Peter Rhodes on losing landlines, avoiding sport and keeping focused on Ukraine

One good thing about inflation is that your savings earn more interest. My personal bonanza is heralded in an email from my building society informing me, in celebratory terms, that interest on my ISA is being raised by a magnificent one-tenth of one per cent. Another polo pony, I fancy.

Traditional telephone landlines are being replaced by a digital phone system which works over the internet. The promise is clearer, cheaper communications. The dread is that when the electricity supply is knocked out, for instance in a storm, the phones rely on a standby power pack which might last no more than a few hours.

BT admitted a few days ago that, in such conditions, customers might not be able to make emergency calls. In the Aberdeen area, where thousands of homes lost power and internet during the recent gales, a local councillor described the standby power packs as “a chocolate fireguard.” So that's the powers-that-be pressing ahead with a project in the face of public alarm. Isn't this how we got “smart” motorways?

The saddest words I have heard on the war in Ukraine came from a Ukrainian women interviewed on Radio 4 who fears that before long the world will lose interest in the agony of her beloved homeland. She may be right. We in the West have the attention-span of gnats. How long can we stay focused on Ukraine, let alone tolerate the expense and shortages that the war may inflict on us?

I would not be surprised if, in the next week or two, Putin announced that his glorious “special military operation” has succeeded in ridding Ukraine of Nazis and nationalists, and he is pleased to negotiate a compromise solution. The compromise will be Russia grabbing the entire Black Sea coastline, Crimea and the “independent” Russian-backed statelets in the south of Ukraine. And the West, facing the prospect of five million more refugees and the risk of World War III, will urge Ukraine's democratic leaders to“be reasonable.” It's a hideous forecast and I hope to be proved wrong.

A survey by Women in Sport reports that sporty girls in primary school tend to become unsporty in their teens. Maybe that's because they discover that organised sport is full of fanatics, bores and bullies. Speaking as an unsporty male, that is.