Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on knife deaths, Eurovision and impossible ways to save the planet

Read today's column from Peter Rhodes.

Published
Afraid of nothing?

LAST in Eurovision. Makes you proud to be British.

A READER says it would be impossible to change the venue of international finals just to save aviation fuel, as I suggested, because "they are decided years in advance." So what would happen if, just supposing, that Icelandic volcano blew its top, as it did nine years ago when more than 100,000 flights were cancelled? I bet the impossible would happen. Tottenham and Liverpool, scheduled to meet in Madrid, and Arsenal and Chelsea, planning to play in Azerbaijan, would instead stage their finals somewhere in England. When events dictate, the impossible becomes possible. And we are never going to save the planet without doing some pretty impossible things. Up to and including telling your little princess that she can have her 18th birthday party in Barmouth, but not in Bali.

NATIONAL treasure Chris Packham turned up at Buckingham Palace to collect his CBE wearing a tie with the Extinction Rebellion logo. I can't find a supplier of such ties online, nor any details about Packham's tie. But ties usually come in two sorts: polyester which chokes turtles and silk which exploits silkworms. I think we should be told.

IT is one thing to collect statistics, quite another to interpret them. And when the experts say 100 knife killings have resulted in 95 arrests and this is "a promising sign," we should be wary. As I noted back in March: "The killers often make little attempt to escape. They seem to accept arrest and prison as an inevitable part of life." The high rate of arrests is not always the result of brilliant forensic work but of a generation of young knifemen who don't care if they kill and don't care if they get caught. That's not a promising sign. It is a terrifying sign.

OUR changing language. After Danny Baker's spectacular fall from grace, the BBC News website carried a report with the headline: "The presenter issues fulsome apology a day after the BBC sacked him." It is surprising how many allegedly educated people think "fulsome" means "full." It doesn't. The essence of fulsomeness is that it is insincere, overdone or excessively flattering. And if Baker had done that, he'd be in even more trouble.

TEARS in Downing Street- again. The Conservative Party always hails itself as the party of equal opportunities which has had two women party leaders while Labour hasn't produced a single one. What they never mention is that having promoted women, the Tories make them blub and sack them.

POST-Jeremy Kyle, a reader asks what happened to the promise to get rid of in-yer-face TV with people "trying to out-lie and score points off each other, cheered on by a mob-like audience and overseen by a preening, pompous and self- serving master of ceremonies. " He says he tuned in to the BBC Parliament channel and it's still happening.