Peter Rhodes: What might have been

A READER writes: "I purchased a hanging basket of spring flowers this weekend. The instructions say: Keep out of draughts."

MORE awful first dates. A lady recalls dining with her boyfriend, chewing on a tough piece of steak and being too embarrassed to take it out of her mouth: "So I kept it in my mouth all the way through my pudding of sponge and custard. I waited until we got outside to get rid of it." She and her beau are still together, 51 years on.

LOCALS in Avebury, Wilts, are complaining about men using the prehistoric standing stones as a urinal. While such behaviour cannot be encouraged, the Avebury Stone Circle is, as Churchill famously said of Russia: "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." For all we know, Avebury may have been specifically designed and built as a neolithic public loo. As far as I am aware, there is nothing to disprove this theory. This is one for that great historian of folklore, Professor I P Knightley.

THE old debate resumes. How would Brits have behaved if our country had been occupied by the Germans in 1940? The nightmarish world of the new BBC drama SS-GB is set in 1941, just a year after the Luftwaffe won the Battle of Britain. But history is written by the victors and by now several generations of British children would have been taught in school how good old Uncle Adolf rescued Britain from the Jews and Bolsheviks. They would have learned to hate Churchill and to regard the British Resistance (stamped out years ago) as terrorists. The Germans would certainly have changed the Brits. But it's always a two-way process. How might the Brits have changed the Germans? The history of England is a saga of foreign invaders going native, becoming English in a few generations, usually as a result of occupying soldiers falling for English girls. Kipling tells of a Norman knight reflecting on the process:

"I followed my Duke ere I was a lover,

To take from England fief and fee;

But now this game is the other way over -

But now England hath taken me!"

The best-selling novel waiting to be written is about how Occupied Britain would have been not in 1941 but in 2021. Off you go.

THE Irish government is looking for suitable sites for post Brexit border posts with Ulster. Scottish campaigners are demanding another referendum on independence. There is an outside chance that leaving the EU will finally persuade the Scots to go their own way and might even lead to Northern Ireland slipping peacefully out of the UK to join the Republic, which was always Whitehall's long-term plan. I suspect a big majority of the English would not view any of this as an unmitigated disaster. We might even get rid of Gibraltar, too. Brexit – the gift that just keeps on giving.

IT occurs to me that, as DNA scientists prepare to create the first woolly mammoth for aeons, the lawyers are probably preparing to sue somebody for hunting the species to extinction tens of thousands of years ago. The sooner Theresa May formally apologises on behalf of Homo sapiens everywhere, the better.