Best of Peter Rhodes - May 31

"PUT that ruddy light out!" As long as we hear those much-repeated words echoing around Walmington-on-Sea then Bill Pertwee, who played Warden Hodges in Dad's Army and died this week, will still be with us. His light may be out but the memories go on.

WHAT an amazing spring this is. It seems only a few days since the fields were frozen and tearful Welsh farmers were pulling dead sheep from snowdrifts. Now, the tractors are out on the farm next to Chateau Rhodes, filling trailer after trailer with tons of lush, emerald-green grass for silage. How on earth did it grow so quickly? Farmers must be bracing themselves for the fact that this may not be the worst year ever, after all.

THERE is a world of difference between artificial intelligence and the real thing. As my email system has been playing up recently, I asked our IT experts to "do the electronic equivalent of rodding the drains" Quick as a flash, my email program identified my need, reached into cyberspace and grabbed this advert: "Drains unblocked from £25. No call out fee. OAP discounts."

IT'S hard to define that old expression about somebody's face being a picture. But on Springwatch (BBC2), as Chris Packham described the curious mating habits of slugs, which sometimes involve biting off their own sex organs, Michaela Strachan's face, frozen somewhere between horror and hysteria, was an absolute picture.

THE JIHADISTS may have lost the battle to win hearts and minds on the streets of Britain but they are steadily taking over our prisons. This week's attack on warders by Muslim inmates at a prison in Yorkshire is a reminder that the UK prison population is 12.6 per cent Muslim, more than four times the proportion in Britain. That proportion is growing, partly through radicalisation and conversions inside the prisons and partly by an influx of young, angry Muslim criminals, many of whom plead guilty, as though they actually want to get behind bars. The British penal system is becoming a rite of passage for jihadists and a training ground for future horrors.

"THE last time I see genuine equality was around 3,500 years ago in the Bronze Age." Gorgeous, pouting TV historian Bettany Hughes complaining that she is judged on her looks, not her skills.

I REFERRED recently to the horrors of camping. A reader recalls camping with an old chap who coped with the problem of an over-active bladder by means of a plastic funnel attached to a length of rubber tubing outside the tent. His pals tied a knot in the end of it, which apparently caused much cursing in what are sometimes called the wee small hours.

THE trouble with May was that it has been too cold, too hot, too calm, too blowy, too dry and too wet. I have a German friend who said he never understood why the Brits spent so much time talking about the weather – until he moved here.

I SUGGESTED recently that the BBC should be funded from taxation instead of extracting its money by means of a vicious, clapped-out licence system. A reader asks: "What about people who don't watch the BBC?" Simple. Under my scheme, people who claim not to watch the BBC and therefore qualify for a tax break are invited to fill out the exemption form Gov23/3343/43/55444/Eng/Wales (2011-2014), omitting section 642 (vvi) (b) and subsections ii,iii,iv,xxi and xxxiv, plus the first 27 amendments in schedule XXV (excluding all sub-sections following the appeals procedure for Welsh-speaking Somalis). This exemption form, available on the first Friday after Michaelmas at your nearest harbour office, has to be completed in green ink and must be submitted no later than yesterday.

THE Highland landscape cries out for a Barbour, green wellies and sturdy tartan socks. Yet in a dazzling photograph to mark the 60th anniversary of her coronation, Her Majesty poses in the tussocky turf of the Balmoral Estate wearing full formal dress including the sovereign's green velvet mantle and the Vladimir Tiara. The loyal monarchist within me rejoices at such a fine image. But I am ever so slightly reminded of those pictures of elderly ladies in nightdresses, striding among startled shoppers in the high street, to highlight the perils of dementia. The time to worry will be when HM opens Parliament in her wellies.

"CRIME runs in families in the same way that being a doctor, teacher or lawyer does." So says Alan Goldsack QC, calling for babies of criminal families to be removed to better homes to save them from a life of crime. It would be a fascinating social experiment. But what if the kids, transplanted to decent, respectable homes, still drifted into crime? We might then have to accept that it's nature, not nurture, and that criminality is passed down families like blue eyes or ginger hair. I once interviewed an old copper who genuinely believed crime was in the genes.