Best of Peter Rhodes - September 2

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

DEFINITIONS for our time. Bank: a place that will lend you money if you can first prove that you don't need it.

VANESSA Redgrave lives securely and enjoys the rewards of her acting because her physical safety and her rights to royalties are protected by the rule of law.

When she throws her support behind what she calls the "strong, wise, warm and gentle community" of gipsies and travellers occupying an illegal site at Dale Farm in Essex, she is effectively calling for the ripping-up of the law.

And when she defends illegality by waving the banner of the European Convention of Human Rights, she turns ethics upside-down.

The Convention was created to protect innocent people from oppressive laws, not to reward those who deliberately conspire to break reasonable laws agreed by a democratic system.

On this issue, although she cannot see it, Redgrave is taking the side of the oppressors against the innocent and the law-abiding. A truly embarrassing performance.

MAGISTRATES in Warley heard this week how a pub manager who pocketed £26,000 left a note saying "sorry" in the till.

Is anyone else reminded of the note left in a drawer by Labour's outgoing Treasury Secretary Liam Byrne after last year's General Election?

It read: "I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left."

Some apologies are more sincere than others. Steal £26,000 and you get arrested. Blow £26 billion and we all have a laugh.

SO, FAREWELL, Wootton Bassett. The town which saw more than 300 bodies home from Afghanistan and Iraq has been eased out of history by the re-routing of the hearses.

I attended only one repatriation, when six coffins passed through the little town in succession. It was a curious event.

The ceremony took only a few minutes but for Wootton it was a full day. The pubs were open, the mood at times more carnival than sombre.

I have mixed feelings about the "grief tourism" of some holidaymakers who dropped in to have a look. There is an element, too, who seem to gain some strange fulfilment from wrapping themselves in the heroism of others.

But at the heart of the day, in that terrible moment when the funeral director doffed his cap to the cortege and bowed like some great black bird symbolising grief, there was a strange, theatrical and yet profound sense of loss.

You cannot help feeling that those lads who got the Wootton Bassett treatment received a proper homecoming that the war dead from this day forward will be denied.

THE recent C4 documentary on Wallis Simpson reminded a spry young reader of 89 of a children's game played during the Abdication year of 1936. The kids would chant:

"Who's that coming down the street?

Mrs Simpson's stinking feet.

She's been married twice before,

Now she's knocking at Windsor's door."

At which point the youngsters would fight for a seat, musical chairs-style. You won't find that in the history books.

I AM beginning to regret my piece suggesting that God, in making nine million species of plants and animals in the six days of Creation, spent just 17 seconds on each species (later corrected to 0.0576 of a second when some of you noticed my appalling maths).

Other readers have since pointed out that, according to Genesis, the Almighty spent only two days of Creation doing the flora and fauna which works out at a truly dazzling 0.0192 of a second per species.

STOP press: Yet another reader reminds me that some scientists believe 99% of all species that once were alive are now extinct. This means God, producing the whole damn lot in a couple of days, spent as little as 0.0002 of a second on each species.

Which probably explains why so many of us have non-matching ears.

Zhou Enlai, the legendary Chinese leader who died in 1976, was once asked to judge the effects of the 1789 French Revolution.

"It is too early to tell," he famously replied. We should take the same view of victory in Libya. On the face of it, Nato has made possible a popular uprising which has deposed a terrible dictator. The glittering prize is that rarest of things, a happy, democratic state in the Arab world where people will feel positively about the West and shake our hands when they find we are from Britain or France.

But there is still a hell of a way to go. It is too early to tell whether the Libyan uprising is the beginning of a new rapport or just another hiccup before it all goes pear-shaped and Libyans resume their normal view of us as oil-stealing imperialist allies of the Zionists.

MET Office statistics show that 2011 was the coldest summer since 1993. And yet you can bet the figures won't deter the climate-change zealots.

Confronted with the wrong sort of evidence, they sneer and tell us that climate is not the same as weather and only an idiot - or worse - would confuse the two.

What is worse than an idiot? In a bizarre interview recently, global-warming crusader Al Gore likened those who disagree with him on climate to racists whose views would one day be unacceptable. This is strong stuff but it shows how climate change is becoming the new religion with all heretics regarded as spawn of the Devil.

And like any other religion, it dismisses any evidence to the contrary and embraces any scrap of proof with relish.

Supposing this week's figures showed Britain had experienced the hottest summer since 1993. Do you think Gore and co would dismiss them? Of course not. They would brandish them like the Ten

Commandments.

OKAY, then. Just a couple more medical definitions:

Colic. Sheep dog.

Cauterize. Attracted her attention.