It's a dirty old game

WHEN Hillary Clinton launches her presidential campaign in Iowa by declaring: "I'm back!" am I the only one reminded of the Wicked Witch of the West?

A READER sends me the debit-card bill he was asked to sign by his dentist to cover some treatment. He asks: "Is this the latest ploy for getting the NHS out of the red?" The request is for £278,057. Damn those decimal points.

POLITICS is a dirty game and it is pointless for Labour to complain about Tory "gutter" tactics. Just supposing David Cameron had stood against his own brother to become party leader. Do you seriously believe Labour would not now be picking this family scab for all it was worth, muttering darkly about the true character of the Tory leader? Of course not. Ed Miliband backstabbed his way to the top and must live with the consequences. It is not mudslinging to ask how a man who treated his own brother so badly is likely to treat complete strangers like you and me. It is common sense.

WE are off to a wedding this week, which makes a nice change from all those funerals. Mrs Rhodes has been out in search of wedding shoes, a curious form of footwear which tends to be worn once, unconfidently and usually painfully. She snapped up a pair in the sales and says she will be uncomfortable for a lot less than she imagined. That's the spirit.

HOW fortunate is the male of the species. We don't have wedding shoes. We just have shoes. I will be wearing the black ones with white shirt, pale grey tie and the M&S Quasimodo suit. It claims to be my size, 44 Medium, yet grips the hips, gapes open at the chest and hangs most oddly, one shoulder higher than the other. At weddings it must make the other family wonder what sort of genes they are drawing into their bloodline. The bells, the bells.

THE old lattice-style electricity pylons have had their day. A new, shorter, single-pole replacement in gleaming white will soon be striding across the English countryside. It is claimed to be prettier and less intrusive than the old type. Really? On hearing the news I went to the back door of Chateau Rhodes and counted the pylons in view. There are 18 stretched across the horizon and, while they are not exactly things of beauty, over the past 40 years or so they have faded to a dull grey. They blend well into the background. I can't see shiny white pylons doing the same.

DAVE Doggett, chairman of Cambridge United says groups of fans in their 50s and 60s are arranging fights with rivals on match days. Apparently, these grey-haired thugs are reliving their golden days of football hooliganism of the 1970s, having first taken the middle-aged precautions of adjusting their hearing aids, applying extra denture grip and suchlike. In a perfect world, they would get smacked around by the local bobbies, as in the 1970s, and fined or jailed by olde-style magistrates. But we live in curious times and anything smelling of history gets special treatment. Is this real football hooliganism? Or is it heritage football hooliganism, a sort of Sealed Knot of the terraces? I wouldn't be surprised if they qualify for a grant.

A STUDY in Italy shows that dogs can score a 98 per cent success rate in detecting prostate cancer simply by their sense of smell. Something else to worry about when your adoring pooch buries his head in your lap.