Peter Rhodes on Waterloo, shaking hands and a night out with The Searchers
To demonstrate their commitment to the provinces, some TV companies have set up branches away from London. The result, as we saw a few days ago, is Channel 4 covering a stabbing in Wales from its London HQ and then switching to an item on Irish politics, covered from its studios in Leeds. Beyond me.
Plans to increase diversity in MI5 and MI6 allegedly include advice for our spooks not to shake hands with Muslims for fear of causing cultural offence. A female civil servant quoted in the document says, as a Muslim, she will not shake hands with men and recommends the “hand on heart” greeting instead. You may recall I made this suggestion during the pandemic. A brief nod with your hand over your heart avoids offence and reduces infection risks. Got that, 007?
Heart-touching also spoils things for those peculiar blokes who see any handshake as a trial of strength and an opportunity to crush another person's fingers. If the hand-on-heart is good enough for Bond, it's good enough for the rest of us.
“Anyone who wasn't a teenager in the Sixties had a deprived childhood.” Vocalist Frank Allen on the Thank You Tour of 1960s pop group The Searchers. Allen's words of wisdom got a huge round of applause in the Spa Centre, Leamington. What a privileged generation we are. And don't we know it?
One of the statistics wheeled out during the defence debate is that the British Army of today at 70,000 is the smallest it has been for 200 years. Maybe so. But while we need enough troops to deploy, fight and occupy in the old fashioned way, technology matters. Wargamers love re-fighting old battles in new ways. From one website comes the guesstimate that Napoleon, who assembled 72,000 troops and 246 guns at Waterloo in 1815, could have been swiftly defeated by a modern infantry platoon of 25 soldiers with a dozen field guns. It's not all about numbers.
Not that progress solves everything. At Waterloo, Napoleon was discomforted by piles. Two hundred years later, some people still find them a pain in the rear echelon.
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