Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on hand-written cards, hard-bitten Remainers and an outbreak of PSS

The fetish season?

Published
The fetish season?

IN ACCORDANCE with the "safe space" guidelines for comedians appearing at a London University college, this column will not use "racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion or anti-atheism." Pity. I've got this cracking tale about a fat old gay vicar who goes for a sex-change operation and . . . Enough.

A READER writes: "Three months to Pancake Day and already they're selling flour and eggs."

AFTER this week's item on driver-awareness courses, a reader declares: "They are great. They provide people with the one-off chance not to obtain points on their licence and the subsequent rise in insurance." This euphoria is based on the urban myth that you don't have to tell your insurance company you've attended one of these courses. Wrong. As one insurer's website puts it: "Even if a car insurance company doesn't specifically ask for it . . . voluntarily disclosing this information will minimise the risk of a driver’s insurance cover being found invalid due to the withholding of these details."

WHY do some drivers think it's fine to keep quiet? As the website puts it: "Reports have circulated around the country that police forces, speeding awareness course tutors and the subsequent paperwork are failing to advise attendees that they should inform their insurance companies." Be warned.

FROM the days when trade unions ran the factories comes an old tale of the senior shop steward telling the workforce: "Comrades, the management have caved in to all our demands. With immediate effect holiday entitlement will be trebled and a new bonus system means we'll only have to work on Wednesdays." A union firebrand at the back shouts: "What? Every bloody Wednesday?" The moral is that if your aim is to wreck the system, no deal will ever satisfy you. So if any prime minister produced a Brexit deal, with the Irish backstop scrapped, on a scroll of gold signed by the Archangel Gabriel, some MPs would still not vote for it because, whatever the people wanted and whatever the election manifestoes promised, they will never support Brexit.

AILMENTS of our time. Parliament Square Syndrome (PSS) chiefly affects excitable political reporters who, being surrounded by other excitable political reporters and screaming loonies of both Leave and Remain camps, come to believe that this feverish, hyperventilating condition is normal. It is not. Parliament Square Syndrome is a localised malady, quickly cured by a trip to the provinces where the mood is neither febrile nor hysterical, just quiet despair.

MORE than half of NHS staff are reckoned to be overweight or obese. And now Whitehall is banning the use of any more fax machines, things can only get worse. I bet the only exercise some staff get is lifting sheets of A4 paper on and off the fax.

THERE'S nothing quite like a hand-written Xmas card, is there? I've just deciphered one from friends which appears to offer: "Best dishes for the fetish season."