Peter Rhodes on lip reading, predictions that came true and a lamp to light your pepper

A MEMORABLE discovery of yuletide was a miraculous cocktail, Prosecco served with a splash of ginger wine. Warms you up as it cools you down.

MEANWHILE, in this stony-broke post-Xmas phase, doesn't last week's news from the Access to Cash organisation have a hollow ring? They warned us that Britain was heading towards a cashless society. After a thorough search of the sofa, I have to agree.

IT is traditional at this time of year that something important in the house packs up. In our case it was the pepper mill. During one festive blow-out, it suddenly expelled its innards in a rattle of bolts, nuts, springs and plastic wheels. Replacing it brought us once again into the over-sophistication of everyday life. The latest pepper mills are not only powered by batteries but include a little light. You can't help wondering if, at any stage in the development, anybody asked the inventor: "Yes, but why..?"

THIS is the time of year when we hacks look back proudly on all the predictions we got right (while quietly ignoring all the ones we got wrong). I take some pride in forecasting in October that any tax cuts in the 2018 Budget would be swallowed up by your 2019 council tax. Sure enough, councils are being told to bump up the tax to pay for more policing. I was right, too, in December 2017 with this: "If I had to make one political prediction for 2018 it would be that either John McDonnell or his boss Jeremy Corbyn will have a serious and very public loss of temper." Corbyn's "stupid woman / people" moment in the House of Commons was not a raging fury but was still damaging.

IF my aunts and great-aunts in Yorkshire were still alive, they would have known in a split-second exactly what Jeremy Corbyn said. They were all mill girls and all fluent lip-readers. When you work among the thunder of steam-powered looms in a cotton mill, lip-reading is not so much a skill as a necessity.

RESEARCH at the London School of Economics suggests that "endurance exercise" such as jogging, weight-lifting and push-ups may be as effective as tablets in bringing down blood pressure. Maybe so. And if some patients can replace some tablets with some exercise, that has to be good for them and for the NHS budget. But don't expect miracles. When I was first diagnosed with high blood pressure more than 20 years ago, I tried everything from hard exercise and meditation to garlic capsules and blackcurrant tea. In the end, nothing cured my blood pressure quite like blood-pressure tablets.

MEANWHILE, my campaign against the reckless use of the term "up to" in advertising leads me to the Flash Magic Eraser which, according to the package, "erases up to 100 per cent of impossible stains." Impossible stains presumably include unicorn dung.