Best of Peter Rhodes - January 25

SO THAT'S it. In clear, concise language that no-one could possibly misunderstand, the die is cast. The British people will be given a simple, straightforward choice on our future membership of the EU. It is in or out. Or possibly innish or outish. Sort of. A bit. Depending . . .

THE reality is that David Cameron is standing on the quayside, urging us to step aboard the good ship EU which, even as he talks, is casting off and moving away from us. By the time we get this promised referendum the Eurozone nations at the heart of today's EU will have become a superstate, in effect one nation with one central bank and one economic policy. Simply by standing still, the UK will move away. David Cameron, if he is still PM, will then proudly announce that he has negotiated a new relationship with Brussels and a grateful nation will vote to stay in (even though we will actually be out).

DURING the wintry spell cars, vans, lorries and the eBay courier, gawd bless him, all managed to get up the farm track to Chateau Rhodes. But the Royal Mail didn't. I am reminded of the graffiti in a post office in New York. On the wall a famous inscription in praise of postal workers declares: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." Underneath, someone wrote: "So what is it, then?"

SO FAREWELL, Michael Winner. I had tea with him once at a hotel in Birmingham. It was after the 1993 media screening of his revolting blood-and-boobs flick, Dirty Weekend. He was delightful company, even though he must have suspected that I was going to rubbish Dirty Weekend. One obituary claimed that Winner despised the Press so much that he tape-recorded every interview. I don't recall him taping our conversation as he chatted freely about his life and times. The hardest part was reconciling the creator of so much Death Wish violence and gratuitous nudity with the chuckling, chatty Michael Winner who was pouring the tea and handing out the biscuits like a favourite uncle.

YOU will be pleased to hear that it takes more than Mr Winner's winning ways and a couple of ginger nuts to sway this reviewer. I wrote of Dirty Weekend: "I found the whole thing quite repulsive . . . Truly gross."

WHITEHALL decrees that all children must be taught about the First World War. I can just imagine the government-approved curriculum for the1914-18 conflict: mud, blood, poison gas, lions led by donkeys, Wilfred Owen, pointless sacrifice and let's not offend the Germans. From the 1930s onwards our view of the war as the needless, thoughtless slaughter of a generation at the hands of incompetent generals has been shaped by war poets, pacifists and the bleak, mocking satire of Oh, What a Lovely War! and Blackadder.

It is a version which conveniently overlooks two facts. Firstly, Britain had no choice but to fight the war. Secondly, we won. In the final 100 days of the war, in a series of fast-moving offensives planned and led by the generals who would later be condemned as donkeys, the British Army routed the Germans and saved a continent from the Kaiser's regime which was almost as evil as Hitler's Third Reich.

I am privileged to have interviewed many soldiers of that war. I never met one who was not proud of his regiment, his mates and the victories they won. The only unanswered question for many was why it ended in a ceasefire – the Armistice- when, as one old gunner told me: "We had them on the run. We could have chased them all the way to Berlin."

The First World War was unspeakably terrible but it was neither pointless nor avoidable. We won because our great-grand-parents and their leaders had the will to win and because ordinary British lads in the trenches had unimaginable reserves of courage, loyalty and perseverance. That is the truth about the First World War, but don't expect to hear it in any classroom.

MORE telly anachronisms. A reader claims that in the excellent drama Spies of Warsaw (BBC4) David Tennant was driving a version of the classic Citroen Light 15 which was not produced until well after the war. Mind you, this seems a small niggle, bearing in mind that not so long ago we saw David Tennant arriving in ancient Pompeii in a 1950s police telephone box.

A HARVARD professor, George Church, is looking for an "adventurous" woman to give birth to a baby Neanderthal, assuming he can create the DNA of our long-extinct relative. I bet the queue is already forming. The eagerness of some women to become Jurassic Park-style surrogates is astonishing. In 1991, the frozen body of a man who died 5,300 years ago was found amazingly well preserved in the Alps. Rumour spread that Otzi, as he is known, contained fertile semen. Scientists were bombarded with requests from women eager to conceive a prehistoric baby. Maybe these ladies want to be famous. Or maybe they are just fed up with modern blokes.

I HAD to read this letter a few times. A reader cheerfully recalls his schooldays: "I won an award for my punctuation. They gave me a posh trophy."