Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on finding Mr Okayish, scum in cyberspace and why we shouldn't be beastly to the Russians

"ROMANTIC fatalism" is the term coined by researchers at Queen Mary University, London, for people who believe that fate will deliver their Mr or Ms Right.

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Made in where?

Unsurprisingly, the academics found that a lot of romantic fatalists end up single. Meanwhile, in the university of real life, many women discover that a lot of Mr Rights turn out to be Mr Wrongs. There is much to be said for finding a Mr Okayish and, over the next years, making what improvements you can.

JUST under two years ago I wrote: "My personal foreign policy can be summed up in four words. Make friends with Russia." Today, it seems an impossible dream. But we shouldn't give up on it. Being friends with Russia is not the same as being friends with Putin. The Russian people I met on a couple of trips to Leningrad (as it was then) and Moscow were good people. They may have been bombarded with propaganda but they were nobody's fools. They were long-suffering, distrustful of politicians and fed up with the system, whether it was creaking communism or its successor, mafia capitalism. They queued for hours to get a table at the first McDonald's in Moscow not because the food was great but because the staff smiled at you and it was the nearest these Muscovites could get to a day trip to the West. The people of this proud old imperial power have more in common with Brits than we think. Our leaders may snarl at each other but we, the people, should be friends.

THE whole point of leaving the EU is for Britain to become an independent global power, bestriding the oceans, befriending the world and striking the best trade deals possible at the keenest prices. So why all the little-Englander bellyaching about our new blue UK passports being made in France? That's how its going to be, folks. Look out for chlorine-washed Wyoming chicken and Cornish pasties made in Rio.

WE are getting a regular on-screen demonstration of where protesting against unfairness can lead you. When the BBC's China editor Carrie Gracie raged against sexism in the pay rates and resigned from her job a few weeks ago, didn't we all assume she was facing some great self-sacrificing demotion within BBC News? Not exactly. Gracie now pops up in a plum job as a fully-fledged £145,000-a-year newsreader looking exactly like that old metaphor, the cat that got the cream.

IN a perfect world no-one would be allowed anywhere near the internet without truthfully answering a simple little questionnaire which begins: "Are you scum?" Sadly, the lack of such a filter means cyberspace is infested by scum. Like the ones who could not read about a mother's two-year-old toddler drowning in a slipway accident without pouring out their bile on social media and denouncing her as a bad mother. There are times when the only comment should be no comment. And if you don't get that, here's a simple little questionnaire . . .