Peter Rhodes: A piffling gift

THIS is hardly a scientific survey but our local corner shop sold 40 books of stamps in a single day this week, which is apparently outstanding even for the time of year. Could it be that Christmas cards are regaining lost ground? Surely it was only a matter of time before people realised that a multiple-address Xmas email doesn't really hit the spot.

THE Government's £10 Christmas bonus arrived in 1.2 million bank accounts this week. If this piffling handout, unchanged since 1972, were scrapped I bet 99 per cent of recipients would not even notice. Yet it would free up tens of millions of pounds which could be spent on nurses and carers for those who really need help. All it takes is political will.

DON'T you get fed up with commentators describing this or that politician as hard-Left or extreme-Right? These sloppy descriptions depend largely on the prejudices of the observer and have absolutely no measurable veracity. I am therefore proud to launch the Rhodes International Standard of Lefty-Righty. On the extreme Left we have Josef Stalin, on the extreme Right, Adolf Hitler. Smack in the centre of this political spectrum is, let us assume, Paddy Ashdown. The rest of the world's politicians are slotted into this matrix on the basis of a questionnaire asking how they feel about nationalisation, how many people they have massacred and so on. The results would be expressed in terms of PM (Paddy Minus) to the Left or PP (Paddy Plus) to the Right, with 10 grades in each direction. Thus, a politician today described as centre-Right would be PP3 while a hard-Left socialist would be PM6. And we'd all know exactly what they stood for. Unless, of course, they lied in the questionnaire. Heaven forbid.

DAILY Telegraph readers have been agonising over the etiquette of electric cars. If a friend arrives for dinner and says he's a bit short of juice, do you allow him to plug in and recharge his electric car? And what if you find he's plugged in his electric razor, too? Best answer so far is to base your decision on the quality of the wine he has brought.

"WAS this TV's greatest ever thriller?" enthused one of the tabloids, referring to Missing (BBC1). To which the only possible answer is maybe, but only until the next one. While TV comedy gets worse, TV drama gets better, especially with the influx of Scandi-noir and some first-rate American stuff. Having been hooked on The Bridge, Wallander, Trapped, Beck and 24, I am now enslaved to Modus and Designated Survivor. But I guarantee that a year from now they will all have melded in the memory into one interwoven fantasy about some kid who went missing in Iceland just before the terrorists blew up Congress. Or something like that.

FOR what it's worth, I still think the best-ever whodunnit on telly was Charles Dickens's Bleak House, screened by the Beeb in 2005 and starring Gillian Anderson and absolutely everybody else you can think of. Perfection.

I SANG the praises some weeks ago of English Heritage's yuletide rhubarb vodka, the only spirit that makes you fancy a custard chaser. I see this week they are also offering marmalade vodka. For breakfast, presumably.