Peter Rhodes: Voting for Groucho

"I HOPE my decision will limit and help repair the damage I have done to an institution I hold dear," declares Lord Sewel's resignation statement. The institution in question appears to be the House of Lords. Not marriage, then?

***

THANKS to my misspent youth in the TA, I find I am eligible to join the Labour Party for a bargain £1 as an ex armed-forces member, and vote for Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Some party high-ups mutter darkly about infiltration and entryism into the election process. The current set-up was championed by Ed Miliband (you remember him; tall bloke with a gravestone) who seems to have bequeathed his party a voting system which could make Labour unelectable for decades.

***

ALTHOUGH who's to say? For all any of us know, the next global financial collapse could make us long for a Parliament full of Marxists, just to see what happens. I have no problem with voting for Marxists, especially Groucho.

***

CURIOUS tale. A married couple of my acquaintance awoke at 3am a few days ago to find a stranger standing in their bedroom. The husband got out of bed to assess the situation and the stranger, aged about 20 and clearly very tired, very drunk and no threat to anyone, slid gratefully into the marital bed (at which stage the wife vacated the bed, sharpish) and fell asleep. The bemused couple assumed the intruder was one of their son's friends, staying over. The son was summoned from his bedroom but didn't recognise the intruder. They woke the sleeping man who staggered downstairs, collected his shoes at the door (which they discovered had been left unlocked) and vanished into the night. The husband, concerned for the stranger's welfare, followed him long enough to see him let himself into his rightful house a few hundred yards away. And that was that. No names, no identification, no explanation. Just a bizarre little reminder that real life is infinitely stranger than fiction.

***

FOR all practical purposes Kepler-452b, the "earth-like" planet discovered by Nasa, might as well be pure invention. Even if we could travel at the speed of light, it would take us 1,400 years to get there. The images we see of Kepler-452b today are 1,400 years old. For all we know, it may not even exist any more. Some people may find such discoveries fascinating but they are stupendously irrelevant.

***

THE Age UK report claiming middle-class drinkers are consuming "harmful" quantities of alcohol raises more questions than it answers. For a start, it accepts that wealthier people tend to be healthier than poorer people. The statistics also show that rich people consistently live longer than the poor. But even more puzzling is the result of what is probably the biggest and longest-running epidemiological study in human history. For 1,000 years the Christian world has boozed and the Islamic world has not boozed. If alcohol were a significant health factor, life expectancy would be longer in the Islamic world than in the Christian world. In fact, it's the other way around. Discuss.

***

FROM custard pies to banana skins, the oldest and most reliable form of humour is the one based on somebody else's misfortune. If you doubt that, catch the new TV advert for Dreams beds which begins with some sleepy-headed bloke getting a tennis ball smack in the kisser. I challenge you not to laugh.

PS: No tennis balls were harmed in the making of the above advert.