Peter Rhodes: The end of the weekend

THERE was a time when I would have raged against any plans to turn Sundays into just another working day. You don't have to be a churchgoer, or even vaguely religious, to believe that one day of the week should be slower, quieter and somehow special.

I HAD forgotten how angry it is possible to get with BT. It is one of those companies which spends millions buffing up its public image (three happy students in a flat with wonderful BT Infinity) yet has a customer-relations procedure straight out of the darker pages of Kafka. The conversation you want to have would be like this. Customer: "A bolt of lightning has knocked out my BT hub." BT: "No problem, sir. We'll have someone out to fix it tomorrow." What you get is more than an hour of absolute gibberish at call centres in both India and Britain with people reading from incomprehensible scripts whose clauses all seem to begin with: "You should be aware that..." To recap. BT's wiring has brought lightning into my house which wrecked a BT hub. Yet I am apparently responsible to pay £119 for a new hub unless I take out a new contract, based on figures I don't understand. I was asked whether I had a TV aerial, whether the aerial socket was close to the TV and what sort of TV did I watch, "is it mostly game shows?" What the hell have my viewing habits got to do with getting the broadband fixed? The whole experience was more like a police interrogation than a customer-service operation.

BRITAIN has never really been a multicultural country. It has turned, over the past 50 years, into a nation of separate tribes, most of which rub along pretty well. Some inner-city schools are now virtually 100 per cent black or Asian, yet thousands of British rural schools have not a single ethnic-minority kid. Although this week's think-tank report sounds like a dire warning, the truth is that the British pattern has not worked too badly. The United States, eager to encourage unity, deliberately bussed in quotas of white and black pupils to produce what looked like the right mix in schools. That enforced mixing has hardly produced wonderful race relations in America, has it? The lesson may be that, given the freedom, people will at first choose to live among folk like themselves. The mixing will come in its own time. It could take years or even decades but maybe it is best left to happen at its own pace.

I WROTE yesterday about people with claustrophobia avoiding pot holes. But some folk don't know they have a phobia until it's too late. I was with a woman who suddenly discovered she suffered from vertigo. It happened as we stepped on to the viewing platform of a tower, 700 feet above Texas. Yabba-dabba-do.

JANE Peyton, elected as Britain's first "Beer Sommelier of the Year," says beer often goes better with food than wine but is sneered at by wine snobs. Maybe it is. But if you want a truly horrified hush to descend on a smart restaurant, try uttering these words: "A pint of cider, please."