THE silencing of York Minster’s bell ringers is a story only half told. A report on BBC Look North seemed to encapsulate the problem. We learned that the 30 volunteers had been axed and that a more professional system would introduced next year.

The Dean of York, the Very Rev Vivienne Faull, was interviewed but the encounter threw little further light on what had happened or what exactly the bell ringers had done. It was suggested that some sort of health and safety offence might have been committed, and that these sort of things couldn’t be allowed to happen so far away from the main body of the Minster. So far so mysterious.

What could all this mean? It seems hard to say. I just went for my Sunday morning run, going this week into York from the suburbs and through Bootham Bar. I have run this way many times before, and will do so again no doubt. It’s a lovely route and usually on a Sunday morning you hear the bells, but not today; today there was only silence, a weird silence of the sort introduced into a spooky film (“the bells aren’t ringing – no good can come from that silence.”)

Our eldest lives in a flat near to York Minster so perhaps he enjoyed his lie-in this morning. In truth he is probably used to the ringing by now, and few people seem to be impressed with the Minster’s behaviour.

A skim of the comments on Facebook brought a number of standard responses. Mostly people thought the Minster’s actions were hardly Christian and regretted the muffling of the bells. One unusually fair-minded person said something along the lines of how we would know the truth when the dust had settled and that the Minster wouldn’t have acted in this way without due cause.

And then there was an interesting thought from the musician Karl Mullen, who wheels his piano round York and into pubs as well. Karl said, in effect, that the bell ringers had been out of control for some time now and the situation needed to be resolved. Again the exact reason for what had happened remained elusive.

There is a strange opacity about this story, with everything being reported through a blur of half-told truths. Whatever the rights or wrongs, the Minster authorities emerge with little credit.

Yesterday The Times wrote a leader article on the matter. In this, the newspaper said: “The management techniques of the FTSE 100 companies, not known for their roots in Christian compassion, have taken root on consecrated ground have taken root on consecrated ground: the bell ringers have been told to re-apply for their jobs.”

The leader writer on The Times, like everyone else, appeared puzzled by why a church would act in this manner. My old newspaper reported that John Ridgeway-Wood had been suspended. I don’t exactly know John but did speak to him in my letters editing days, as he was an occasional correspondent.

According to the Press, John received a letter telling him the move followed his ‘intemperate’ comments on Facebook and ‘similarly objectionable’ comments attributed to him in the media about the Chapter’s decision.

There was also a quote from Canon Precentor Peter Moger which bears repeating: “The unacceptable terms of your comments about the Minster and people involved in the Minster’s life contravene Chapter’s Volunteer Agreement and Social Media policy.”

Who knew that York Minster had a ‘Social Media policy’ or that it could so easily be contravened?

When I lost my job I did for a while consider PR work but the applications always fell on stony ground. And, you know, I am not really sorry. I am better on this side of the fence. If nothing else, the silencing of the bell ringers of York Minster shows just how badly wrong public relations can go. For whatever the true reason is for the strange affair, the result is copper-bottomed clanger of a PR disaster.

Perhaps there is a book in here somewhere. Lovers of classic crime fiction will recall that Dorothy L Sayers introduced bell ringing into a couple of her novels, notably The Nine Tailors, in which Lord Peter Wimsey used his knowledge of change ringing, the art of ringing tuned bells, to solve the mystery.

Does anyone have Wimsey’s number? York could do with a visit from the aristocratic sleuth to solve the Mystery of the Silent Bell Tower.

WHAT exactly is this “peoples’ revolution” I keep hearing about? Perhaps I missed that memo from the revolutionary committee or something.

Oddly, the people who go on about this are not themselves revolutionaries but reactionaries. And they are not people as such but newspapers.

Yesterday the Daily Mail splashed a bit of its editorial comment across the front page, proclaiming: “Damn the unpatriotic Bemoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people.”

So, yes, we are in Brexit-land again, but there is no need to apologise. For those of us who voted Remain did so with as much legitimacy as those who wished to leave. And to interpret a close-call victory as “the will of the British people” really is acrid nonsense.

Yes, the Leavers won the vote on the day, and nothing can change that. But all this talk about the will of the people is just opportunistic nonsense from newspaper editors who spent so much effort helping to engineer the result they wanted.

To remind ourselves, the vote went 52 to 48 per cent. So it was relatively close – close enough, certainly, to banish any notion that leaving the EU is what everybody wanted; leaving Europe is what a majority of those who voted opted for, and that is different.

