Peter Rhodes: Is your perfect holiday really The Truman Show?

Beer, Devon.

We had barely stepped out of the car in Beer car park when an old chap in a fisherman's smock smiled broadly and bade us good morning in a rich Devonian burr. Down on the beach, two minutes after ordering our food, a handsome young man called out "ticket number 99?" and delivered a trayful of perfectly formed full English breakfasts. The sun blazed, the waves lapped, the locals chattered. It was almost too Enid Blyton-perfect to be true and it stirred an old suspicion of mine. Supposing these annual holidays of ours are not actually in real-life Devon but are a franchise of The Truman Show. When you arrive, all the "villagers" play their parts. When you leave, the thespians relax, drop the West Country accents and boast to each other about landing a part in Emmerdale or a super little walk-on at Chichester, darlings. In The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey almost glimpses the truth when one of the electric lights of the fake night sky comes loose and hurtles to earth. If a large bulb marked "Sirius" suddenly crashes from a great height into Beer high street, I will not be surprised.

JUST up the road from our holiday cottage is a big house which would have been the perfect final address for the late Paul Daniels: Trick's End.

IN his great poem Cargoes, John Masefield described the ships and goods plying the world's oceans, from gilded galleys to dirty old coasters. Sitting here on an English beach, I feel moved to add a final verse: "Dodgy rubber dinghy wot I bought off eBay / Splashing up the Channel with the lights switched off / With a cargo of Syrians, Albanians, jihadists / Gelignite and fuses and Kalashnikovs."

THE mysterious decline in gull numbers continues. Five years ago the skies over Beer were thick with wheeling, screeching herring gulls. Today they are outnumbered and drowned out by raucous rooks.

OUR changing language. A reader reports that his manager regularly issues memos with the instruction: "Cascade this down to all colleagues." I am delighted to maelstrom this tit-bit to my readers.

GREAT philosophers of our time. "Life itself is pretty amazing. The fact that it just changes all the time – that kind of amazes me." Sir Paul McCartney, interviewed in the Mail on Sunday.

ON the eve of Muhammad Ali's funeral, a tale of two boxers. I saw Ali in the 1980s when he visited Birmingham. Even then, before his Parkinson's was diagnosed, he was a slow, shambling echo of the beautiful boxer who once floated like a butterfly – a victim, possibly, of too many punches. I never expected him to live so long. In contrast, Henry Cooper, whom I interviewed in his 70s, miraculously avoided brain damage and remained a great raconteur and an imposing figure almost to the end. What especially impressed me about Cooper was that he knew I understood virtually nothing about boxing and pitched his chat accordingly with great charm, as though we were lifelong friends. A gentleman.

ANOTHER cheerful old charmer who came across as your oldest best mate in an interview was Charlie Kray. But that's another story.