Peter Rhodes: A gift to Jeremy

OUR changing language. In the garden centre this week I found a sale bin full of items "priced as stickered".

LIKE an errant spouse promising to improve, the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker admits the EU has lost "parts of its attractiveness" to ordinary citizens and interfered too much in their private lives. Like so many errant spouses, he then spoils it by making a threat, calling Brexit "pie in the sky." Either way, it's too late, pal. Your pie's in the oven and we're packing our bags.

VICTORIA Wood had a great eye for the ridiculous. Situations which other folk would barely notice became the basis of a great little gag or two. And while most of the obituaries have been about Wood & Walters, Dinnerladies and Acorn Antiques, I will always remember her wonderfully understated tale of going into a cafe, ordering four baked potatoes and being told that the proprietor had only three potatoes. "Blimey, I've got more than three potatoes at home, and I'm not a cafe," replied Wood. In cold print on paper, the line is not remotely funny. Sprinkle the Wood magic dust over it and it still makes me smile, 20 years on.

ALTHOUGH she was only 62, many of Wood's best characters were inspired by those strong, self-sacrificing, tragicomic and endlessly resourceful 1940s women who coped with wartime separation and bereavement by carrying on as normal, whistling as they worked and never letting the tears show. In our race-memory there is a time when England was populated almost entirely by Victoria Woods, making do and mending, and was better for it.

JEREMY Corbyn is on fine form attacking the Tory plan to impose academy status on all schools. Why present him with such a target in the first place? Like the poll tax and bedroom tax, the academy plan is a gift to the Opposition. It unites Labour, divides the Tories and mobilises neighbourhoods against diktats from Whitehall. And if it's such a good idea, Dave, then why wasn't it in your election manifesto?

THE dementia rates for men are falling sharply, possibly because the massive numbers giving up smoking over the past few decades have cut the number of brain-shrinking conditions. We can only hope that the NHS does not respond to this good news by cutting back on dementia services. It would be nice, just once, if part of the health service was over-funded.

AFTER all the commemorations and pomp to mark the centenary of Ireland's Easter Rising last month, you may be surprised to learn that the actual anniversary is this Sunday. It was on April 24 1916 that the rebels seized the GPO in Dublin. The Easter Rising must be the only major political event whose anniversary is tied not to the calendar but to a religious festival.

HER Majesty's 90th birthday has focused attention on the issue of monarchy versus republic. These are hard times for the republicans because the monarchy has never been so popular. And if we had a revolution tomorrow and the next head of state was elected on the votes of 40 million citizens, I bet the successful candidate would be Prince William, by a mile.

AT times like this I am reminded of the old theory that there could never be a proletariat revolution in England because the workers would desert the barricades to wave at the Queen passing by.