Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on the pressures of Brexit, talking with cars and a nasty email from TV Licensing

UP pops a nasty little email from TV Licensing headed: "You've just days left to renew your TV licence."

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Anna Soubry

This is the first alert, not the final warning, so why the threatening tone? Why do they make it sound like we've done something wrong? If they think "just days" is cutting it a bit fine, then why not give us more warning? TV Licensing has always struck me as a bunch of bullies and they don't try to make any friends. The sooner the whole iniquitous and outdated TV licence is scrapped, the better.

AND how many of us will be forking out the licence fee purely to pay the BBC's damages to Cliff Richard?

THE anti-Brexit Tory MP Anna Soubry has been suggested as a possible presenter of Have I Got News for You (BBC1). In time, perhaps. But at the moment none of our 650 MPs seems to have been hit quite so hard, or exhausted so much, by the Brexit debate as Soubry. She has given everything to the fight. She does not look well.

MY car hunt goes on. In the past I have found that the car that's right for you will speak to you. A few days ago in a showroom a gleaming white Audi convertible spoke to me very seductively but unfortunately Mrs Rhodes overheard it.

TALKING of whom, it is our wedding anniversary today. It is a strange thing that in the early years every successive anniversary is dignified with some substance (paper, cotton, tin, etc) but after the 15th you have to wait five or ten years for a named anniversary. So you get a paper anniversary for sticking together for two years but tiddly-squit for making it to 42 years. When all that Brexit stuff is sorted out, maybe our MPs can look into it.

FORTY-four years, since you ask. And, no, it don't seem a day too much.

ANYWAY, back to buying cars. It's a head and heart thing, isn't it?. You go to the Ford website and your wise old head takes you to the nice, safe, sensible Fiesta and Focus. And then you see the button marked "Mustang" and your foolish heart guides your fingers. If you are of a certain age , a small part of you will always want to be Bullitt.

I WROTE recently about the prospect of a second referendum on Scottish independence. Interestingly, the land border between England and Scotland is just over 100 miles long while the problematical border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, which you'd think would be shorter, is three times as long. Even so, 100 miles is quite enough to cause problems and I can't recall hearing Scotland's plan for dealing with them. How on earth could they stop all those starving, envious, raggedy-trousered, post-Brexit Sassenachs from streaming northward to the sunlit uplands of Free Caledonia?

FINGER trouble. "Sunlit uplands" almost appeared as "unlit suplands." Come to think of it . . .