Peter Rhodes apologises for the rail chaos. Plus nature's unwanted bounty and lazy workers

That summer of chaos on the railways with all the cancellations and confusion was entirely down to me. Mea culpa. Please try to forgive me as I pack my bags and clear my desk.

NOW, as you may be aware, I have absolutely no connection with the rail network, the rail companies or the Government. So why the apology? Because I can't help noticing that when anybody makes an utter cock-up of anything in public life, they tend to get a seven-figure pay-off and a seat in the House of Lords. Yup, I'm the guilty party, folks. So where's my million quid?

I'M not sure whether Nature is wasteful or we are. But just look at the unused harvest of apples, pears and berries rotting on the ground after the storms. There must be millions of tons of perfectly edible and healthy fruit going to waste while kids get their calories from the sweet shop.

MAYBE we don't cherish fruit as we should. There was a time when everyone knew that an apple a day kept the doctor away. These days, NHS contracts have the same effect. A home visit? You must be joking.

BOTHIES are old huts, hovels and outhouses in remote locations which have been restored and made available free of charge to the nation's ramblers. If sharing a redundant pigsty with a bunch of smelly, big-booted strangers is your idea of fun, then a bothie's for you. But there are snags, as a family discovered recently as they and their children settled down for the night in a bothy in the Cairngorms. A group of five men turned up and one of them insisted on smoking until the kids, in their father's words, "were literally being saturated by this guy's cigarette smoke." Oddly, the law which forbids smoking in most public enclosed spaces does not apply to bothies in Scotland. In this case, the smoker declared: "We can smoke in bothies if we want to," and the family, facing a night of coughing and kippering, felt obliged to leave.

YOU may see this as a little victory for smokers' rights. Or you may see it as an example of the selfishness of some smokers who, by their own pig-ignorance, are paving the way towards even tougher bans on smoking. And when that day comes the bothy smoker's mates will tell him: "Och, ye brought it on yourself."

ACCORDING to a survey in Birmingham, more than half of workers feel their colleagues are not pulling their weight in the office or factory. I suspect this may be one of those statistics that you'll find repeated anywhere in the world, like the one that tells us 90 per cent of drivers think they are better than average.

THE Brum survey reminded me of the Australian farmer interviewed by the BBC. "So how many people work on your farm?" asked the reporter. "About half of them," replied the farmer.