Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on the late, great Alan Rickman, scares from Russia and our fickle memories

THE best Sheriff ever?

Published
My room, 10.30

AS the wretched HS2 project rumbles on, a reader in Shropshire calls for an underground link from Birmingham to Shrewsbury. He wants it to be called the Salopian Tube.

IT is just two years since that great, born-to-be-baddie actor Alan Rickman died of the cancer he had long kept secret. A repeat screening of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (C5) reminds us how good he was. As Sheriff of Nottingham, Rickman has to deliver what must be the most unlikely medieval invitation in movie history, to two serving girls: "You, my room 10.30 tonight. You, 10.45. And bring a friend." He pulls it off beautifully, thanks to that voice which, as Helen Mirren once put it: "could suggest honey or a hidden stiletto blade." Who knows what epic performances Alan Rickman might have delivered in his 70s? Taken far too soon.

MEMORY is a fickle thing. I was doing my public-speaking bit at the weekend, describing a truly bizarre trip spent trying to persuade an explorer to abandon his walk to the North Pole (it is a long story). I was delighted that Phil Bateman, the Wolverhampton councillor and my companion on the polar expedition, was in the audience. We had barely met since saying our farewells in northern Canada 20 years ago. He remembers things I had forgotten and vice versa. But the extraordinary part is how we remember some incidents quite differently.

TAKE the curious tale of the musk oxen. Flying low over the arctic ice floes in a light aircraft, Phil was convinced he could see a musk ox below. The pilot descended and I was soon convinced there were two musk oxen. The co-pilot reckoned the two oxen were mating. As the Twin Otter finally swept over the spot, the "mating musk oxen" proved to be no such thing. Phil Bateman reckons they turned out to be an outcrop of black rocks. I thought I recalled them proving to be a couple of black plastic bags. It was a reminder of how unreliable memory can be. It's nothing new. Four people wrote accounts of a preacher in first-century Galilee and there are big differences between them. While each account is a Gospel, they can't all be gospel.

SOMETHING I do remember clearly is the annual panic from the Ministry of Defence every year during the Cold War , coinciding with the UK military spending review. It followed a pattern. The Russians apparently had some deadly new tank / killer plane / silent submarine which outclassed anything we had, and the UK must match it.

AND then, a few years later, the new Russian killer plane would prove to be nothing special, the silent sub would be as noisy as a steam train and the deadly tank had an unfortunate tendency to stuff its own crew members into the gun breech. So when we are warned today that the Kremlin has the ability to cyber-pulverise us and slaughter thousands of Brits by disrupting our infrastructure, I don't lose sleep. When people cry wolf, just count sheep.