Peter Rhodes on a dangerous safe house, an aristocratic encounter and a long trip for Poirot

SHOP early for Christmas. With just 352 days to go, I may start by shopping Bob Cratchit. In most movie versions of A Christmas Carol, the Cratchits exist like paupers in a hovel. But as you may have noticed last month in the 1984 version starring George C Scott as Scrooge, they live rather well. The wife and kids are well fed and the Cratchits even boast some possessions including a clock and an egg timer. All that on 15 shillings a week? Looks like someone's been embezzling from Ebenezer. So here's a special present for Bob Cratchit from the Metropolitan Police. It's an Unexplained Wealth Order.

A "SPECIAL investigation" by the BBC revealed that Whitehall had signed a £14 million shipping contract with a new company which possesses no ships. The affair was presented as a deeply dodgy misuse of public money. This is the same BBC which is spending £87 million of our money on a new set for EastEnders - currently £27 million over budget. Accountancy, like charity, should begin at home.

WAY back in 1972, as a keen young hack on the Warwick Advertiser, I was sent to interview a local boy who'd just been selected for the GB Olympic skiing team. He lived in a very smart house in the poshest part of Warwick, just over the Avon from Warwick Castle. The place was stuffed with expensive furniture and ornaments, as though the family had downsized from a palace. He was charm itself, a handsome, floppy-haired, aristocratic product of a good English public school with an easy smile and the self-confidence that goes with very old money. But what I remember most is that the coffee was poured by a servant, a footman in a gold-and-black striped waistcoat who looked like an extra from the Grand Budapest Hotel.

THE young skier was Alex Mapelli Mozzi. Today he is Count Alessandro Mapelli Mozzi and his son, Edoardo "Edo"Mapelli Mozzi, 35, has just started dating Princess Beatrice. Naturally, Fleet Street is scrabbling to find out all it can about the princess's boyfriend and his family. Strangely, I can find little mention of his father the Count, nor any recent images. Maybe Count Alessandro has become a recluse or discovered a way to be rich and successful while avoiding Google. I dare say all will be revealed.

THERE'LL always be an England as long as train buffs pick up their pens, as one did a few days ago, to inform Daily Telegraph readers that, if the locomotives and their livery in The ABC Murders (BBC1) were to be believed, Hercule Poirot left Kings Cross in 1933 and arrived in Doncaster "some time after nationalisation in 1948." Priceless.