Peter Rhodes: Time to topple Gandhi?

THE year turns, the air goes chilly and spiders suddenly appear in the bathroom. Thankfully, they come singly although there is a variety of collective nouns if you happen to run into a bunch of them. You may encounter a cluster, clutter or venom of spiders.

AND I dare say spiders have a collective noun for people who hunt them down with slippers. A splat of humans.

MY father bought a cine camera in about 1960 and set about recording family life. We are seen dutifully enjoying ourselves on a shower-soaked beach at Swanage and rambling over t'Yorkshire Dales in anoraks specifically designed to absorb huge quantities of rainfall. But it's not the family that makes the most fascinating viewing. It is the occasional glimpse of 1960s towns, motorways, cars, blokes with pipes and ladies in hats. The ephemera of the age. After our latest trip up North, I printed off some photos of the family and was about to chuck out a pocketful of till receipts. Then it struck me that, 100 years from now, the receipts will be far more interesting than yet another snap of batty Uncle Peter at Kettlewell bridge. This one tells us that at 10.12am on September 20, 2016, somebody called Adam behind till number five at the motorway services served me with a ham sandwich at £3.69 and a Daily Telegraph at £1.40. The 22nd Centurists, on discovering my old album, will be astonished that a snack could cost less than 14 million Globedollars and that anyone would pay to carry around right-wing opinions printed on inky paper. They will make documentaries about the life and times of 21st century shop workers. It worries me a bit that when I am long gone and forgotten, Adam the till lad will be a celebrity.

IT worries me even more that the 22nd Centurists may regard the Daily Telegraph's views from 2016 not as right-wing but as extreme left. I would not risk a bet on which way the pendulum will swing between now and 2116.

I CAN'T help feeling that Hillary Clinton is missing a trick. Donald Trump has eagerly brandished a medical report showing he is physically fit. Why doesn't Mrs Clinton ask him to produce a psychological report?

HERE we go again. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign to topple a statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford was understandable, on the grounds that Cecil Rhodes was an imperialist. But now, an online petition has been started by academics in Ghana to bring down a statue of that global hero and pacifist, Mahatma Gandhi. This is based on a few "uncharitable" remarks by Gandhi including "savages or the Natives of Africa." If the saintly Gandhi is fair game for the statue topplers, can any icon be safe? How much longer, for example, can the activists tolerate presents being handed out annually by an old white man, based on his autocratic judgment that children have been naughty or nice? Today Gandhi, tomorrow Santa.

LAST words on Yorkshire. Skipton has a fine contender in the national list of firms with odd names: Savage Crangle. It may not be as stirring as the Leamington Spa legal practice Wright Hassall or Kidderminster's immortal estate agency Doolittle and Dalley, but memorable nonetheless.