It's the rules, innit?

THE Russians advanced and the Ukrainians retreated. One major withdrawal involved a column of Ukrainian armoured vehicles led by a police car. Funny sort of war.

GERMANY, once the uber-militarist bogeyman of Europe, now spends so little on defence that on a recent exercise some German troops used broomsticks instead of rifles. There is real alarm that Angela Merkel's forces cannot fulfil their Nato commitments. How times change. In 1914 Germany spent far too much on arms and Europe was terrified. In 1939 Germany spent far too much on arms and Europe was terrified. In 2015 Germany is spending far too little on arms and Europe is terrified.

YOU know how it is. The TV or radio interview ends, leaving a glaring, unanswered question and you think, hang, on what about . . . ? In the Countryfile (BBC1) feature on foxhunting, we were told that drag hunting involves laying a trail of fox urine. But no-one explained where they got the stuff. I had a fleeting mental image of foxes locked away in secret cellars at the hunt kennels, being plied with pints of ale. Apparently not. Fox urine is supplied by commercial companies although I doubt if Britain has anything to compare with the US market leader, The Pee Mart. It trades as "Your best discount online source for 100 per cent real, undiluted predator pee and animal urine." Although I try to avoid the following phrase, you couldn't make it up.

MEANWHILE, the saboteurs harass the hunts and the hunts take the occasional whip-swipe at the sabs. The skirmishes we see every hunting season may look unpleasant but they are actually a sort of safety valve. This is the English Civil War being continued by other means.

SO farewell, Wolf Hall (BBC1) which concludes this week and has been, depending on your tastes, either one of the the finest things the Beeb has ever done or a rather long, dark and boring waste of time. I'm in the former camp, among those whose Wednesday nights have become a delicious blend of high drama and long, meaningful silences. I've lost count of the number of times somebody asks Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) a question and Cromwell gazes meaningfully into the middle distance and declines to answer. Any actor can spout lines; coping with a total absence of script takes real skill. In years to come drama students will study the Rylance Silence.

GREAT excitement at our local park where conservationists were netting the lake to remove fish before it gets overpopulated. It is extraordinary how a few acres of shallow, muddy water has become, in just a few years, home to some gigantic fish. As the last bit of the net was hauled ashore there was a mighty boiling and thrashing of brown and white – and quite a bit of gold. It's not just cats and dogs that get dumped when feckless owners go on holiday. Some people quietly slip their goldfish into the nearest pond.

TORY MP Robert Halfon has accused parking wardens of "fleecing" motorists by issuing penalties for piffling errors such as placing the pay-and-display ticket in the "wrong" part of the dashboard. I recall a reader's tale of woe. Having parked his estate car in a tight parking bay in a dark multi-storey, he tried to help the wardens by sticking his ticket not on the windscreen but inside the rear window where it was most visible. This act of kindness earned him a £30 ticket. It's the rules, innit?