Peter Rhodes on donating organs, repairing roads and the end of the road for the Mash Report

A letter arrived quite unexpectedly from the only government department whose name would make a great shouty-sweary oath: NHS Blood and Transplant! I have added the exclamation mark but you get the idea.

It turned out to be my organ-donor card, the one you get when you renew your driving licence and tick the box marked donor. I'm not sure how much difference it makes. Come the hour, it's still your nearest and dearest who make the decision whether your bits and pieces can be harvested. The card may influence them but it's not a legal command. Not yet.

Strangely, according to the NHS leaflet, while 85 percent of folk realise the importance of discussing their donation wishes with others, only 46 percent have “had the conversation.” So without more ado I “had the conversation” with Mrs Rhodes who asked: “Are you sure you've got anything they'd want?” Blood and Transplant!

The road menders are resurfacing the road outside Chateau Rhodes. I can't think of any process quite so unchanged by time. The roadlayers still scrape off the old surface, lay hot asphalt and compress it under a roller, pretty much as they did in the 20th century and the 19th, for that matter. By now, you might imagine the process would involve fancy new polymer road surfaces with smart implants and drone-guided gizmos, or something equally epoch-making we vaguely remember from Tomorrow's World all those years ago. Nope. It's just scrape, lay, roll in the old-fashioned way (although I suspect they may be adding embryo pot holes to the mix, to erupt at some future date and provide more gainful employment).

So farewell, the Mash Report (BBC2) which, in the greatest tradition of corporate double-speak, is first dumped and then praised to the rafters. In a statement to mark the axing of the “brilliant” show, the BBC declared: “We are very proud of The Mash Report . . .we would like to thank all those involved in four brilliant series.”

Hang on. If it's brilliant and they're proud of it, why are they scrapping it? The truth may be that the show, presented by Nish Kumar, was supposed to be a comedy series but was never particularly funny. In September 2019, as I pointed out at the time, it contained a spoof advert for a commemorative painted plate to mark Brexit, focusing on the unfounded drug-shortage scares. The plate featured a picture of a dead diabetic.I suspected then that the Mash Report's days were numbered. The one thing we've learned in the pandemic is that nobody laughs about diabetes.

A new prime minister to replace Boris. A solution to Brexit problems in Northern Ireland. A referendum on Scottish independence. A pay rise for nurses of only one per cent. You catch me making a list of things that once seemed likely but are never going to happen this year.