Peter Rhodes: Gareth Malone's beard is all in the genes

USEFUL statistics for our time. There are 400,000 planning permissions in England and Wales granted for houses which have still not been built. There is no housing shortage, just a building shortage.

DAVID Suchet reveals that he perfected Hercule Poirot's mincing walk by clenching a coin between his buttocks. In future, Mr Suchet may have some difficulty persuading shopkeepers to accept his small change. You wouldn't want a warm one, would you?

THE fresh-faced Gareth Malone popped up on The Choir (BBC2) with a ginger beard. One TV critic demanded: "How come it was that reddish shade when the hair on his head is dark brown?" Simple. It's all in the genes. Some of us (and I write personally) are born into gingerish families, surrounded by carrot-topped siblings, but displaying not a single reddish hair of our own. We are the hidden gingers. One day, usually in our teens, we decide to grow a beard and discover the ginger line. It runs approximately at mid-ear level. Everything on the face above this line is brown, everything below is red. You look so daft you immediately shave it off. The next time you try to grow some stubble, probably at mid-life crisis time, your beard turns out depressingly grey, so you buy a Harley Davidson or a nice pair of leather trousers instead, while convincing yourself that your bizarre colouring is a sign of exciting forbears. It's a Viking thing, innit? Probably not.

THE DAILY Telegraph leader column asks solemnly: "Will the costly carriers be fit for purpose?" And the answer is, of course they will – so long as we all understand that the main purpose of the Royal Navy's two massive new aircraft carriers, whose price has just soared above £6,000 million, is not to carry aircraft. They were given the go-ahead by Gordon Brown's government chiefly to provide jobs for Scottish shipyards through an "unbreakable" 15-year contract that the incoming Coalition was unable to cancel.

AND when these twin leviathans have served their nation for a few decades, cruising the oceans, hosting cocktail parties and burning millions of gallons of fuel, they will doubtless be towed back to Scotland to provide yet more work, this time for Scottish ship breakers.

THE question, as Remembrance Day approaches, is why are we building warships at all? Philip Zec, the legendary political cartoonist, marked VE-Day in May 1945 with one of the finest war cartoons of all time. A wounded British soldier, standing in the ruins of our bomb-scarred continent holds out to the reader a laurel wreath inscribed: "Victory and Peace in Europe." The caption is: "Here you are! Don't lose it again!" But we did lose it.

IN fact, in the 68 years since the Second World War ended there has been only one year – 1968 – when a British soldier has not been killed on active service. But surely times are changing. After next year's withdrawal from Afghanistan, Britain need have no more wars. The sunlit uplands of peace dreamed of by Winston Churchill are at last within our grasp. But don't get your hopes up. In an interview this week, the new Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, insisted that, after Afghanistan, Britain's armed forces will be "engaged in the world". In a phrase you may find particularly chilling, he says: "There is more that we can yet do in Somalia." Well, of course there is. If Britain chooses to go looking for new wars we will certainly find them. But having seen our troops in constant action for so long, and counted the coffins coming home, aren't we entitled to look not for war but for the long, happy period of peace we were promised back in 1945? Let us take a break.