Best of Peter Rhodes – November 9

REJOICE. The new Archbishop of Canterbury is in favour of female bishops and against gay marriage. He could Welby the best thing to happen to the Church for ages.

A NUMBER of you have asked whether the infection threatening our ash trees, will become known as the Welsh disease. Die Back.

SO it's official. The Government is so committed to the idea of Police Commissioners that they don't really care whether you vote or not on November 15. Home Secretary Theresa May says there is no question of the elections being declared void no matter how few people vote. Yet I detect no enthusiasm at all to elect candidates we have never heard of into £100,000-a-year jobs that probably don't need doing on the strength of policies that have not been properly explained, using an electoral process which was roundly rejected in last year's AV referendum.

SOME readers tell me they will be spoiling their ballot papers. One promises to vote for "utter waste of money".

FOLLOWING a series of newspaper exposes, the NHS has promised to involve relatives more closely in the end-of-life treatment for patients known as the Liverpool Care Pathway. Not before time. A couple of years ago I talked to a widower whose wife died in hospital. Before she passed away, the doctors and nurses discussed the Liverpool process with him, but in such vague terms that he came to believe it was some intensive-care procedure to make the old lady better. Maybe some relatives will appreciate a clearer, franker explanation. But there will always be some who see the deliberate withdrawal of food and liquids as a cruel and unkind course, the very opposite of what nursing and caring is supposed to be about. It seems wrong to let a person die slowly of hunger or thirst. If there really is no hope, then can't we at least ask for the mercy of an injection?

"THEY were brown and they looked nice." The reason some idiots give for eating wild fungi without having a clue what they are, as related on Radio 4 by TV chef Valentine Warner.

ONE of life's little milestones came around, the renewal of my passport. One thing has changed in 10 years; the instructions for the photograph are now very stern. There must be no smiling, no reflective spectacles, no headgear and the head must be kept bolt upright. This is a bit of a blow to those of us who look particularly dashing smiling whimsically over the top of our reading glasses from beneath the brim of a moleskin fedora. The passport snaps turned out as grim as I expected but at least I appear to be alive, unlike in my 2002 passport photo which looks like a death mask. In years to come archaeologists will be puzzled by the curious discovery that, although foreign holidays were supposed to be happy events, the only people who went on them looked really miserable.

ANNOUNCING a project to count the number of red-haired folk in Scotland, a BBC report informs us: "For a child to have red hair, both parents must be carriers." For heavens sake, it's a colouring, not a disease.

FOUR more years. As President Obama looks ahead to his new term, does he pause to reflect on the bright, well-educated, sophisticated population of 315 million Americans he leads? A friend is just back from a holiday in the tropics which included one day swimming with the dolphins. An American lady announced loudly: "I read the Bible and the Bible tells me that after I die I will spend all my days swimming with dolphins, and that is why this is so important to me." And she's got the vote. God Bless America.

IF you, the readers of this column, are surprised by lines such as "a fan club" and "you're a big girl's blouse" in Anachronism Abbey (ITV), why on earth do experienced actors not rebel? Before every episode of Downton the cast read through the script, sitting around a table. Surely at that stage these modern phrases must jar terribly. Does no-one have the nerve to point out to Julian Fellowes that his scripts are less than perfect?

ANYWAY, for all its curious turns of phrase, Downton has been the best thing on telly for years. It was one of those series you just wanted to go on and on. I must assume that Mr Bates will finally admit his guilt as a murderer in the Christmas edition (or Winterval Holiday Special as Fellowes may call it).