Peter Rhodes: Barking mad

BEST TV of the festive season? I loved BBC4's Slow TV special, two hours of uninterrupted reindeer-sleigh trek through northern Norway. There is much pleasure in hearing other people's ice crunching in the warmth of your own lounge.

OUR changing language. York has always tended to flood. Forty-odd years ago, when I worked on the city's newspaper, the Yorkshire Evening Press, a sub-editor told me in no uncertain terms that people are never evacuated, except with an enema. He insisted that buildings were evacuated but people were rescued. He may have been right then but, just as the weather changes, so does grammar.

SO Lady Edith got her marquis, Isobel got her baron, Mr and Mrs Bates got their baby, Lady Mary got pregnant, Barrow got the butler's job, Molesley got a cottage, Daisy got her bloke, Carson got his pension, and the Granthams got the perfect ending they richly deserved. Julian Fellowes did not so much tie up the loose ends in Downton Abbey as embroider each end with a baby-pink ribbon of pure saccharine. The ending was so universally contented and joyous that I half expected the nation's favourite labrador to amble into the great hall with Carson explaining that owing to a clerical error at the vets, good old Isis wasn't dead after all. Ah, bless.

DRIVERS are celebrating the price of petrol falling below £1 per litre. I reflect sadly on the day I decided I had to sell my wonderful old Rover 110 because petrol had just hit 50p per gallon.

WE may have been worrying too much about the wrong sort of migrants. Human newcomers from the EU and Syria may strain the NHS and force wages down but they won't give you rabies. Dogs being brought in wholesale from puppy farms in eastern Europe may do, and some experts believe 2016 could be the year when these puppies and their ailments come home to bite us. The English obsession with owning unusual-looking pooches (it's half-wolf, what do you expect?) has created a booming market in smuggled puppies, some of which come from areas with rabies. It is a particularly horrible way to perish but I dare say we will have to wait for someone to die before anyone in Whitehall wakes up.

LIKE the elephant in the living room, The Line is with us again. It has been appearing on the weather maps of Britain for the past couple of years yet no-one seems to mention it. It is a thick and fuzzy line and it drifts around a bit. But as a rule it runs from the south of Wales across northern England and up to the North Sea at Newcastle. Time after time, weather fronts from the Atlantic sweep in from the west, hit The Line and bounce off up north. The result is a UK with starkly different weather zones. If you live to the south and east of The Line, you get good weather. If you live to the north and west you get drenched. The south has always had a better climate than the north but I can't remember it being so marked. Scotland hasn't had a decent summer for three years while the south-east of England seems to get hotter and drier all the time. Behold, The Line. It deserves a proper name. Any ideas?

A READER challenges my claim to be working class. Listen, I can build brick walls, I can play the ukulele. I hate Waitrose. Case proved.