Peter Rhodes on heat pumps, missiles and how Morecambe and Wise almost split up

The bad news is that in order to meet the Government's net-zero target, this rule may be scrapped, enabling millions of householders to install these devices on their walls. Just pray your heat pump is a quieter model or that your neighbours are not over-sensitive to noise. Otherwise we may see noisy neighbour disputes being settled in the traditional British way with folk chasing each other around the streets with baseball bats. (This is, of course, a most efficient way of keeping warm.)

I was mooching around a university campus the other day and couldn't help noticing that while all the new, super-efficient heat pumps were merrily humming, half the windows in the teaching blocks were wide open.

A collection of letters and other items owned by the late, great Eric Morecambe is to be auctioned in January. It includes a letter written to Eric by Ernie Wise announcing: "I want us to break up the act.” Thankfully, Eric talked his partner out of quitting - and the rest is hysteria. The pair went on to become telly legends and at their peak attracted 28 million viewers. I'm reminded of a colleague who, many years ago, had sight of the script of a Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special before it was broadcast. He said there was not a single funny line in it - until Eric and Ernie got their hands on it. The magic was all in the delivery.

Bets you'll always regret not placing. On the day Keir Starmer became prime minister last July, what odds would the bookies have offered against this bespectacled, rather dull barrister giving the go-ahead within five months for Storm Shadow missiles to be lobbed into Russia?

Mind you, it was another softly-spoken Labour prime minister, Clem Attlee, who in the 1940s ensured that Britain had its own independent nuclear deterrent. History is an endless thread of the unexpected.