Best of Peter Rhodes - February 25

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

DEFINITIONS for our time. Ex-pat: Brit who works or retires abroad, boasts about his big salary and low taxes, moans endlessly about the Old Country going to the dogs and then expects the RAF and Royal Navy to drop everything and rescue him when the local dictator is toppled and things turn sticky.

IT'S official. Beer is an alcoholic drink. We Brits have known this for some time. It is the alcohol in beer that explains why, after about eight pints, you sometimes wake up in a police cell with a traffic cone on your head. But the Russians, who consume industrial quantities of vodka, have always regarded beer as a soft drink. This is why so many Muscovites can been seen swigging from a can on the way to work. But now, in a major drive against alcoholism, the Kremlin is officially designating beer as an alcoholic beverage. And a fat lot of difference that will make, Comrades.

CELEBRITY author and former coke-head Tara Palmer-Tomkinson has been invited to the April 29 Royal Wedding and says she really must get a nose job in time. She is literally cutting it a bit fine. Looks like we could have two Red Nose Days this year.

YOU read it here first. I suggested some time ago that "zero emission" electric cars are only as green as the power station supplying the juice and some are no more than nutty-slack runabouts. Confirmation comes this week from the consumer organisation Which? After testing the latest generation of electric cars, Which? concluded they were not much greener than diesels. What's more, you can drive a diesel car in comfort. One of the latest electric cars boasts a range of 106 miles. But if you put the heater on, the range drops to 56 miles.

AFTER the opening of a new community fire station, a reader asks: "What is a community fire?"

I keep thinking of witches.

AS the sides divide in Libya, a reader reminds me that war does not determine who is right - only who is left.

NOT entirely sure why former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith felt obliged to pose in the red light of a sex shop for a BBC documentary on pornography. It is, after all, a radio documentary.

I CAN see why real champagne must come from the chalk-slope vineyards of Champagne in northern France and why the name must be protected by law. But a Cornish pasty? This week the European Commission has solemnly ruled that only pasties made in Cornwall can be sold as Cornish pasties. It is patent nonsense and if you doubt that, just take a look at the website of the Cornish Pasty Association which lobbied loud and long for EU geographical protection. You can download a recipe for "the traditional Cornish Pasty" - and you can cook it anywhere you like. This week's ruling has nothing to do with common sense and everything to do with the EU cosying up to the regions as part of the master plan to turn Europe into a collection of little, easily-managed mini-states. When Cornishmen wave their flag and brandish their pasties, Brussels rejoices.

ALL over Britain, public lavatories are closing down to meet budget cuts. It is clearly time to revive the advice to foreigners, offered by that great entertainer Gerard Hoffnung in the 1950s. Hoffnung explained that as public conveniences were rare in Britain, relief was permitted in certain quiet streets marked with a P sign.

WHEN God Spoke English (BBC4) told the story of the King James Bible and reminded us that some other translations of the Good Book were decidedly dodgy. The so-called "Wicked Bible" of 1631 managed to drop a crucial word from the seventh of the Ten Commandments and solemnly informed its readership: "Thou shalt commit adultery."

AS a footnote to the above, the printers of the Wicked Bible were fined about £38,000 in modern money and lost their printing licence. Infuriated by the error, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, thundered: "I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing . . . and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the beste, but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned."

Nothing changes. Every generation thinks it remembers a golden age when there were no misprints.

A READER is alarmed at the headline: "UK Defence Secretary to launch crackdown on ballooning costs at MOD." Balloons?

AN AMATEUR weather forecaster sends me a confident outlook for the summer of 2011: "April showers, warm wet May. Early June heat with a traditional summer of scorching heat with hottest day July 30-31."

Glorious. But to put this in context, his last forecast, published with equal confidence in the summer of 2010, told us we could look forward to: "December mild with Christmas Day mild and sunny."

I seem to recall shovelling three feet of mild and sunny off my drive.

TEXAS believes it has the answer to campus massacres by deranged gunmen. A new law would allow the state's 500,000 university students to carry concealed handguns to class. What could possibly go wrong?