Peter Rhodes: Cowboys as role models

THAT left-over Easter egg? The sooner you eat it, the sooner the temptation is gone. You know it makes sense.

MY recent thread on folk named after battles and places of the first World War has clearly only scratched the surface of a national phenomenon. The Daily Telegraph has been rooting around in the General Registry Office and discovered that between 1914 and 1919 no fewer than 1,634 babies were given such names. Patriotic choices included Zeppelina, Tanky and Lusitania.

IT also became a fashion for women who were widowed while pregnant to use the month their soldier-spouse perished as a middle name. This explains the popularity of April, March and May in that fated and almost-forgotten generation.

I WROTE a couple of days ago about those heroes of a 1950s childhood, cowboys. But they were odd role models, weren't they? Cowboys spent an awful lot of time sitting around campfires with other cowboys talking about purty things. Yessir, they had a purty girl back home and they'd bought her some purty ribbons in Abilene to tie in her purty hair. And what would happen when the cowboy was reunited with this paragon of purtiness? It usually seemed to involve her cooking him grits 'n' beans. Even at the age of six I remember thinking, is that it?

BACK in February as Boris Johnson announced he would campaign for the Leave vote in the EU referendum I wrote: "One thing is absolutely certain. By June 23 we will all know a lot more about Boris Johnson than we know now." What I did not expect was the co-ordinated anti-Boris offensive we are now seeing. In the space of just a few hours over Easter came a triple whammy. The Guardian carried Nick Cohen's column: "Boris Johnson. Liar, conman – and prime minister?" Matthew Parris, a fellow Tory writing in The Times, denounced Johnson for past failings (and there are plenty of them) and urged Tories to "end our affair with this dangerous charmer." And then Johnson's old flame Petronella Wyatt weighed in with her revelations in the Mail on Sunday. Boris at bay.

WHILE all eyes have been on the arms-smuggling, willowy-lady whodunnit The Night Manager (BBC1), how many of us are quietly enjoying the slow-burn Scandi wind-energy and adultery whodunnit (and I don't expect to use that phrase again), Follow the Money on BBC4? It stars some great Danes.

THE boffins in Shakespeare's Tomb (C4) were allowed into Holy Trinity church, Stratford-upon-Avon, after promising they would not disturb the Bard's grave. Instead of picks and shovels they used the last word in ground-penetrating radar which is, of course, entirely harmless. Or is it?

I WAS reminded of Ready, Steady Dig! a delightful novel by an old friend, Rosalind Winter. It tells the tale of the Lares, the little Roman household gods in a villa abandoned by its owners as the Roman Empire collapsed. Some 1,600 years later the gods are disturbed by archeologists working with the popular TV programme Ready, Steady, Dig! As Winter puts it: "Deep under the villa, the Lares are prostrated with migraine, a side-effect of the ground-penetrating radar that would probably surprise its manufacturer." The radar-operators on Shakespeare's Tomb may not have found the Bard's bones, but did they give his ghost a headache?