Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on a provocative flag, a flatulent legacy and a strange tale of a dog

BEER, Devon.

Published
Would you wade in?

A READER, lamenting the closure of local banks, wonders whether they might be able to keep a few more branches open if only they reduced the “obscene” bonuses paid to some bank bosses. Nice idea but that would mean banks treating their customers as though they valued them. Under the present arrangements the banks regard customers as numbers while spending millions of pounds on TV adverts pretending that they really, really value us. Anyone else sick to death of black horses?

STRANGE incident down the coast in Seaton where a dog, chained outside a shop, managed to get a foot caught in its lead and was yelping for help. What would you do? While you’re mentally rehearsing your own heroism, I should point out that this agitated dog was a huge English bull terrier with jaws like T.Rex. Massive respect to the old chap who, knowing nothing about this beast, cooly stepped forward to untangle it, and promptly got a good licking as the terrier’s new best friend, while the rest of us dithered.

OUTSIDE Parliament this week, EU zealots wrapped themselves in banners combining the Union Jack and the EU flag. Another own goal. Do these clots not understand that this image, of Brussels muscling in on our democracy, is what made people vote Brexit in the first place?

I ONCE worked on a newspaper founded in 1805 and I spent hours poring through old editions. One advert, from 1806, was headed “For the inspection of the curious.” It described an exhibition of gallstones, some tiny and others huge, recently extracted from the guts of a cow. Back in 1805 people actually paid to see such things. How laughable, how primitive and how much we have changed. You think?

THIS week one news website was offering, for the inspection of the curious: “Watch a huge Galapagos tortoise eat a cactus at San Diego Zoo.” We don’t change that much. I bet today’s internet generation would pack the town square to ogle a public execution.

TALKING of which, in the entire history of English courts, were felons ever reprieved on the gallows and allowed to walk away scot-free, as seen in Poldark (BBC1)? Having been spared the most terrible punishment of death by hanging, the sentence would surely be commuted to the second-worst punishment, being forced to be Australians.

AFTER Monday’s item on the most embarrassing moment in my life, thanks for all your equally red-faced experiences. Loved the tale of the schoolboy who broke wind so violently in class that his chair rattled the door and the teacher shouted “Come in!” How strange that the Department for Education, in its endless teacher-recruiting campaigns, never mentions such golden moments.

AND how unfair that the perpetrators of such incidents, no matter what great feats they achieve in later life, are always remembered for that one incident. As you kneel to collect your knighthood, someone, somewhere will ask: “Higgins? Wasn’t he the door-rattler of Form V?”