Best of Peter Rhodes - April 5

FOR the past few weeks we have had a nasty spell of weather. As I understand it, next week will see the return of climate.

I WENT into town, ears blue with cold, to buy a winter hat, one of those woolly items, much favoured by Al Pacino and New York street thugs. The woolly hat is probably the only knitted garment ever to inspire fear. Sadly, I had reckoned without the seasonal shelf-stocking policy of clothes shops. For commercial purposes, winter is officially over. There is not a winter hat to be seen but the shelves are full of straw hats for something called summer.

COME to think of it, I recall another knitted garment that inspired fear. It was my first swimming costume, made by my mother when I was five. Things tended to fall out.

THE swimming-cossie story stirs a memory in one reader who recalls, as a five-year-old, watching her sister emerging from the waves on a Welsh beach "gathering up the folds of her now-enormous swimming costume, knitted with great love by my mother." If wool was meant for water, sheep would swim.

THE Government admits it has spent £18 million on confidentiality agreements to buy the silence of nearly 5,000 departing employees. These gagging orders can cost up to £400,000. In the bad old days the Mafia achieved much the same result with a bullet in the head and a dead canary stuffed in the victim's mouth to indicate he had been "singing." This solution was not only effective but cheap. And also cheep.

I WONDER how many millions of us watched the "emotional" press conference of Mick and Mairead Philpott and suspected, right from the start, that they were guilty of killing their six children in a house fire. I remember watching it on television last May and asking, as many others must have asked: "Where are the tears?" Philpott did a lot of hankie-wringing and face-dabbing but failed to produce a single teardrop. He wanted to be the celebrity and the hero. Instead, his performance for the cameras marked him down as the chief suspect.

CONTRAST Philpott's dry cheeks with those of his heroic neighbours, Jamie and Darren Butler who tried to rescue the kids but were beaten back by smoke and heat. Both men looked as hard as nails but as Darren recalled the night, tears poured down his face. If justice is done fully in this case, there will be medals.

MANY local Derbyshire folk turned up hoping to be extras in The Village (BBC1) but few were chosen. Most were rejected because of dyed hair, tattoos and other 21st century giveaways which would have looked bizarre in a 1914 drama. The rejects may be miffed but we should be profoundly thankful that it is so difficult for us to recreate the look of ordinary working folk nearly 100 years ago. Great-grandfather's generation grew up with rickets, TB, polio and cholera and a diet of 1,000 calories a day if they were lucky. Kids could be whacked by parents, teachers and any passing stranger and if you were sacked, you went hungry. In old photos, that doomed generation looks poor, pinched, spindly and deferential. If they could have looked into the future and seen us they would have been astonished at our size, our education, our good health and the curious fact that we don't doff our caps to anyone. From starvation to swagger in three generations. What an amazing century it has been

MY GRANDFATHER was the village joiner in a Yorkshire village very similar to the one in the TV drama. Like tens of thousands of others he following the recruiting band and signed up in the autumn of 1914. Private John William Smith served in the Duke of Wellington's Regiment from the start of the First World War until a year after it ended when he was in the Army of Occupation in Germany. He fought in the epic battles of Cambrai and the Marne and survived being gassed in the last few weeks of the war. Yet for all his time in uniform, for all his combat experience and despite the grievous losses his battalion suffered, he ended the war as he started, as plain, unambitious and unpromoted Private Smith. Must be some sort of record.

MANCHESTER police are to extend the definition of "hate crimes" to cover attacks on Goths, emos and other sub-cultures. Let me know of any other groups who you think deserve special protection. Old blokes in libraries noisily sucking mints spring to mind.

MEANWHILE, back at the clothes shop I note that underpants are now being marketed as "keyhole trunks." Yale or Chubb, sir?

I HAVE a friend living in Australia who rushed home last week to be at his dying mother's bedside in an English hospital. He says the combination of treatment, attentiveness and simple humanity she was shown by NHS staff in her final hours was superb and we Poms should be very proud of it.

A SURVEY reveals that one person in four has shopped online while drunk and ended up buying unsuitable clothing. You have no idea how hard it is typing this stuff in a brontosaurus onesie.