Peter Rhodes on a new Joan of Arc, cheap meals for oldies and a lament for diesel

So here we are, on holiday a few miles from the Suffolk coast, after driving 161 miles at an average speed of 44.6mph and averaging 43.3mpg of petrol. I do miss my old diesel. It was a 2.7 litre beast yet it sipped diesel like a humming bird sips nectar. Fill it up on Good Friday and it would see you through till Christmas.

Like so many drivers, I opted for diesel because the experts told us it would save the planet. And then the experts said diesel was actually killing thousands of innocents. And so we switched to petrol and now watch our fuel economy plummet from 60mpg to 43.3mpg on the long and pretty road to Saxmundham, and the experts say we’re still killing the planet anyway.

AND not only our home-grown experts. Even in this age of austerity, it seems there is enough spare fuel to import strident teenagers from Sweden to give us all a good telling-off. Anyone else turned off by the sight of mature politicians pretending to believe 16-year-old Greta Thunberg has all the answers? Some have likened her to Joan of Arc although Joan left a much bigger carbon footprint.

WE had lunch at a cheerful old Georgian pub in Saxmundham which sticks to the charmingly outdated belief that if customers are old they must be poor. So the two-course lunch menu, normally £12, is just £8 for pensioners. And very good it is, too. But how unfair that when we really were poor, back in our 20s, we had to pay top whack for everything. On the day we enjoyed our subsidised pub meal, a committee of the House of Lords recommended abolishing age-related benefits for the elderly to make life fairer for young people. As a first step, the Lords have decided to slash their numbers from 850 to 500 and cut their daily allowance from £300 to £200. Only kidding.

ON the wall of our holiday apartment is one of those self-improvement plaques that have taken over every craft shop and garden centre. This one declares: “Learn from yesterday. Live for today. Hope for tomorrow.” In today’s stern, finger-wagging times such sentiments are, of course, deeply inappropriate. We must all live in misery and the only acceptable outlook is terror.

ASSUMING we have any outlook at all. One consequence of us aged babyboomers living long enough to take more holidays is the reception you get at resorts. There was a time when the first thing that greeted you in a hotel reception was the dinner gong or sand on the carpet. Today, for all to see in its cheerful little yellow box, is the defibrillator. See Blackpool and die.