Add to this a newish prime minister who has decided to take the Hard Brexit road and a relatively modest ‘win’ for Brexit is suddenly being inflated into the will of all the people. This won’t end well, as the will of the people is a mixed, uncertain, ungraspable thing that has been clenched by the meaty fist of certain newspapers and flourished to within an inch of its poor confused life.

All the while the people who didn’t want to leave are being scribbled out of the argument, and MPs who speak up for the Remainers are being hauled into the newspaper stocks, with the Daily Express this morning calling them “whingeing pro-Brussels MPs” and saying “the staggering arrogance of these people is a horror to behold”.

Well, pardon me but the “staggering arrogance” surely belongs to those who stagger about newsrooms as they turn a narrow win into a strutting column of bogus patriotism. And what does patriotism have to do with all this anyway? Love of one’s country doesn’t have to equate with hating all other countries, but that’s the way this argument is being dressed up.

Calling everyone who has doubts a “whinger”, and laying into the BBC for not being positive enough about Brexit; this is all just nasty nonsense. And when it comes to the will of the people, what about the will of the people who voted in 1975 to join Europe? Their will seems to have been extinguished on the whim of the now departed prime minister who got us into this situation.

Anyway other duties are calling and I don’t have time to sit on this stony ground for much longer today. But surely we should be able to agree that nasty disparagement of everyone who disagrees with Brexit is not a helpful way forward.

And while we’re about it, the nastiness has really been heaped this morning on Lily Allen. The singer was filmed by the BBC visiting the migrant camp in Calais. She burst into tears and apologised to an Afghan teenager during her visit, and has been dragged through the inky gutter – all for displaying a bit of common humanity.

The Daily Star calls her a “sobbing luvvie”. Well, I call her a woman who bothered to go and have a look, rather than sitting on her arse in what used to be called Fleet Street and spilling viciousness onto the newsprint.

Here is a mini-interview with the Tory politician Iain Duncan Smith about the soles of his shoes…

INTERVIEWER (possibly a mildly sceptical bald man in glasses): So Iain, the bottom seems to have fallen out of your shoes since the Brexit vote.

IDS: I am perfectly happy with the bottom falling out of my brogues. These shoes have been over-valued for far too long.

INTERVIEWER: But surely this is all the result of the policies your government has been following since Brexit. The soles of your shoes have been devalued by 18 per cent since the EU Referendum when measured against the soles of American trainers.

IDS: These are good English shoes and there is nothing wrong with the soles…

INTERVIEWER: But I can see your striped socks through the hole in the leather.

IDS: Nothing wrong with a bit of ventilation. That much-need hole in the bottom of my shoe lets out all the stale European air that has been stuck in there for far too long. It’s a good honest English hole in a good honest English shoe.

INTERVIEWER: But aren’t you at all worried about the alarming fall in the value of your shoes?

IDS: Not one bit. These remain robust shoes. These shoes are made for walking all over the world and that’s what they are gonna do.

INTERVIEWER: Look, your lot has engineered a double fall in the value of the shoe. The first drop in shoe stocks fell after the EU referendum and the second followed all that Hard Brexit rabble-rousing stuff at the Tory conference in Birmingham last week.

IDS: The fall in the value of shoe-leather is good for this country and…

INTERVIEWER: Sorry to interrupt (that’s a lie by the way), but this is an historic turnaround, as the Conservatives are meant to be the party of sound shoes, measuring the strength of shoe leather as a symbol of national virility. Now you are happy to see the value of shoe-leather collapse.

IDS (putting his feet up on the desk): I’ve told you already that British shoe leather has been over-valued for years.

INTERVIEWER: That hole in the underside of your shoe has got even bigger and now the striped sock has a hole in it too.

IDS: Two holes for the price of one – that’s the sort of value you get with the Conservatives.

At this point the studio door bursts open and a pair of leopard-skin kitten heels tap briskly into the room, with a prime minister attached.

IDS (quickly taking his feet off the desk):  “Ah, Theresa. I was just putting this lefty interviewer to rights about how British shoe-leather has been over-valued for years and…”

TM (sits down and puts up her feet):  “No holes in the soles of these beauties…”

INTERVIEWER: You know prime minister, it very much looks like there are…

TM: You weren’t listening. If I say there is no hole in my shoe, there is no hole in my shoe. Brexit means Brexit. Where there is discord we shall bring Harmony Hairspray…

IDS: I fear Theresa has gone on the blink.

