISSENT. A FAST NEVER PREVENTS A FATNESS. I DIET ON COD.

FROM a chatroom this week about a Jamie Oliver recipe: "my boyf made dis 4 me. hes not good chef at all but cos it woz jamy he tried it. cos hes from jordan he luvd de idear of puttin the corianda and gwakkamilee in." You know, school dinners are not the only problem in our schools.

A LESSON from history. In June 1944, American troops advancing doggedly to liberate the French city of Cherbourg received a strange message from a German commander, one General Sattler. He was in charge of the city's heavily-defended arsenal and he realised the game was up. But he still had his pride and was not going to throw in the towel to a bunch of footsoldiers. Sattler said he would surrender only if the American tanks fired a few shells at the fortress. The shells were duly fired and Sattler and 400 men marched out with their bags packed. Few soldiers are keen to die and many set their own personal limits to keep their honour intact.

Fast forward to 2002 and Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda suspect, is arrested in Pakistan. He is accused of involvement in a plot to attack Los Angeles International airport. Might waterboarding, a form of torture, make him talk?

In his new book George W Bush says of Zubaydah: "His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfil his religious duty, and then co-operate."

In other words, if we believe Bush, this suspected terrorist was demanding the equivalent of a tank barrage before surrendering.

He not only expected waterboarding. He virtually requested it.

Hands up, anyone who still believes that torture is a simple ethical issue.

A READER who runs a youth group tells me the teenagers were spellbound when a veteran of the Second World War came to talk about his experiences. "Mind you," he says. "We did have to explain who Jerry was."

FOR millions upon millions of years, a short little herbivore on the African plains evolved longer legs and neck to reach the most tender leaves. Today, the giraffe stands head, neck and shoulders above all the other beasts. It is a triumph of natural selection. Well, usually. Hamley the giraffe, star of ITV's Wild at Heart, has died in a South African game reserve after being struck by lightning. Hasn't Mother Nature evolved a grand sense of irony?

CONTINUING the debate over H being pronounced as aitch by Protestants in Ulster but as haitch by their Catholic neighbours, a reader who knows his Bible refers me to the tale of Shibboleth (Judges). This word, describing a plant with seeds, could be pronounced by Gileadites but not by their Ephraimite enemies whose dialect did not include the Sh sound. By this means the Gileadites identified and slaughtered 42,000 Ephraimites. Oh, happy daysh.

THE world's tallest statue of Jesus has been erected in the Polish town of Swiebodzin. It stands 33 metres tall - one metre for every year that Jesus lived. Behold, the Metricated Messiah. Whatever happened to cubits?

THE sacking of Phil Woolas MP for telling whoppers about a Lib-Dem candidate has clearly rattled the House of Commons. Some MPs seem to fear they may be hauled before an electoral court for saying anything unkind about a rival. The Tory MP Edward Leigh says it should be for "people to evict MPs, not judges". Politicians love this sort of sound bite. It implies that the sacred will of the people is being usurped by old duffers in wigs and our precious democracy is at stake. It is, of course, bunkum. The truth is that the people elect the MPs and the MPs pass the laws, in this case the 1983 Representation of the People Act. MPs lobbied for it, drafted it, voted for it and passed it. Yet when their law is duly enforced by a court, they start crying foul. The Woolas case is a timely warning to legislators everywhere. Before voting for a shiny new Act, why not try reading it?