Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on the end of Yellow Pages, an adult in the classroom and the ideal face for the £50 note

A READER says that as Britain prepares to leave the EU, another nation seems to have joined. His new television is marked: "Built in Antenna."

Published
Professor Stanley Unwin

END of an era. Our copy of Yellow Pages arrived, stamped: "Final edition." A victim of the internet, it's now a thin reflection of what it used to be. Gone are a thousand different trades. Gone is that unforgettable entry which endured for years: "Boring - see civil engineers."

THANKS for your suggestions of what to put on the new 50p coin marking Brexit. Latest contender is some very dodgy Latin: "Semper in excremento profundo variant" which, according to my reader, translates very loosely as "always in the s***, only the depth varies."

MEANWHILE, Stephen Hawking is a front runner to be pictured on the new £50 note. I spy danger. Inevitably, visiting foreigners will ask who Professor Hawking was and what he did. And I doubt if one in 1,000 Brits has a clue about Hawking's work, or has finished one of his books or could explain, even in simple terms, his views on cosmology. If we are honest, we remember Professor Hawking chiefly for his heroic struggle against a terrible paralysing disease and for that curious speech machine which made an English academic sound American. If we really need a popular professor on the £50 note then let's have one whom we understood, even if his speechoddly warped around the tonsiloids and was harding to graspify, oh, deep folly. Professor Stanley Unwin, your moment has come. Or there's always Professor Jimmy Edwards.

ADULTS have a great capacity for looking but not seeing. Kids are not so easily fooled. In the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes, it's a child who points out that the emperor is naked. And it's a schoolboy who recently texted: "How’s there a 30-year-old man in our maths class?” How indeed had a six-foot Iranian joined a class of 15-year-olds at a school in Suffolk? The answer seems to be that he arrived via Germany with no paperwork. He told immigration officials he was 15. And they believed him. Just as so many do-gooders believed the stories of the big, stubbly "children" who arrived from Calais a couple of years ago. When a system sees only what it wants to see, it is a system badly broken.

DELIGHTED to hear that misandry, the hatred of men, may become a hate crime. If that happens, presumably we can have a jolly old witch hunt for historic cases of misandry. I am reminded of those scary feminists in the 1970s whose favourite placard was: "All men are rapists." Hunt 'em down. Lock 'em up.

ACCORDING to the latest reports, the British Army's troubled SA80 rifle has evolved into one of the most reliable and accurate weapons in the world. How times change. In its early days, squaddies referred to the jam-prone SA80 as "the civil servant" on the grounds that it didn't work and you couldn't fire it.