Peter Rhodes: Dylan the Unexpected

I WROTE last week about the bacon, lettuce and tomato (BLT) sandwich from a motorway service station which contained almost as many calories as three Mars Bars. I should have mentioned the crucial difference. No-one I know (or would wish to know) could eat three Mars Bars followed by another three Mars Bars but I could have eaten those BLTs all day long. Temptation, thy name is bacon.

I SUPPOSE we should give thanks that the makers have not come up with a bacon-flavoured Mars Bar.

STILL on food, I came across a website a few days ago offering a recipe for "the perfect Dorset apple cake." It looks like every other apple cake you've ever seen, except that it is covered with flaked almonds. So what is it about flaked almonds that imparts Dorsetness? This is a puzzle to rival the old savoury conundrum: what is it about a casing of sausage meat and orange breadcrumbs that makes an egg Scotch?

I CAN'T think of a new comedy series which promises as much as Zapped (Dave channel). A hapless office dogsbody Brian (James Buckley from The Inbetweeners) is transported to a fantasy world ruled by really unpleasant fairies where a chicken-headed man terrifies the locals but also lays eggs for breakfast. That sort of place. Weird. Wonderful. Watch it.

I'VE just had a close encounter of the jay kind. They used to be such shy birds, probably because the only humans they ever encountered were gamekeepers with 12-bores. This one, busy hunting for bugs in a ploughed field, stood his ground less than 15 feet from me. I have seen more timid parrots.

THE reporters were dead right when they told us the Nobel Prize for Literature had been "unexpectedly" awarded to Bob Dylan. As a rule the prize goes to people like Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Herta Muller and Maria Vargas Llosa who may be hugely admired by the international literati and glitterati but whose names mean absolutely nothing to ordinary folk. Dylan has been weaving his lyrical threads through our minds for the past half-century, creating imagery as clever and subtle as anything in classical poetry. The British singer and songwriter Billy Bragg likens Dylan's rhymes to those of Coleridge. If you have half an ear for verse, you cannot hear the words of Mr Tambourine Man or Chimes of Freedom without being reminded of the great works of yore. Strip away the music from a Bob Dylan songbook and you've got a great book of poems.

AND now the Nobel judges have recognised that wonderful poetry can exist in pop music, any chance of a gong for the finest British pop lyricist of his age? Ray Davies of the Kinks, who else?

HAVE you ever almost, but not quite, met someone famous? A reader tells me he once owned a firm which sold steel bars. One of his customers was a gym in London used by the visiting Arnold Schwarzenegger. "It is quite possible," he enthuses, "that Arnie and I have touched the same piece of steel." Why, that's almost first-name terms. Similar tales of near-misses with megastars are welcome.

LATEST dodgy email to arrive in my computer allegedly comes from one Arnulfo Birkett. Scammers - by their choice of names shall ye know them.