Peter Rhodes: Eating toads, watching toads

IN Colombia, the authorities have arranged a truce with the Farc guerillas to end a 50-year war. The Colombian expression for doing unpleasant things such as haggling with mass murderers is "eating toads."

WHICH leads seamlessly on to Manchester City's decision to expose the tunnel, the passageway from pitch to changing rooms in which so much swearing, spitting and scrapping goes on unseen by the fans. The new tunnel will have a glass roof. Watching toads?

OUR lawn erupts with mole hills, some just a foot apart. If a mole needs to keep coming up for air, why live underground in the first place? One for you, Chris Packham.

THERE is far too much premature rejoicing by the Brexiteers, and I speak as one of that happy band. True, the economy has not collapsed. But we have not had a sniff of Article 50 yet and there is a long, hard way to go. Over the past 40 years we have surrendered to Brussels parts of our sovereignty and legal system which had been created by the British people over 1,000 years of war, revolution, reform and democracy. Now we are beginning the process of unpicking the knots that bind us into the EU. If you think it's going to be a painless process you deserve a gold medal for freestyle optimism.

IN the RSC's current production of The Two Noble Kinsmen at Stratford, set in Athens, a character appeared on stage at press night carrying a chainsaw. There was no explanation and it has puzzled me ever since. Does the chainsaw somehow speak to a brutal, mechanised age? Does it represent mankind's destruction of the environment? I am beginning to think that this may not be a dazzlingly insightful gambit by the director, but a cock-up. Perhaps, in the rush to get on stage, the actor absent-mindedly grabbed a prop, assuming it to be a spear or shield, and ended up in ancient Greece with a chainsaw. These things happen. Tonight, the chainsaw. Tomorrow night, the fire bucket.

A READER wrote to say Britain's 200-odd Challenger tanks are obsolete and should be sold off. By coincidence, on the very same day a dozen Turkish tanks rolled over the border to clear a Syrian town of IS terrorists. The terrorists fled. Tanks still have their uses. I remember an old soldier complaining that barrage balloons and mules would have been damn useful in the 1982 Falklands War. Unfortunately, both had been declared obsolete and scrapped.

HOW much faith do you put in those online reviews of hotels, B&Bs, restaurants and so on? After our recent underwhelming stay at an overpriced pub in the Cotswolds, I put a firm but fair review on TripAdvisor. It was only the latest in a flurry of reviews complaining about the rooms and the service and awarding the pub only one or two stars out of a possible five. And then, lo and behold, three five-star reviews were awarded in the space of 48 hours. I referred this to TripAdvisor as "suspicious." Since then, two of the five-star reviews have vanished.

AN online video promoting another hotel shows a chef preparing a goat's cheese tart while wearing a watch, a wristband and a ring. Yuk.