Peter Rhodes: Why Eddie Izzard is the patron saint of the League of Bad Losers

THIS made me smile. It's yet another online hotel review, this time from a disgruntled guest who specifically booked the hotel which boasts of being closer to the sea in Sidmouth than any other establishment. If you got any closer you'd be paddling. He moans: "Not all rooms have double-glazing, so the sound of the sea is very noticeable."

REMINDS me of the night I spent in the Big Ben Hotel, Ding-Dong Mews, Cacophony Street, Westminster. Not a wink.

DON'T read too much into the American research suggesting the benefits of holidays can last for a month. Scientists at Harvard and the University of California found that just six days off work boosts the immune system and reduces stress. But when it comes to holidays, we and the United States are poles apart. Over here, most workers get five weeks paid holiday per year. In the States it's just 10 days – and some companies regard it as disloyal to take your full entitlement. No wonder the Yanks' poor, stressed-out bodies perk up after six whole days off. They may call it the Land of the Free but it's actually a land of wage-slaves.

AND now, yet another demo by the League of Bad Losers (patron saint Eddie Izzard), calling for Britain's exit from the EU to be postponed or overturned in a second referendum. These whining Remainers remind me of those insufferable foxhunters who chant "Listen to us," as if, merely by hearing their arguments, we would be persuaded that chasing small animals to their death is a good thing. The Remainers still think they can talk us round. They really don't get it, do they?

NOT only did 17 million Brits vote to quit the EU but they did it in the face of the direst warnings from the Government, Opposition, Bank of England, Bob Geldof and hundreds of doom-mongering economists and industrialists. By now, if we believed the pre-poll warnings, Britain would be a wasteland, screwed into poverty by an emergency budget and trampled to dust under the fleeing feet of foreign investors. The reality, so far (and I admit these are early days), is that optimism abounds. And if 17 million Brits voted for Brexit having been warned that the sky would fall in, how many more would vote for Brexit having seen that life is grand after the referendum (apart from that whining noise)? Nobody in their right mind wants a second referendum but if it came, the majority to quit would be even bigger. Memo to Remainers: Be careful what you wish for.

THE ones who really irritate me are those who, having lost the referendum, are now desperate for things to go wrong. They want to see their own country fail. They salivate at the prospect of businesses collapsing and workers being made jobless and homeless, just so that they can claim they were right. They are beneath contempt.

SWEEPING up in the garden, an elderly friend decided to wear a dust mask, held on by elastic. When the job was done he pulled off the mask. The elastic snagged on both his hearing aids, pulled them out of his ears and and catapulted them far into the long grass where one remains lost to this day. Be warned.