Best of Peter Rhodes - June 21

WE ARE on holiday in Beer, Devon. As I write this, it's another sultry day on the beach, heat rippling off the pebbles and the sky as blue as a sailor's shirt. Trippers in shorts and sunglasses queue for the all-day breakfasts and chat lazily under the cafe umbrellas. It is worth recalling that the weather experts who last week hadn't a clue that this hot spell was coming are the same forecasters who are this week predicting washout summers for the next 10 years. So they can't get it right five days ahead but they are quietly confident about 2023. Allow me to raise one eyebrow.

A MET Office spokesman on Radio 4 helpfully explained the difference between weather and climate. Climate is what you expect . Weather is what you get.

AFTER a week at the seaside, Mrs Rhodes has announced she wants to be resurrected as a herring gull because they fly so beautifully and mate for life. This is awkward as my long-term plan is to come back as a timber wolf. So we may meet in a future life, but only briefly.

JUST along the coast, one of Seaton's oldest restaurants has had a facelift and encountered that modern plague, the sign writer who can't actually write. At goodness-knows-what expense, the lettering on the front window of the restaurant now offers "Gluton-free meals." Glutton? Gluten? Who knows?

AFTER 12 years of combat in Afghanistan, the Americans and UK are now seeking peace talks with the Taliban. Isn't this what we used to call a defeat?

I LOVED the story a few days ago about little Adam Kirby, from south London who, at the age of two was found to have an IQ of 141. Mind you, his parents guessed he was a bit of a prodigy when Adam potty-trained himself at 23 months - having read a book on the subject.

A REPORT by the Institute of Fiscal Studies reveals that Britons are consuming fewer calories but are two stone heavier than people were 30 years ago. So what's new? I recall my father, a builder, remarking in the 1970s on the shrinking size of the average labourer's lunch. Back in the 1950s, when men worked without the aid of brick hoists, cement mixers or dumper trucks, lunch on building sites was a big, calorie-packed meal of cheese or corned-beef sandwiches. By the 1970s it had shrunk to a bag of crisps and a Kit-Kat. We have swapped backbreaking toil for flabby bodies and most folk seem happy with the deal.

THIS week yet another survey reveals that white British kids from poor homes are the ethnic group least likely to succeed at school. We ought to be surprised, but are we? Every other group seems to realise that education is the way to succeed in life. In too many British families, anyone who shows academic promise is taunted for being a swot, a snob or a class traitor. Deep in the DNA of Britain is the belief that you must know your place and never get above yourself and that college ain't for the likes of us. Kids fail because they are bred to fail.

IF YOU believe the adverts, no matter where you roam, your portable computer will instantly seek out a Wi-Fi hot spot and deliver perfect communications. In real life this column is reaching you only because I happened to stumble across the one tiny place in our holiday cottage where things work. If I use a cable extension and lie on the living-room floor with the balcony door open and the computer angled just to the right of the church tower, I can get a signal. Things have changed since the days of Mr Marconi but not as much as we like to think.

I HAVE been in journalism for 44 years and I bet each of those 44 years has brought news of an imminent miracle cure for cancer. Latest contender this week is a paper in Nature Cell Biology which tells how scientists at University College London believe they have discovered how cancer spreads from one part of the body to another. If they are on the right track they say it could be "relatively easy" to develop drugs to stop it. And yet look behind the headlines and you discover that the scientists have been working with frog and fish embryos rather than cancer cells and experts admit: "There's a very long way to go." I am dead against censorship but just as pornography should be carefully monitored and controlled, so should hope.

THE Beer church restoration appeal drags on with second-hand books piled in the pews at 50p a time and a stern notice reminding us that some people are taking books and not leaving money. My eye fell on a steamy little paperback from Mills & Boon whose cover, somewhat out of place in a church nave, promised: "Nurse Julie has been playing the good girl her whole life, so falling into bed with sinfully seductive Sebastian is the perfect opportunity to let her naughty side out." It is a reminder that if your church needs a new roof, the wages of sin are just as useful as any other wages.