Peter Rhodes on a puzzling sign, our obsession with America and things created on the back of fag packets

Our changing language. Motorway gantry messages provide many multiple meanings. My favourite, NO PHONES AWAIT POLICE, may never be surpassed but this pandemic-time warning on the M6 made me smile: DONT DRIVE TIRED SERVICES OPEN.

Searching in my wallet for a credit card, I found a plasticky-paperish sort of thingy stamped £10. In the olden days before the virus, people used these items, known as banknotes, to purchase things. Then we found out viruses loved them, and everyone went contactless overnight. We will probably save a few to show our great-grandchildren who will be amused to hear that, back in the 21st century, people not only handed banknotes around but had long and bitter arguments about whose face should go on them.

Boris Johnson announces a government commission to look into all aspects of inequality. The Labour MP David Lammy promptly denounces it as “written on the back of a fag packet.” I'm always wary of this term because in about 1961 my father, a builder, designed a house. It was our family home for the next 20 years and his first sketches were on the back of a packet of Churchmans cigarettes.

“Hello, is that Knox Oil & Gas, Houston . . ? Hello . . ?” Planning permission has been refused for a 4G mobile-phone mast at the Aberdeenshire village of Pennan. Councillors say a huge mast would reduce the charm of the place. And there is a certain rusticky charm in relying on a landline, just like they did in Local Hero, that great little movie filmed at the village in 1983. The red phone box (not the original) is still a must for tourists and film buffs. I stayed in Pennan a few years ago and, sitting on the harbour wall at sunset, played the waltz from the Local Hero ceilidh on my squeeze-box. Small ambition ticked off.

One suggestion to improve race relations in Britain is a new national museum of slavery. I was surprised to read the inspiration comes from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. Two points. Firstly, exactly how has America's museum helped the US race crisis, which seems to lurch from disaster to disaster? Secondly, do we really have anything to learn from America?

There is a wider issue here, of why Britain – or at least the British media – is so utterly obsessed with the United States. Events that we'd pay no heed if they happened in France or Germany get huge headlines when they occur in Seattle or New York. Some days you'd think that Britain is part of America, the 51st State, ever watchful of Washington and hanging on every tweet of The Orange Thing.

Look again at the ceremony in Windsor Castle to replace this year's Trooping the Colour. The guardsmen and band were the regulation two metres apart but Her Majesty was flanked by two aides almost in touching distance. Putting the ER in error.