Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes: Lambs to the slaughter?

THE car-credit crisis, a warning on police pursuits and what Mr Darcy did in the fireplace.

Published
Temptation beyond endurance?

MY recent references to pterodactyls makes one reader wonder how the prehistoric flying lizards would cope today. He believes that, as pterodactyls preyed on the unwary, they would thrive in modern society, picking off human beings obsessively glued to their smartphones.

AS motorists plunge £50 billion into debt acquiring cars they cannot afford by PCP (personal contract plans), there is speculation that some will be pursued through their entire life by debt-chasing firms. I doubt it. Isn't it far more likely, in this age of zero personal responsibility, that they will come to be regarded as victims of a wicked system? (“You see, m'lud, my client never really wanted a Range Rover. He was lured into it by predatory sales staff and evil money lenders. He was a lamb to the slaughter.”) The courts and Parliament will agree that the terms of these loans were an abuse of human rights and a blatant denial of the freeborn Englishman's right to behave like a blithering idiot without facing any consequences.

WITH all the rabid enthusiasm of Red Guards in Mao's Cultural Revolution, some readers have been tallying up my holidays for this year and denouncing me as a pampered lickspittle jackal of the capitalist paper tigers, or whatever. In my act of ritual self-abasement may I point out that my vacation tally so far is one week with the midges on Loch Lomond, two days bobbing around on a lake near Northampton, three days in Cornwall and a week in Devon. Not exactly Princess Beatrice, is it?

THE crisis in Korea reminds me of the old tale of the motorist who asks a passing yokel directions to the next town and is told: “Oh, you don't want to be starting from here.” The Korean question should have been settled long before a megalomaniac boy got his hands on the buttons for Doomsday. We shouldn't be starting from here.

MORE than 30 years ago local media reported a police chase at over 100mph around Coventry ring road. It emerged later that the cops were in hot pursuit of a man who had allegedly left a restaurant without paying the £14 bill. Since then, goodness knows how many innocents have been killed or injured in police chases where the original crime was piffling. The Police Federation has just issued a reminded to its members that officers engaged in “emergency driving” have no protection under the law on careless or dangerous driving. Which is how it must be.

HOW common in British industry are the booze-fests described in the case of the Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley who allegedly drank 12 pints at one “meeting” and threw up in a fireplace? A reader recalls an encounter, admittedly some years ago, with the director of a German steel company who was later sacked when his bosses discovered he was a non-drinker.

IF vomiting into the fireplace strikes you as gross, in Regency England, after the ladies had withdrawn from dinner into an ante-room, it was not unusual for the men of the party, rather than trek through the house to the closets, to pee into the open fire. Strange that Jane Austen never mentions it. Move over, Mr Darcy...