Peter Rhodes: President Obnoxious?

OUR local building society is organising a festive competition. The prizes include: "A two-course meal (for one). This prize may contain nuts. No cash alternative is available." The spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge is going strong.

THE experts have been hard at work getting every detail right in Stephen Poliakoff's drama, Close to the Enemy (BBC2), set just after the end of the Second World War. The vehicles, costumes and interior scenes are spot-on and you can almost smell the brick dust from the bomb sites. So why is our hero, Captain Ferguson (Jim Sturgess) allowed to wander around with a three-day growth of beard? Designer stubble at the dinner table in 1946? I think not.

A FRIEND bought a get-well card this week for someone who is seriously ill. Only when she got it home did she examine the design closely. It shows70 parrots, one of which has fallen off its perch. As any dictionary will tell you, the phrase "fall off your perch" does not mean to be ill. It means to die. So how does a greeting-card company manage to produce a card with such a perverse message? I blame the modern tendency, accelerated by the internet, to make any word or phrase mean whatever the user thinks it should mean. The result is that English, the first truly global tongue, is becoming a sloppy and confusing language. I found one self-appointed expert online explaining to a student in Vietnam that "to fall off your perch" means to laugh at something hilarious. Out there in cyberspace we are building a new Tower of Babel (From the Bible. Look it up).

HERE'S a cheering development in the fight to prevent English law being further turned into a nice little earner. Whitehall has announced that drivers caught using mobile phones will be fined £200 and given penalty points - with no option to attend a driver-awareness course in lieu. Hooray. These courses, costing about £100 a time - have become a vast industry, making money for course organisers and police forces while allowing serial speeders to carry on speeding. Yet there is no proof that they either make the roads safer or are value for money. The latest move suggests Whitehall is not particularly impressed with these courses, either as punishment or deterrent. Is that their death knell I hear?

HAVING done its share of sneering at Donald Trump over allegations of sexism and misogyny, the current Private Eye magazine describes Theresa May's latest dress as "by top French designers Mouton / Agneau." Or, as we say in English, Mutton / Lamb. That's ageism and sexism. Shame on you, Eye.

THERE are three things that could happen in the Trump presidency. Firstly, he could become President Obnoxious. Secondly, he could be genuinely transformed by the role laid upon him by history and become a fine president. Thirdly, and I bet the most likely, is that Trump, the wham-bang, can-do magnate of the private sector, will get fed up with the snail-like pace, stifling red tape and endless obstacles of Washington where it is almost impossible to change anything. Two years from now Donald Trump may be playing an awful lot of golf.