Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on crab apples, computer bugs and the sublime majesty of The Two Popes

Read today's column from Peter Rhodes.

Published
Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce in The Two Popes

If you're having difficulty sustaining climate-change terror, or you're no longer scared by the soothsaying of Greta, patron saint of emissions, here's a couple of new things to worry about. According to researchers at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens, Britain's wild apple trees are at threat from foreign species which grow from apple cores chucked out of car windows. Run for the hills.

And if a sudden shortage of crab apples fails to terrify you, prepare to be petrified by reports that the year 2038 could bring a millennium bug-type collapse of all computers. This is not entirely new; some scientists were warning about it five years ago but, hey, if you can't recycle an old horror story at the New Year, when can you?

For the technical, the 2038 bug would be caused because computers allegedly cannot tell the difference between 2038 and 1970. Mankind made a serious mistake when we abandoned the abacus.

And, no, I don't know how the 2038 bug will be sorted. But I bet it involves paying lots of money to lots of geeks.

We had to wait until 2020 was almost upon us before seeing what for me was the best movie of 2019. The Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Bergoglio, who becomes Pope Francis. The story may sound as dry as dust. It's about two clerics, both with shady pasts, and the complex business of a deeply conservative German Pope realising he must resign and hand over power to a popular, tango-dancing liberal from Argentina with whom he has nothing in common. The photography is magnificent and the acting, from two screen legends at the peak of their powers, is majestic and sublime. What sticks in my memory is the effortless fluency with which Hopkins and Pryce switch from Spanish to Italian, to German, English and Latin as if to the Vatican born. If you can see it, do.

Meanwhile, what better solution could Labour find to its ills than a proper, in-depth study of its General Election disaster, with a panel of experts including Ed Miliband? I can already guess two of Ed's conclusions on what went wrong. Firstly, Jeremy Corbyn should have been filmed eating a big, juicy bacon sandwich on the campaign trail because that always plays well with the punters doesn't it? Secondly, it would have been a great idea to carve the key principles of Corbynism on a large stone slab. Just so long as the wicked Press didn't say it looked like a gravestone.

Tory Zac Goldsmith loses his seat in the General Election but is instantly back in the Cabinet and the House of Lords with a life peerage. This casual spitting in the face of the electorate is yet another excellent reason to scrap the Lords and turn it into something more useful. Like a car wash.