TM: I am off to the cobblers…

OUR house is ram-packed, as Jeremy Corbyn said of that train when he sat on the floor.

This party is the last tumble of the birthday dice. Friends and family are squeezed around the rearranged furniture to celebrate my survival for 60 years. This anniversary is still a surprise to me; how did that happen? I think as I weave through the throng, checking that everyone who wants a drink has one. The ones who usually like a drink are liking it today, so that’s reassuring.

As the birthday boy, I should like a drink, too. I fill a glass for myself but put it down to greet another guest. I do this again and again (possibly with another ‘again’ attached). And each time I forget where the full glass went. My wine remains undrunk, as do I. This is just as well. Too much wine can send me a bit tearful at such occasions, and nobody wants to see that.

I tell friends what we’ve been up to and they say they know as they read it in the blog. That’s the strange thing about parading bits of your life in public: you forget you already put it out there.

Nowadays I don’t have a career so much as a pick-and-mix bag of occupations. Bit of this, bit of that, and now a touch of guest lecturing for two hours a week. For a class on personal stories in journalism, I contact Tim Dowling, who writes about his family in the Guardian Weekend magazine. He obliges with some thoughts on how he approaches his column, including the fact that he always makes himself the butt of the joke.

He says he keeps the details vague. He doesn’t specify his socio-economic background, the kind of car he drives or the names of his pets. This is interesting advice, but a little late in the day after all those mentions for the dear departed Volvo and an appearance or two by Lucy the cat.

One of my brothers is at the party, the other is in France. The absent one phones up and says hello against the party clamour. Parents, in-laws, a couple of cousins, two nephews are here, plus friends carrying bottles. As I greet newcomers and supply more drinks, a dim memory surfaces of a column in the Manchester Evening News years ago in which the writer recounted his 60^th birthday meal out at a restaurant. Reading the column at the time, I wondered why someone would rattle on about their 60^th birthday in a column, but there you go.

Time for more circulating. Three male friends have been standing in the same spot for two hours now, so perhaps the world has been put to rights. I join them briefly to point out how long they have been at it, then head to the garden. This is where the journalists are gathered. Journalists always seek each other out like that. And the one who normally holds court with his tales is doing that now and everyone is laughing. I stay for a while, then set off matchmaking. One South African is introduced to another; and my violin-playing father is introduced to a friend in a string quartet.

Back at the table, the food cooked by my wife or brought by friends is disappearing fast. All evidence of meat has disappeared, as too has my mother’s Bakewell tart (damn, that is one good tart). I eat salad and some of the bread I made.

When the birthday cake arrives I blow out the candles, but sidestep a speech. No one wants to be making speeches, apart from that old friend in the garden.

I go in search of another glass to fill and then put it down again, liquid untroubled. Later I manage a glass. Later still, happy and tired, I nod off on the sofa. That’s allowed at this age. But it was allowed before as well.

STEVE Hilton used to be David Cameron’s policy guru. As Cameron has sunk without trace, you might think that Hilton would have done the same. Instead this morning he is laying into Theresa May, so all praise to the man who used to walk around Downing Street in bare feet, or so it is said.

Frankly, he always sounded like a bit of a shoeless twit to me, but Hilton does speak sense when he turns on the party he used to advise.

His latest target is the Conservatives’ idea to make firms list their foreign workers – a plan he sees as worse than Donald Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the US.

Although he parted company with Cameron to back Brexit, Hilton is scathing about the suggestion trailed by home secretary Amber Rudd at the Conservative conference this week. Writing in the Sunday Times, he says that ministers might as well announce that “foreign workers will be tattooed with numbers on their forearms”.

Oh, why stop there – what’s wrong with tattooing their foreheads? The Daily Express would be sent into raptures over the idea. This morning its Sunday stablemate proclaims “The Conservatives’ common-sense revolution” above a headline shouting: “A UK border that works!”

Apparently this is a digital border that will prevent entry into the country all those people considered undesirable by the Daily Express – in other words, just about everyone.

Rudd came over all defensive after her clearly xenophobic plan stirred up a row, and she asked people not to brand her a “racist”. Well sorry, home secretary, but that’s just what this plan is. What’s more, beneath Theresa May’s pitch for the centre ground lies a nasty seam of intolerance. The growing clamour for a Hard Brexit from the right of the Tory party represents a mean lurch away from the cherished notion of a Britain that is open-minded and tolerant. Instead the result of the referendum is being hijacked as a reason to close down liberal Britain and put up a sign reading: “Bugger off – you’re not wanted here in Little England.”

