Peter Rhodes on a fair price for water, the return of the Partridge and a Groundhog Day moment

A READER points out that, if you give the charity Water Aid £2 a month it can supply water to a family in scorching-dry Africa. So why does Severn-Trent demand £38 a month from him to do much the same in a country where, as he puts it,"it pees down with rain two days out of five on average?" Fair point.

IN its latest newsletter, with a great fanfare, the car-recovery firm Green Flag boasts that its latest smartphone app will: "Notify us of your breakdown, and using your phone's GPS signal we'll be able to locate you easily. . . .You can track your technician's progress on a map as they approach." Which sounds perfect. However, with rather less of a fanfare in the small print of the Green Flag renewal documents is the news that their "Sixty Minute Promise" to pay you £10 if they don't arrive within the hour has been scrapped. One step forward, one step back.

STEVE Coogan is returning to telly with a new series, This Time with Alan Partridge. We can expect another excellent slice of cringe-comedy. And yet, while Partridge is a comic masterpiece, for my money the best thing Coogan ever did was The Trip (2010-2014) in which he and Rob Brydon toured Northern England and Europe, allegedly reviewing restaurants for an upmarket Sunday newspaper. It was stressed that these were "fictionalised versions" of Coogan and Brydon, yet the insecurity and point-scoring of real-life thespians seemed genuine as they flirted with the staff and pitted their best Roger Moore and Sean Connery accents at each other over dinner. Brydon's conversation with one of the petrified corpses in Pompeii was one of the funniest things I've seen on telly, albeit it in very bad taste. So while it's good to see Partridge return, I'd rather see a new series of The Trip.

I FINISHED A A Gill's collection of essays on America, The Golden Door, and picked up, on a friend's recommendation, the latest Dan Brown thriller, Origin. Gill's glorious, intricate and beautifully observed moments left me wondering, how do you get that good? The multi-millionaire best-selling Brown's daft plot and clunking prose made me think, how do you get that lucky? To switch from Gill to Brown was like exchanging a Ferrari for a wheelbarrow. Brown writes about angels but Gill wrote like one.

WE woke yesterday to two depressingly familiar items of news. In Northern Ireland, time was yet again running out for a decision on forming a government. In Florida, kids were howling in grief after yet another American high-school massacre. The same old headlines keep coming around and it feels like living in a time-loop. Welcome to Groundhog Day.

COUNCIL tax looks set to rise. If the money is to be used for social care, who can complain? Yet doesn't it seem daft to bump council-tax bills up by £100 in April and give millions of us £100 back in winter-fuel allowance in November?