Peter Rhodes on an evening with Jewdas, the death of an African icon and memories of that first Saturday job

What about the offence Christians might feel at Corbyn mixing with a group whose name sounds the same as the most despised character in the Easter story - Jewdas? It is as crass as dropping in for a snack at the Haddolf Hyttler Bavarian Deli.

CORBYN always comes up with some wide-eyed, plausible excuse but why does he keep putting himself in such awkward positions? For his advisers it must be like trying to teach a simple lesson to a particularly truculent child, over and over again. Lest we forget, in a throwaway remark last year, Corbyn said: "I don’t consider myself the world’s greatest intellectual."

SO farewell, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela who gleefully supported the "necklacing" of her opponents by hanging a petrol-filled tyre around their necks and setting fire to it. If you think she was a saint, just pray you never meet the Devil.

STRANGE how many memories have been stirred by the Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey calling for more kids to do part-time jobs. My first Saturday job was for a couple of workaholic butchers who slogged from 5am to 6pm and made a fortune in the process. They were a hard-bitten pair. Both had served in the infantry during the war and seen all the inhumanity that man could inflict on man. They swore endlessly, insulted the customers and staff alike, and routinely denounced me as an idle little arse. And yet one Saturday morning I saw these hard nuts weeping like babies in the shop as the news came of a terrible accident at a place called Aberfan. You never forget the first time you see men cry.

WHEN I resigned from the butchers, after an incident involving the disappearance of a small pork pie, I took a Saturday job with an old mechanic called Jim who introduced me to elementary car maintenance, working men's clubs, Ansell's bitter and poetry.

JIM had lived an amazing life. In the 1930s he had worked on pipelines in India and Arabia and dined on peacocks with maharajahs. He went ashore in Normandy on D-Day in a converted tank, one of "Hobart's Funnies" of the 79th Armoured Division. He had an amazing memory which probably explained his fluency in Urdu and Hindi and his ability to recite every verse of Eskimo Nell and Maggie's Drawers: "She laid 'em on the mat, and they paralysed the cat / Them old red flannel drawers that Maggie wore." Wordsworth, I believe.

GONE awfully quiet in Salisbury, hasn't it? Now that the Russians are mischievously suggesting that Britain was responsible for the nerve-gas attack, you can be pretty sure that either a) the Kremlin has smuggled its assassin safely back to Mother Russia or b) there never was a Russian assassin in the first place. As you know by now, I incline to the latter.