Best of Peter Rhodes - July 5

A READER asks: "If I sponsor a South African antelope at my local zoo, could I ask for it to be called Vlad the Impala?"

A RECYCLING centre in Smethwick is set ablaze by a Chinese lantern and our immediate response is to run around like headless chickens calling for a new law to ban such devices. For heaven's sake, we do not need any new laws. England has been passing laws for 1,000 years and the law against deliberately or recklessly starting fires is fully covered by the Criminal Damage Act. All we need is a prosecution or two to make the point that sending a naked flame aloft in a Chinese lantern is as reckless as lobbing a petrol bomb over your neighbour's fence.

WEASEL words. A furious Brownie leader sends me the full text of the rather hearty letter to all Girlguiding volunteers by Chief Guide Gill Slocombe, explaining why all reference to God has been removed from the Girlguiding Promise. Slocombe ends her missive: "What you can be sure of is that all of us in Girlguiding are still committed to the same values we have been for over 100 years." Hang on. Even we hard-boiled atheists can see that if you delete a sacred promise right at the heart of a movement you must inevitably affect its values. Faced with this sort of gibberish from their Chief Guide, is it any wonder so many Girlguiding leaders are seething? A churchwarden at a church where generations of Guides and Brownies have met tells me: "Over the years I have failed to meet a Guiding leader who has expressed concerns about the wording of the current Promise. Since the new wording was announced I have failed to meet a leader who does not have concerns." That's what happens when a movement stops listening to its foot-soldiers.

"IT WOULD be too much to say that death does not frighten me, but I have no fear of the hereafter because I do not believe in it." From the last interview by the Nobel-winning scientist Christian de Duve, 95, whose death by legally assisted suicide in Belgium was reported this week. He went out, according to his family, with "a smile and a goodbye."

AN INTERNET poll shows a big resurgence of "extreme retro" names from Victorian times. But we all grow old and one day today's young people, with names like Chardonnay, Sting, River and Waynetta, will become old people, living in homes where they will be cared for by young people called Mabel, Florence, Winifred and Stanley.

"THE Conservatives' high priest of enthusiasm." Boris Johnson, as described this week by political pundit Benedict Brogan.

AS anyone in academia will tell you, there are two great reasons to become a teacher, namely July and August. The long, sunny, six-week holidays are a relic from the time when kids were needed to bring in the harvest and are a huge attraction for would-be teachers. No wonder that union leaders are enraged by the Government's Deregulation Bill which will allow head teachers, not local authorities, to set term times and holidays. But I doubt if they have much to worry about. Most heads, like most teachers, want long holidays and a quiet life. The last thing they desire is to be pinned up against the wall by angry parents complaining that they can't juggle family holidays to suit a changed term. The most likely outcome is that schools in the same area will quietly agree on the same holidays and that any head who tries to introduce radical new short terms will get a flurry of resignation notes from the staffroom.

WHAT rocked me slightly on my heels in the school-term reports was the passing reference to how many state schools there are in the UK. Go on, have a guess. The answer is about 25,000. In the internet age when all the world's knowledge, languages and culture are a mouse-click away, isn't it extraordinary that we have no better means of educating children than dragooning them in batches of 30 through 14 years of lessons, at the end of which some can't even string a sentence together? There must be a better way.

MEMORANDUM. From the White House, Washington, to EU Headquarters, Brussels: As a mark of goodwill, the United States Government hereby solemnly pledges that all electronic eavesdropping on the emails, offices, phone conversations and personal diaries of EU officials and politicians will cease as of 2000 hrs on Monday, July 15 (immediately after Angela Merkel's pedicure appointment).

MORE curious married names. A reader informs me that her friend Gail married Mr Whale.

ANOTHER reader recalls that his father's Auntie was born Alice Ann Taylor Monks, and married a man called Taylor to become Alice Ann Taylor Taylor.

AND yet another writes: "My Aunt Valerie married a Mr Gallery."