Peter Rhodes: Would you have killed the Nazis?

MORE time-shift quotes from Downton Abbey. When Lord Grantham in 1925 refers to "the dark side," he is using a phrase popularised by Star Wars in 1977.

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THESE Downton anachronisms remind me of Woody Allen's tale of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They allegedly date from biblical times but Allen wrote: "The authenticity of the scrolls is currently in great doubt, particularly since the word Oldsmobile appears several times in the text."

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I SUGGESTED water found on Mars and bottled could sell for huge prices. A reader writes: "You'd have to drink it in Mars bars – and there's no atmosphere."

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THANKS for your continuing suggestions of places that would be enriched by an exclamation mark. Latest contender is a Worcestershire village. Feckenham!

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HERE'S a question for the Green Party politicians launching a legal challenge to the RAF's use of drones to kill IS terrorists. On January 20, 1942 a group of 15 top Nazis met at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. If we had possessed drones back then, we could have killed them all. These men posed no direct threat to us. They were probably not armed. Yet the purpose of their meeting was to plan the details of the Holocaust, the industrialised slaughter of six million Jews. So would you have given the order to kill those Nazis? If not, shut up.

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THIS will sound like being wise after the event but no-one else should get caught like the Black Country couple whose belongings were last week packed into a furniture van, which promptly vanished. Not so much a house move as a heist. Moving house is a big event, the sort of thing we all like to record for posterity. So the moment the removal men appear, ask them to pose for a photograph. If they agree, you can safely assume they're kosher. If they tear off in a cloud of smoke, you have just saved your family's possessions.

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I SUGGESTED last week that if you add up all the fatalities claimed by all the pressure groups for all medical conditions, you will end up with more statistical deaths than there are dead bodies. In an idle moment, I started counting. About 500,000 people die in Britain every year. Action on Smoking and Health claim 100,000 of those deaths are caused by smoking. Alcohol Concern claims 50,000 are due to booze. The Chief Medical Office for England claims another 50,000 are down to obesity. The Alzheimer's Society claims 60,000 deaths are due to dementia. Age UK says 40,000 die of the cold and now the clean-air lobby claims 30,000 deaths a year from vehicle pollution. But the most striking figure is that two-thirds of Britons – that's about 330,000 of the total – die over the age of 75 which, not long ago, was regarded as death by old age. Go figure.

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THANKS, all you Swedish speakers, for advice on the use of "kyss" (kiss) as an affectionate greeting as see in the Swedish crime series Beck (BBC2). One reader suggests a better greeting is "Puss och Kram" which translates as kisses and hugs. Sweet.

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ANOTHER reader says in order to avoid confusion "kyss" is best avoided "because kissa means to urinate."

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I LOVE this terse little comment on the VW diesel scandal from a reader: "What I find ironic is that Americans are more concerned with what comes from the back of a car than out of the front of a gun."