Was this why we held a referendum, so that all the old nastiness would seep out of the woodwork; all the small-mindedness, all the suspicion of foreigners, all the blind bumbling around our own front garden after we have nailed the gate shut?

The vote is done and gone with, but it should be a starting point for a sensible way forward, and not a signal for a mad rush to a Hard Brexit. I am not even sure what that might be, and I reckon those who want it don’t really know either: they just like the sound of it. To misquote Bob Dylan, A Hard Brexit’s Gonna Fall. And the results won’t be pretty.

SOME of us need cheering up these days and Ukip is the gift that keeps on giving.

First new leader Diane James resigns after 18 days in the post – a period not much longer than a Nigel Farage bender (or so one assumes). Then leadership hopeful Steven Woolfe ends up in hospital for two days after a “slight scuffle” with Ukip MEP Mike Hookem, a man fully equipped with the right surname for delivering a punch. Not that he did. Oh no, it was all what people in Hull call “handbags at dawn”, according to Hookem. Well, I guess it depends what you keep in those handbags.

Hookem told BBC Radio Humberside on Friday: “Any injuries Steven Woolfe had, which caused whatever medical problems, did not come from me, from my hand. I did not injure him. I did not throw a punch at him. I did not cause those injuries.”

In a surreal Ukip moment, Woolfe was shown in hospital giving the thumbs up during a visit by Farage, the Ukip leader or not, depending on the day of the week. Farage has unresigned before, sometimes barely before he has resigned.

The cause of the not-fight was said to be fears among Ukip MEPs about Woolfe’s reported flirtation with the Tories. Well, you don’t want to flirt with those people, especially as a Ukip/Tory flirtation is a sort of political incest at best.

Anyway it is heartening to see Ukip caught in this unbrotherly chaos, with handbags at dawn and leadership reigns of 18 days. The problem is surely that Ukip has always been a single-issue party fashioned in the shape of a single leader. Now that the issue of leaving Europe – the only Ukip policy of note – has been settled, at least in theory, the party has become headless, while the departing Farage remains both a unifying figure and a divisive one, too. Ukip members seem to love him or hate him. Personally I find that the hate option saves a lot of unnecessary bother.

With Theresa May delivering a conference speech that was largely right-wing, a bit left-wing, a pick-and-mix of political ideologies wrapped in a big blue bow, the Tories are making a grab for the centre-ground. That’s if anyone can agree where the centre might be. The theory being that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has moved to the left-hand-side of the political playground, leaving room for May to claim she is now in the middle – a statement undermined by her disgraceful Tory-tummy-tickling remarks about immigration during her speech.

All that and, over the Pond, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made an apology – almost. His sort-of-sorry followed lewd remarks about women, in which he bragged about using his fame to try and “fuck” women and groping them without waiting for their consent. “When you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump said in a recording from 2005 which was obtained by the Washington Post.

All of which suggests that even Ukip has some way to go before it can catch up with Trump.

SOME people you like straight away and it’s the same with cities. Glasgow with its hills and grand buildings, its tipping-away streets and dizzying vistas, won us over in a blink.

We chose Glasgow for my birthday break because it was a place unvisited. Turns out I am the same age as the newish prime minister. Theresa May spent her 60^th birthday running the country, and perhaps composing a grandly presumptuous speech or two, and I spent mine walking around Glasgow, looking at art, having a pint or two, and going for a meal: tasks at which I am better suited than running a country.

First up we did one of those touristy things one sometimes shuns: an open-top bus ride around the city. And it was great. We had the historian Neil Oliver for company. Or at least our ears did, thanks to the headphones, and the commentary was good and interesting, if broken up by loud bursts of Scottish dancing music. And there’s a sound you don’t want bursting in on your lugholes.

If you ever go to Glasgow, and you should, this bus trip is an easy way to get to know this city, letting you piece together a mind-map of the place. After the trip we had a grasp on the geography, an inkling of what went where, and where we wanted to go.

Glasgow is great for many reasons, for pubs and bars and restaurants; for galleries and museums; for the buzz of the place and the seemingly endless rows of tall and lovely buildings; for the hills and the steep panoramas. We like galleries so we followed the Charles Rennie Mackintosh trail – or at least some of it. One thing you can say for Glasgow is that they never avoid an opportunity to mention Mackintosh, architect, artist and designer.

Yet he wasn’t always so celebrated. He died of cancer of the tongue, probably brought on by pipe smoking, at the age of 60 (no age at all), and was more or less forgotten by then.

