Peter Rhodes: We'll meet again?

IF the temperature hit 36 degs C this week, it would be hailed as evidence of global warming. Yet that is exactly what happened during this week in the scorching summer of 1976. At the time, the experts were forecasting another ice age.

BACK in '76, as the rains failed and the gardens turned brown, the Government advised us to use washing-up water on our gardens. I ingeniously laid a hose from the washing machine to our lettuce patch. After a few days the machine broke beyond repair owing, as the engineer put it, to" no bleedin' back-pressure." The drought of '76 was hot, dry - and expensive.

I WAS surprised that Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister who spoke for Leave in one of the TV referendum debates, was not one of the first Tories to throw her hat in the ring as a potential successor to David Cameron. At a time like this, when the nation needs to pull together, what could be better than a prime minister who looks like Vera Lynn?

NOT much sleep tonight. I am planning to rise at 4.30am on Friday to attend a vigil at my local church to mark the centenary of the First Day of the Battle of the Somme. With reservations. For a start, I'm not sure a church is the right place to remember the boys of 1916. However, all the most appropriate venues for a vigil, the buildings the Tommies knew best such as the drill halls and regimental depots, have been either knocked down or converted, so the church it must be.

THIS vigil is being promoted as a memorial for the dead and maimed - of both sides. One of the mysteries of the past 100 years is how the Church has cornered the market in reconciliation. In 1913 Britain and Germany were two nations who admired and respected each other. Within a year, millions of their young men were trying to kill each other. What turned peaceful boys into savages? Religion eagerly played its part. The Church assured soldiers that God was on our side, that Huns were baby-bayonetting, Godless fiends and it was an Englishman's Christian duty to kill them. In the years of peace that followed the conflict, the same clergy told us that the baby-bayonetters were actually victims all along. The Church loves to tell us to forgive and forget but has it ever gone down on its knees and begged forgiveness for its part in a century of savagery?

AND talking of ye olden days, has anyone else noticed how much easier it was for countries to leave the British Empire than it is to escape from the European Union? In the post-war world it was a simple case of pulling down the old flag, running up the new flag, firing a 21-gun salute and waving goodbye. No Article 50 procedure, and definitely no queuing.

MY item on the chap who took his bicycle into a public lavatory reminds a reader of a trip to Canada. In a loo in Toronto he encountered a "slightly hippy character" busy spray-painting his bike: "The fumes from the paint were so bad that he had to pop outside for fresh air every few minutes." My reader was assured this is not normal behaviour in Canada.