Peter Rhodes: No eating in the theatre?

YET another bunch of parents and kids have been disappointed when a day trip to see Santa turned out to be a tent in a waterlogged field, this time in Derbyshire. But the giveaway, surely, was the name. By this time in human history, we should all be very wary of any attraction involving the words winter, wonderland and grotto. Especially in November.

MEANWHILE, more post-deluge free entertainment at our local ford where a queue of tremulous SUV drivers hesitated before plunging their mighty chariots into two inches of water. It was so shallow that you could see the white lines and yet still the 4WD drivers dithered. How very strange to spend £40,000 on a behemoth designed to storm fearlessly up mountains, through forests and across rivers, and then fret about getting the tyres wet. While the SUVs queued at the ford, a tiny Daihatsu Copen, one of the smallest and sweetest cars on the road, shot effortlessly through.

ON the very day that the Government announced plans to upgrade Britain's broadband, a neighbour came around in despair, his phone once again on the blink. While the latest all-singing, all-dancing hyper-fast fibre broadband would be truly wonderful, some of us out here on the urban fringe would be pathetically grateful for anything that works in the rain.

BUT beware of rose-tinted nostalgia. A Daily Telegraph reader, driven mad by the palaver over moving his phone just four doors down the road, claims that in "the good old days, you would simply arrange to transfer the line." Yes, the procedure was simple enough. But actually getting the line connected in the good old days could take several good old weeks.

AT the theatre a few days ago, I returned to my seat after the interval to find myself paddling. "Sorry about that," grinned the bloke in the seat behind. "Just spilt my tonic water." He had managed to spill the entire bottle in such a way that his area was dry but ours was soaked. His "sorry" didn't convey an ounce of remorse. He was simply exercising his human right to stuff his face with food and drink during The Tempest. I thought of him this week when Imelda Staunton suggested in the Radio Times that snacks and beverages – with the possible exception of small tubs of ice cream - should be banned in theatres. She is fighting a losing battle. We have become a nation of grazers, chomping and slurping 24/7 on the sugar-frosted road to obesity, or worse.

MIND you, even the small tub of ice cream Staunton mentions brings its hazards. In about 1961 mine fell off the balcony during a pantomime in Coventry Hippodrome into the audience below. It got the biggest laugh of the night. Oh, yes it did.

AND, if I am brutally honest, I rather envy those people who settle into the stalls at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre with a pint of bitter, having presumably done the calculation about bladder capacity and length of time to the interval, and decided whether or not to use the loo beforehand. You may recall that Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy, faced a similar dilemma.