Best of Peter Rhodes - December 31

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

MORE useful definitions:

Avoidable: essential skill for matadors.

Myth: female moth.

WELCOME to fatherhood, Sir Elton, even if we have no idea who did what to whom and with what.

INSTEAD of encouraging us poor people to give to charity every time we use the cashpoint, why doesn't the Government impose a 10 per cent levy on all lottery winnings over £1 million? The National Lottery created 158 new millionaires in 2010 who shared £770 million. Why not cream off £77 million for charity? A lottery jackpot is money you never expected and what you never expect you can hardly miss.

UPSTAIRS, Downstairs (BBC1) was filmed a long way from London. The frontage of Eaton Place is actually Clarendon Square in Leamington Spa. We didn't see a single shot of the house at the end of the street, for good reasons. It may look authentic Regency, like the others, but it's actually a steel-framed pastiche, built by the local council in the 1960s. And while it will probably outlast its genuine Regency neighbours in the square, the house on the end has one extra storey which explains why modern staircases are clearly visible through the mock 19th century windows. I love replica buildings and this one is a thing of beauty, but only when the curtains are closed. The Upstairs, Downstairs storyline was a bit of a pastiche, too, created by the application of several layers of modern ethics to an historic framework. We were expected to believe that the domestic servants in a grand house in the 1930s would empathise with a colleague who was a German Jew and be hostile to the chauffeur who joined the fascist Blackshirts. I suspect in real life it would have been the other way around.

WHEN our old solid-fuel boiler sprang a terminal leak 18 months ago, after more than 30 years of service, we mulled over the options. Oil and gas systems promised endless hot water and warm winters. But an old bodge-it-yourselfer like me couldn't help noticing how complicated this new generation of boilers is. We decided to stick with coal. Our boiler has only two moving parts, the pump and the fan, and (touch wood) it has purred effortlessly through the worst winter we can recall while, all around, modern condensing boilers have been failing. And while our neighbour's oil has just shot up from 50p to 70p a litre, our anthracite bills have never come as a shock. There's life in the old coal yet.

WHEN I use the expression "touch wood," as above, I should point out that it is just a throwaway phrase and not a serious invocation to any deity, creator or woodland spirit. We Taureans are not at all superstitious, thank heavens.

THE Daily Telegraph has spent the festive period encouraging readers to debate the origin of the expression "bubble and squeak," that essentially English melange of second-hand potatoes and sprouts. Yesterday's suggestion was that the term refers not to the ingredients but "to the effect this dish has on the digestive system."

Bubble. Squeak. Pardon.

WHEN the winter returns, as it surely will, watch out for drivers who have a very strange idea of what is meant by "do not travel unless your journey is strictly necessary". The idiot blocking our farm track with his stranded Mondeo turned out to be a birdwatcher in full twitch.

IT IS a well-known fact that while Britain slithers to a standstill in cold weather, the rest of the world shrugs off the blizzards, laughs in the face of freezing fog and carries on regardless. Unfortunately, no-one has told the rest of the world. If you still believe all is hunky-dory beyond Dover, look at the reports coming out of the United States this week. New York vanished under drifts. US airports closed down, just as Heathrow did. One unfortunate bunch of passengers spent 11 hours in an aircraft on the runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a worse experience than anything we had here.

THERE is a huge gulf between real life and fiction. No playwright or novelist would dare put the words "welcome back" into the mouths of parents on seeing the body of their murdered daughter. Yet that is what David Yeates and his wife Theresa said as they formally identified 24-year-old Joanna's corpse in Bristol this week. Grief takes people in the strangest ways. I have interviewed the bereaved of many tragedies. Some sob their hearts out but others, no less heartbroken, watch the telly, tell jokes or vacuum the carpets. Trying to keep a grip on normality seems hugely important. Even when they are 25, you still want to know where your children are. Joanna's parents at least know where she is.

WHEN you reach a certain age, you know in which order of priority to put the adjectives in the following greeting. I wish you all a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year.