Mackintosh’s reputation only began to grow some years later and as you go around Glasgow, visiting buildings he designed or drinking tea in the tearooms he fashioned, or looking at the furniture he made, you can’t help feeling a sorrowful gap between the end of his life and the way he is so celebrated now. Flogged half to death you might even say, certainly in the gift shops.

But there are some great Mackintosh sights to see, from the dedicated rooms at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum – a truly fantastic building – to the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow, which contains the house where Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, lived: the whole thing taken apart and the interiors reassembled. The Mackintosh House makes for a fascinating visit, old rooms perfectly recreated within a modern concrete building.

There is a photograph of Mackintosh as a young man. In it this working-class boy from the East End of Glasgow, one of 11 children, is aged about 25 and he is a proper dandy, with a twirling moustache, flopping hair and a flamboyant bow-tie. That young man’s ghost follows you around the city, and walks beside you as you trail up the very steep hill to the Glasgow School of Art, which he designed at the age of 28, winning a competition for the job when he wasn’t even a fully qualified architect.

Two years ago, the building was badly damaged in a fire, and today it wears a scaffolding shroud as the renovation takes place. But you can still go on a Mackintosh tour of the new building next door, and look at the school’s collection of furniture: an interesting tour and worth 45 minutes of anyone’s time.

We also visited the Lighthouse, a gallery and architecture hub in what was once the Glasgow Herald building, another Mackintosh project. A highlight here is climbing the red-brick tower that once held the water for the steam engine that ran the presses. The views from the top are fabulous, the Glasgow jumble spreading in all directions, with the hills in the distance.

It wasn’t all culture and Mackintosh this and Mackintosh that. We visited a Brewdog pub (always like those) and discovered another brew-pub, Shilling Brewing Co, housed in a massively grand building, possibly an old bank. Here they brew their own beer and make pizzas using some of the left-over brewer’s yeast. Both the beer and the oven-blistered dough are good indeed.

Some cities you take to straight away. And that was Glasgow for us. We will be back.

KIM Kardashian West and me both have our problems. Kim has had jewellery worth millions stolen during a hold-up in Paris and tomorrow I will be 60. My misfortune is of a different nature, it is true, but does come with the benefit of giving me an excuse for knowing hardly anything at all about Kim Kardashian West.

I understand, in so far as I can be bothered, that Kim is a reality TV star who is married to the rapper Kanye West, with whom she has two children.

A quick picture search on Google suggests that she doesn’t worry unduly about catching a chill when she goes out, as she has a loose understanding of what most women call getting dressed. She also lacks any noticeable shyness about her breasts. Men of nearly 60 shouldn’t notice these things, although men of nearly 60 are still men, and men do notice these things even when they shouldn’t.

Perhaps Kim favours jewellery instead of clothes and maybe that is why masked robbers were able to steal jewels worth an estimated £8.7 million pounds from her luxury apartment in Paris’s upmarket 8^th arrondissement.

Here are a few thoughts on this person about whom I know so little. This was a serious crime and the robbers, who are reported to have dressed as police officers, put a gun to Kardashian’s head. Genuinely scary and no one deserves that – not even a fabulously wealthy woman who found fame in a manner I don’t really understand, and don’t wish to understand.

There is something else I don’t grasp; there are many things I don’t grasp, but here is this thing beyond my comprehension: why does one woman need so much jewellery; and is Kim Kardashian West actually being employed as a catwalk parable to illustrate the stupidity of extreme wealth?

A nice ring that costs a grand or two; a sparkly necklace that might run to three grand; perhaps. But £8.7 million on jewellery? Such wealth must bring with it an impoverishment of good sense. Most people when on holiday worry about their passport or their travellers’ cheques – do those still exist? – or perhaps their camera. Having jewellery worth millions in your holiday apartment seems wilfully negligent.

I don’t understand why anyone needs so much jewellery or so much money. Maybe such vast wealth is a sort of competition, a dog-eat-dog-and-spits-up-a-diamond game. Whatever the case, it brought to mind the title of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, The Diamond As Big As The Ritz, which opens with young Percy Washington playing one-upmanship over wealth – “That’s nothing… That’s nothing at all. My father has a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

I guess something in favour of such a diamond is that it would be impossible to steal, unlike those which Kim Kardashian West likes to drape about her much-photographed person.

