Peter Rhodes on chatting with a princess, white saviours and colours designed to confuse

CAN'T quite understand the furore over Islamic State terrorists being tried in the United States and the British Government raising no objections to the death penalty. If all goes to plan, the Yanks will pay all the legal and lethal-injection bills, several serial torturers and murderers will be removed from this planet and they will get their hearts' desire of becoming martyrs. It is a win-win-win situation.

I HAVE just had the air-conditioning in the car recharged, a procedure which a couple of years ago cost about forty quid. This time, with a mumbled explanation about "the price of gas going up," it was £69. A reader tells me he has just paid £89. Similar tales of gassy inflation welcome.

IT must be 20 years ago that I interviewed Princess Anne at the launch of a charity's promotional film. Had she enjoyed it? The great thing about HRH is that she doesn't sugar-coat things. No, she did not care for the film. And why not? "Where are all the black faces?" she demanded. The princess made the point that this charity employed local staff and supporters in Africa, yet the film showed only the white British organisers. This must have been the beginning of the turning against the "white saviour" view of the world in which black and brown people are portrayed as helpless recipients of aid from wise and generous white folk.

THE billboard that caused such a fuss at Wolverhampton University a few days ago, showing a young white woman facing a group of black children with the motto: "If you want to explore new worlds. Start here" fell straight into the white-saviour trap and was duly denounced in a Twitter-storm of academic outrage. The wonder was that the billboard was put up in the first place. Whatever next? A poem by Rudyard Kipling?

STRANGELY enough, none of the academics who raged against the billboard complained about the ungrammatical full stop in the middle of the motto. Pedantry. There ought to be fewer of it.

A READER who, like me, is colour blind, says he's fed up with TV sports programmes indicating, for example, penalties scored with a green symbol and penalties missed with a red symbol. As he puts it: "They might as well not bother." It is a mystery that such a common condition is not better recognised. The leaflet that comes with the BT Home Hub, for example, describes how the hub status lights are green, red and orange and I defy someone with even the mildest case of red/green deficiency to tell them apart. It can't be much fun for the BT engineers either when they ask what colour you're getting and you reply: "Haven't a clue, pal."

ONE of the questions people always ask when they discover you're colour blind is: "What colour do you see grass?" We see it green. Grass is green, so that's what we see. But when it turns brown in a drought, it's still green. I hope this clarifies things.