Peter Rhodes: Crisis, what crisis?

AFTER poor weather in the Mediterranean, Britain is reportedly in the grip of a courgette crisis. To be frank, I have not noticed any shortage of courgettes yet. Mind you, we are fully occupied trying to survive the guacamole famine and the dried-lentil riots. To be honest, we never really got over the Great Papaya Panic of '97.

IN the interests of proportion, can we perhaps agree that the words "courgette" and "crisis" should never appear in the same sentence?

VLADIMIR Putin says that Russia has the best prostitutes in the world. If the fur-sheathed lovelies who used to glide around the foyer of the old Intourist Hotel in Moscow were any guide, he may be right. I recall waiting for a lift to descend. When it opened, the most beautiful, high-cheekboned woman dressed from head to toe in white ermine stepped out, looked at me and purred: "Why, hello," like an old friend. That was as far as it went. In the few seconds that followed I realised that we didn't actually know each other and she figured that the geeky Englishman with the steamed-up glasses was not going to buy anything she was selling.

THANKS for your emails about people with beautiful speaking voices. Like music and perfume, an alluring voice seems to stick in the memory for ever. Have you noticed, too, how you build an imaginary face around a voice? For years as a young reporter I phoned my dispatches two or three times a day to a copy typist called Brenda. After years of this, we finally met. The real Brenda was not my Brenda.

I HAD a similar experience once, interviewing a long-running star of The Archers. Norman Painting was great company and an excellent interviewee but even though he sounded exactly like Phil Archer, I wasn't entirely convinced it was him. No, Phil Archer's much taller than that . . .

ANOTHER new week begins. I wonder whether Boris "Punishment Beatings" Johnson throws back his duvet, leaps out of bed and asks himself: "Now, what's the stupidest thing I can say this week?"

MIND you, let us not rush to dismiss the idea of punishment beatings too soon. When we finally leave the EU and are freed from the civil-rights obsessives of the Euro-courts, will we be able to drag internet scammers into the streets for a good old-fashioned public flogging? Can you think of a more fitting punishment for the amoral scumbags responsible for the latest scam? They send bogus emails, apparently from a genuine charity, Migrant Helpline, thanking you for your donation of £196. If you wish to query this amount (and you will, because you never paid it), you are invited to click on to a link. And at that point, malware is dumped into your computer to steal your personal and banking details. So these crooks are not only filching your data and, later, your cash, but are doing it on the back of a genuine charity which is in no way involved and whose income is bound to fall as people become aware of the ruse. Come to think of it, flogging's far too good for them.

PETER Rhodes will be presenting a one-hour lecture, Talking to Tommies, at 11am on Sunday, January 29 at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, as part of Wolverhampton Original Literature Festival. Admission is free