Peter Rhodes: Sniffing out sausages

MARS Food have advised customers not to eat Dolmio sauces more than once a week because of their high fat, salt and sugar content. Here's yet more proof that the better something tastes, the worse it is for you.

THE new Jungle Book movie, unlike the magnificent but madcap 1967 Disney version, uses Rudyard Kipling's poetry, including a few lines from The Law of the Jungle. The poem is a guide for young wolves but some of it, on the merits of discipline, caring for infants and keeping clean, applies just as much to young people. Both species are formidable fighters capable of doing terrible harm, hence Kipling's plea for cool heads and discussion: "When Pack meets with pack in the Jungle, and neither will go from the trail / Lie down till the leaders have spoken - it may be fair words shall prevail." It is sound advice for wolves and humans alike – but only if we have wise leaders.

KIPLING was also a great observer of this island breed. In his poem, The Puzzler, he has this to say about us English: "Their psychology is bovine, their outlook crude and raw. / They abandon vital matters to be tickled by a straw." This love of trivia probably explains why the serious item I wrote some weeks ago on the rights and wrongs of digging up skeletons for TV archaeology attracted not a single email. Yet I have been snowed under with readers' memories of childhood misunderstandings. As far as we English are concerned, towering ethical issues will always take second place to the five-year-old who was terrified of the burglar in the garden. Turned out to be a pergola.

HOW to make an entire continent love the EU? Get 'em young. The European Parliament is debating a report called Learning the EU in Schools which seeks to promote "the EU dimension in education." It sounds suspiciously like propaganda for kids. How long before children from Aberdeen to Athens are required to stand in class every morning, as the Americans do, and pledge their oath of allegiance to the Union?

IF that sounds far-fetched it's probably because you have forgotten that curious moment in 2006 when, according to the House of Lords report, a senior Euro-judge suggested that criticism which undermined the prestige and institutions of the EU was "as heinous and as unacceptable as blasphemy." You join what you think is a Common Market. You end up in the Holy Roman Empire.

SNIFFER dogs at Manchester Airport are in the, er, doghouse after failing to detect hard drugs. The only success story is one pooch which has developed a talent for finding "small amounts of cheese or sausages."

WHICH reminds me of the time Prince Charles visited the office where I worked. A couple of days before the event, the place was swept by a team of police dog handlers with eager, bouncy springer spaniels. One made a beeline for my desk and sat quivering, tail wagging wildly with his nose close to the top drawer. At enormous expense, this spaniel had been specifically trained to detect guns and explosives. He had found a Twix bar.

A READER tells me his mother once announced that Little Archie was on the telly that night. Liberace.