Peter Rhodes on Dark Ages confusion, avoiding an alarm and the perils of toddlers with telephones

At 3pm precisely, every mobile phone in the land will erupt with a ten-second siren. But already some owners have figured out how to make their device opt out of the alarm.

Think hard. You might well want to miss a warning of unavoidable and imminent disaster such as: “Nuclear war – we'll all be dead in five minutes.” But what if the alert is “Free beer at the Dog & Duck”? You read it here first.

It was a big night for Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Dreymon ), the ultimate Dark Ages warrior, maker of kings, slaughterer of Vikings, seeker of Valhalla and star of Seven Kings Must Die , the finale of The Last Kingdom series on Netflix. But owing to a clash of schedules in our house, Uhtred was pitted against a BBC gardening programme starring Monty of the Nine Trowels.

At Chateau Rhodes, mediaeval mayhem triumphed over pricking out the pansies and we watched Seven Kings Must Die. The battle scenes were amazing and fantastically complicated, which is probably how it was in Anglo-Saxon times. I once interviewed a historian who reckoned that in the days before any recognisable uniforms, “friendly fire” incidents must have been common. If in doubt, whack.

On a much more peaceful tack, every year since 2019, Classic FM listeners have voted Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending as their favourite piece of classical music. Now, amid some genteel surprise, it has been bumped off its perch by Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 2. And frankly, not before time. It is almost heresy to criticise Lark but it does go on a bit. (Mind you, the Rachmaninoff thing is a dirge, isn't it?)

According to research by Ofcom, 20 per cent of three and four-year-olds in the UK have their own mobile phone. Toddlers using devices? Alarm bells should ring. We coo with pride at our three-year-old grandson using my Chromebook to watch cartoons. And then last week I found myself away from home and trying to write a column on the Chromebook, only to discover that the word-processing program had been detected, defined and dumped by fingers much tinier than mine. Took me two days to restore it.