Best of Peter Rhodes - September 7

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

SO FAREWELL, Max Bygraves. He was a link with that curious post-war age of innocence when a pop star could make a record about a pink toothbrush and a blue toothbrush, and the rest of us would rush out to buy it. How times change.

HOWEVER hard we try, we cannot avoid looking at paralympic athletes in a particular way. With an able-bodied star, we first look at the face and then the whole body. As the paralympic athletes line up, our eyes wander over each limb in turn until we see the disability. It is human nature to be so inquisitive but the full body-scan we reserve for disabled athletes must irritate them intensely.

AND so, I guess, must being constantly referred to as brave, heroic, courageous or plucky. Most paralympians are simply hard-working and determined to make the best of a bad deal. And the disabled soldiers in the GB team will tell you, as soldiers throughout history have told us, that the real heroes are their mates who never came home.

WORST job of the Cabinet reshuffle, as the petrol bombs and rubber bullets fly yet again, is surely that of Northern Ireland Secretary, awarded to the luckless Theresa Villiers. It must be like taking over a huge, dysfunctional kindergarten.

A READER reflects on that historic moment in 1969 when the late, great Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the surface of the moon. He wonders whether this was the only time in history that anyone has raised the Stars and Stripes outside the United States without lots of people getting killed.

THE big investment banks report that they are obliged to pay graduates up to £45,000 a year to lure them into an industry which has such a bad name. But why are they recruiting graduates at all? Capitalism follows a cycle of rising greed followed by collapse. In the banking game, long memories are a great asset because the more people who remember the agonies of the last crash, the better are the chances of avoiding the next one. We need a law banning investment banks from recruiting anyone under 70.

CLEAR blue water is appearing between Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Or to be more accurate, clear golden nectar. Romney is a Mormon and a teetotaller. Obama, it was revealed this week, has his own beer brewed at a micro-brewery in the White House. Suddenly, according to the polls, the States is warming to its President. As the aptly named pundit Harry Wallop observes this week: "If your opponent's strongest drink is mint tea, you've got Wyoming in the bag before anyone's cast a vote." Let us hope so. The idea of an American president, the most powerful man in the world, believing that real ale is the work of the Devil sets all sorts of alarm bells ringing.

THE brown hare, that most beautiful and mystical of our native creatures, has been in Britain from the dawn of time. It reacts to danger by crouching stock-still in long grass and for millions of years this tactic has defeated most predators. Sadly, it has no effect on modern farm machinery. On a walk this week I found an adult hare sliced clean in two by the silage cutter. The price of progress.

STILL on British wildlife, what a joy it was to see the rare pine martens on The One Show (BBC1). These home-grown charmers are every bit as endearing as meerkats and do not try to sell you insurance.

NEWS reaches us from London of padlocks suddenly appearing, clamped to public bridges. Apparently it is a continental thing, symbolising a couple's love. Strange symbol. I am reminded of the cautionary verse intoned by a world-weary old bricklayer when I was a teenage navvy on the sites all those years ago: "Remember, lad, it's wedlock, bedlock and padlock. "

DOCTOR Who is obviously chasing the adult audience. The Doctor's current sidekick Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) is sparky, funny, pouty and leggy. But she remains a kids' hero – sassy but never sexy. Her replacement in the new series is the smouldering Oswin, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman. Despite crashing her spaceship, having her neural transmogrifiers ripped out and being turned into a Dalek, Oswin still generates more come-hither in one dimpled smile than Amy Pond has produced while pouting her way across the entire infinity of the cosmos.

NEXT year will mark the 10th anniversary of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Those who believe there are still serious questions to be answered will welcome Archbishop Desmond Tutu's stern call for Tony Blair and George W Bush to be brought to court for what happened in 2003. That will never happen but it is right that Tutu still raises the issue - if only to make today's politicians think twice before unleashing the dogs of war.