Peter Rhodes: Principles or pique?

I BET we all can all guess what Lady Edith is getting for Christmas. A marquess.

THE Brits issue a warning that a plane has been bombed. The Egyptians, desperate to protect their tourism industry, insist all is well. Just like Jaws, isn't it?

A RARE TV screening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Film 4) was a reminder of how time changes us. Back in 1969 we kids were thrilled by the gunfights, the chases, the music and the dead-cool quotes ("Think ya used enough dynamite there, Butch?"). All these years later, we admire the soft-focus, sepia-shaded beauty of Conrad Hall's cinematography; every scene a work of art.

THE most poignant moment in the film, the one that went right over our heads in our youth, now leaps out of the screen at us as the old sheriff predicts the death of Butch and Sundance and the demise of that curious legend we call the Wild West: "Your times is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where."

REMEMBER the beginning of this year when, after the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, the great and the good, and the usual army of hangers-on, rose boldly to declare: "Je Suis Charlie"? I was proud to be in the unfashionable minority which says there is no right to cause gross and deliberate offence to minorities. As I put it then: "When we turn it against our neighbours, a cartoon in a magazine can be as ugly as a swastika daubed on a Jewish shop." The ugliness of Charlie Hebdo is revealed again in its latest cartoons depicting the Egyptian air disaster. One shows a skull with a pair of sunglasses amid the airliner wreckage with the caption: "The dangers of Russian low-cost airlines". So you're still Charlie, are you?

THE Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, challenges Jeremy Corbyn's refusal ever to use nuclear weapons. Corbyn promptly denounces this as the military meddling in politics, which is against all parliamentary principles, and demands a full inquiry. Now, supposing the same general had thoroughly supported Corbyn's position. Would the Labour leader still have been outraged at such meddling by the top brass? I bet not. When politicians get all high and mighty about principles, it's usually because somebody has dared to disagree with them.

CHRIS Packham's assertion on Autumnwatch (BBC1) that the sparrow hawk is the best bird in the universe will not endear him to the legions of bird-table enthusiasts, fed up at seeing their favourite finches and blackbirds exploding in clouds of feathers. One reader wrote to me to denounce sparrow hawks as "worthless predators."

A CHUMMY little letter arrives from our electricity company asking: "How's it going with your smart meter?" It's going utterly indifferently, since you ask. It sits on a table in the dining room emitting a dim green light and occasionally producing figures I neither understand nor care about. It is a gizmo, not a friend.