Best of Peter Rhodes - December 14

I GOT the Christmas tree from a cattle yard where an old farmhand seized a likely-looking Nordland and shook it vigorously to spread the branches.

"Christmas trees are like women," he said.

"You mean they need a good shaking?" I responded warily.

"No," he explained. "They're like women because you'll never get a perfect one."

MEANWHILE, a friend who keeps a couple of turkeys as pets and enjoys the company of these big, bold and intelligent birds has a quandary. What do you give a turkey for its Christmas dinner?

NO broadcaster would devote an hour of prime-time viewing to a programme called Is Our Weather Getting Worse? (C4) if the answer was going to be "No". Sure enough, a succession of experts popped up to warn that climate change can be blamed for anything from drought in Kansas to floods in Yorkshire. The latest prediction is that we are in for more extreme "climate events". Well, maybe we are. But bear in mind that 40 years ago scientists no less distinguished than these were forecasting the next Ice Age. Ten years ago another generation of experts were threatening hot dry summers and mild wet winters. I have no idea what the boffins will be predicting 10 years from now but you can bet your best umbrella that it won't be what they are predicting this year.

THE Metropolitan media have been squeaking with joy as the 2011 Census reveals that nearly four million immigrants arrived in Britain over the past 10 years.

The Guardian trills about "a country that is changing very rapidly, in profound and interesting ways." The BBC's Mark Easton gushes that London has become "a truly international city."

Meanwhile in Boston, Lincs, where the number of foreign-born residents has shot up from 1,500 to 10,000 in a single decade, a local mother recalls that when she attended school in the town 20 years ago there were no foreigners and all local children could get in. Now she says: "My daughter couldn't get a place here at the beginning and had to go to a school six miles away."

Ordinary working people hardly appear on the radar of the BBC or the Guardian but they are at the sharp end in the biggest experiment in population change since Roman times. For many of them the changes are neither exciting nor interesting but merely make life harder.

WE ARE assured that the Church of England will have a gold-plated guarantee that it will not have to conduct same-sex marriages. Just like the gold-plated guarantee that prevents prisoners from having the vote. Until the European courts decide otherwise.

A READER denounces me as a hypocrite for being an atheist but supporting the Salvation Army. If I withdraw my support will that make me better?

SOME of the reaction to the Australian radio prank call is as revolting as the hoax itself. The prank call was a form of cultural oppression, based on the ignorant belief that everyone shares modern Australian values. It was a beery, coarse, practical-joking culture reaching across the planet to take the mickey out of those pompous Poms. But it wasn't a Pom who picked up the phone. It was a nurse from India, a part of the world where issues such as honour, shame and losing face are still deeply potent. When Jacintha Saldanha was found dead, the chorus of disbelief in the West told us much about this cultural gulf. Some Tweeters and emailers declared with certainty that she must have been depressed or suicidal before the incident. This was the ignorant, insular West at its worst, trying to make one woman's despair fit its own little template of life. Nurse Jacintha didn't behave as they would behave – therefore there must have been something wrong with her. Pitiless, brainless and shameless.

POLITICIANS endlessly warn that we must not build up enormous debts which our children and grand-children would have to settle. And then somehow, the Lib-Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey is sent off to the UN climate talks in Qatar with a bookful of blank cheques. He signs Britain up to a proposal which would force Western nations to compensate poor countries for the alleged damage they have suffered from 300 years of industrialisation - no proof required. It has been done, in our name, by a member of the junior partner in a Coalition government. How easy it is to give away other folk's money, especially when your party is destined for political oblivion and will never have to answer for your generosity. If this runs its course, our descendants could be saddled with billion-pound debts to nations which, for many hundreds of years, have enjoyed a damn sight better climate than we have.

WHEN I wrote last week that empire-building would result in Police and Crime Commissioners' deputies appointing deputies for the deputies, it was meant to be satirical. Before the ink was dry it was reported that half the PCCs have already appointed deputies and one has proposed taking on 17 new staff. It's criminal, innit?