Express & Star

Peter Rhodes: A wartime tale and Robin Hood in reverse

THANKS for your messages about misused commas. I loved the police drink-drive campaign one Christmas with posters reading: "Don't drink, take drugs and drive".

Published
Grenfell Tower

JUST taken a call from something called Crime Awareness UK offering free burglar alarms. On the basis that nothing is free and they seemed to want a lot of information about people in the house, I hung up. Their phone number was withheld.

I WAS surprised to learn this week that mental-health professionals in London estimate more than 11,000 people could experience 'difficulties of some description' as a result of the Grenfell Tower fire. Do we give thanks that modern psychology can detect traumatic stress in so many individuals? Or do we simply wonder what's going on? I am reminded of an interview I did with a lady recalling her experience of the 1941 Blitz in Swansea, when she was nine. Her street took a direct hit. She and her family were buried in their cellar for hours. She emerged to learn that her best friend, also nine, had been killed in the house opposite. The next day she reported for school and her teacher asked why she was wearing plimsolls. The little girl explained that her school shoes were buried in the rubble of her house. Kindly but firmly, the teacher said she should go back and look for her shoes, 'because we don't want Mr Hitler to think he's winning'. That was then and Grenfell Tower is now, and I wonder what the Blitz generation would make of it all.

"I CANNOT work with you a moment longer." With those words, bus operator Sydney Hardy closed his company in Somerset, leaving 27 staff jobless. We can only guess at the stress that led to such a decision, but never underestimate the difficulties of employing other people. I have a friend who runs a small company. I once asked him what it's like having 40 employees. "Like having 40 children," he replied.

LOST skills. In these centrally-heated and super-insulated days, spare a thought for those of us beyond the reach of mains gas, that vanishingly-small minority of Brits who start each day by lighting a fire. How many of us still know how to turn a newspaper page into a firelighter?

EVEN further down memory lane, new guidelines from the Good Housekeeping Institute say ice cream kept in the freezer for more than three months can lose its taste. Now, what taste would that be? Ice cream used to be tasty in about 1957 but the modern stuff is taste-free which probably explains why they've starting lacing the caramel varieties with that cheap, all-purpose flavour enhancer, salt.

I AM amazed that any politician can defend fixed-odds gambling machines, the devices that can bankrupt a punter in a matter of hours. These infernal machines are Robin Hood in reverse, robbing the poor to make the rich very rich indeed. One spokesman for the industry this week declared that if the maximum odds were greatly reduced, it would mean the closure of thousands of betting shops. And good riddance, too.