Peter Rhodes: Get over it

HOW neat, how very well organised, to have January 1 falling on a Monday.

THE UN oil embargo on Pyongyang may look formidable. But if the North Koreans are clever enough to build rockets and nuclear bombs, don't you think they are probably clever enough to smuggle petrol?

CLEARING away this year's crop of yuletide cards, it struck me that this is the first year in ages that we haven't received any of those round robins of undiluted boastfulness from friends letting us know that their children are the smartest kids in the world and their own year has been a riot of exotic holidays and expensive acquisitions. Instead, we have had a sprinkling of gloom-ridden sickies, a grim litany of curable and not-so-curable ailments stalking our Babyboomer generation. When the envious millennial kids are whining about the unfairness of life, they should try balancing a little difficulty in getting a mortgage against the sorrowful smile of a surgeon (sometimes accompanied in his consulting room by an old bloke in a black cloak with a scythe slung over his shoulder). The greatest gift of being young, and the one never even considered or remotely appreciated by hipsters, millennials and snowflakes, is life expectancy.

CASTLE Lodge in Ludlow is one of the quirkiest old buildings I've ever visited, probably because it is privately owned and occupied and there's a strange sense of intruding into somebody's secret world. So good luck to the £500,000 appeal to acquire and restore it, although I understand the sentiments of reader who declares: "Food banks in every town - and yet another old building takes precedence!"

THE point is that if every old-building appeal were wound up tomorrow, the money would still not alleviate poverty. Now that we have hundreds of them, food banks, like the poor, will always be with us. As long as some people are happy to collect and distribute food to the less well-off and and other people are grateful to accept it, the food banks will endure. It is pointless and insulting to regard them as a national disgrace. Instead, try thinking of them as part of the "Big Society." They shouldn't exist. They do. Get over it.

I WROTE recently about the unlikely sentences contained in some of the foreign-language phrase books of yore including Monty Python's: "My hovercraft is full of eels." A reader recalls a childhood friend picking up an old Turkish phrase book in a shop in Shrewsbury which contained the memorable translation for: "Ho, boatman, row me and my harlot across the Bosphorus to the palace of the Sultan." Especially useful in Shrewsbury.

A CROSS-party group of MPs says travellers who set up illegal camps should be forced to pay for the cost of cleaning up any mess they leave behind. Good luck with that. I have a mental image of a determined and stern-faced MP handing a bill to a traveller family and inexplicably ending up with an even bigger bill for 50 yards of asphalt he never wanted.