Peter Rhodes: Blacking-up in Brum

A READER tells me he saw his doctor last week. This week he received an email from a funeral-insurance company. Just keep telling yourself it's pure coincidence.

A TEAM of blacked-up Morris dancers started their show in the middle of Birmingham and were heckled and abused and forced to clear off. Well, what did they expect? The Alvechurch Morris men claim to be following an old tradition of dancers blackening their faces so as not to be recognised by their employers. Bunkum. This practice was confined to small parts of Wales, many centuries ago. Why has it become so popular with Morris sides all over England, especially one like the Alvechurch team which was founded less than 30 years ago? Look at old photos of Morris sides and you'll find virtually all the faces are white. Blacking-up is not some revered old tradition but a modern choice, and in the middle of multicultural Brum it's a very silly choice.

MY car-tax reminder arrived a few days after Christmas, inviting me to pay £230 for the next 12 months. The expiry date is January 31 and so, with a whole month to go, I did what any other post-Xmas, spent-up citizen would do. I put it on a shelf. Wouldn't it be helpful if, just for the sake of argument, we had a little disc on the car windscreen to remind us when the tax is due to expire? It is reported this week that since the car-tax disc was scrapped two years ago the number of untaxed vehicles clamped and towed away has doubled. They are being seized at the rate of 9,000 a month with owners being charged hundreds of pounds to recover them. This is a tax not on criminals but on the forgetful, the harassed and the poorly organised. The new system looks as though it were designed by robots, for robots. A re-think, please.

AFTER my recent piece on police being unwilling to carry guns, a retired cop recalls that, although he never wanted a pistol, he found himself with one during a raid. It had fallen out of another officer's holster.

ANOTHER ex-cop tells me the prospect of arming some bobbies chills his blood. He says: "Some of the younger bobbies on my old shift were so gung-ho they would have shot each other before they had got out of the parade-room door. Interestingly, the officers really opposed to being armed were ex soldiers."

I SYMPATHISE with the reader who writes to complain about the "appalling" post-Xmas TV schedules. On one bereft evening this week, we resorted to Netflix for a couple of episodes of Still Game followed by the 2016 movie, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This tells how Jane Austen's classic might have turned out if England had been struck by a zombie apocalypse in the 1800s and the Bennet Girls had been trained in deadly martial arts.

IT was strange to see Elizabeth Bennet kicking Darcy in the crotch and decapitating a horde of the undead. As Miss Austen might have put it in that immortal opening line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single zombie in possession of a head must be in want of a machete. . ."

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