The ordeal is said to have left her “badly shaken but physically unharmed”. And should you feel an any harsh thoughts coming on about her extravagant misfortune, you will have to answer to the TV personality James Corden, who took to Twitter to say that people being unkind about Kardashian should: “Be nice or shut up.”

Okay, James – that is just what I shall do.

Thirteen years is quite a time for a relationship. We met just before a trip to the Yorkshire Dales and parted company under the same circumstances.

Our venerable Volvo V70, midnight blue and wounded by scratches from being parked in our old street, and a decorative swirl in the paintwork thanks to a spot of poor reversing when we first moved to this house, is no more. It still exists but we have parted company. This morning the elderly Swede will be led to auction by the garage who kindly took her off my hands for a sum so inconsiderable that I cannot bring myself to mention how much money was exchanged.

That car did so much ferrying and carting around in its years as the Cole-wagon: offspring were conveyed to and from university many times; a broken-down motor scooter left a smell of petrol; our middle boy’s band left a smiling memory when they all hitched a lift home from rehearsal, instruments and all (minus the drum-kit); cabbage-smelling vegetation often filled the back on the way to the tip; and recently a friend’s piece of hardboard, too big for his Golf, fitted in the back and is now housing his mid-life train set.

Yes, that old car covered many miles and carried many things, but Pete the mechanic said it was on the way out – “I don’t want to see you driving this in six months,” he said. For a moment I imagined plying a trick and turning up in a year for the MoT and service as usual. But Pete knows his cars and after years of keeping the old Volvo rolling, he said we needed something newer.

So now we have a car that measures its age in months (15) rather than years; a smaller and much smarter-looking motor bought under one of those complicated deals people come to nowadays. Not a Golf as I first wanted, but not a huge remove from a Golf.

And the first journey in the new car, driving along dark and twisty roads, was to the Bunk Barn at Halton Gill in Littondale, where we have been regular visitors for years as part of a big group of friends.

The new car is lovely to drive, doesn’t sway and rattle and the brakes – heavens, the brakes. That car stops when you put your foot on the pedal, whereas the Volvo lumbered to a halt like a hippo on an icy pavement.

Sometimes a car just has to go, and that is what has happened here. That new car, lovely though it is, and so easy to drive, will never carry the loads demanded of its predecessor; and we won’t keep it for 13 years. But it should hopefully take us to the Dales a few more times.

We ended the weekend up going up Pen-y-ghent in glorious sunshine. The views stretched to the horizon, and then a bit more. This has not often been the case down the years: snow and ice, rain, fog, more rain – all have been thrown at us at the top of that hill of wind. So sunshine was a treat.

I’VE not even had breakfast yet and Jeremy Hunt is putting me off my food. That man knows how to suppress an appetite.

The health secretary has taken time off from annoying doctors to lecture restaurants, cafes and pubs about the size of their portions and the sweetness of their puddings.

According to the Times this morning, Mr Hunt says that offending establishments will be “named and shamed”. Funnily enough, Hunt was misnamed and shamed years ago by James Naughtie on the radio in a spoonerism that stays in the mind because he seemed so deserving of the accidental honour.

I do feel conflicted about governments interfering in what food establishments can serve. This is partly because puddings, cakes and bakes are treats, and in life we should be allowed a treat.

Just imagine that you are about to tuck into your cake or dessert in a restaurant or café when suddenly a man with a permanently startled face looms up over your shoulder…

“There’s a man behind you.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Frowning at that slab of sticky toffee pudding you are about to eat.”

“Now he is holding up a big placard that says, ‘This man is eating too much pudding’.”

At which point the health secretary leans over the table and slices off half of the sticky toffee pudding, which is then removed to a government-approved pudding landfill site where calories deemed officially unnecessary are condemned to rot away without harming the nation.

The thought of Jeremy Hunt telling us what to eat really is disturbing, isn’t it? Next thing you know he’ll be gate-crashing the Great British Bake Off and swiping that extra slice from Paul Hollywood’s hands.

All very alarming, but the thing is we are all getting fatter. According to the report in the Times, “Calories-cutting targets for fatty foods including burgers and pizzas will be decided next year. Calorie caps for individual products such as chocolate bars or muffins will also be introduced.”

This did make me wonder if a calorie cap was a restriction or something you are forced to wear, a dunce’s cap for the modern over-eater perhaps.

And this is where I am conflicted. Governments sometimes wish to interfere too much in what we do, and yet if we are all getting fatter, and obesity is such a problem, then it is obvious that something needs to be done.

According to the BBC Good Food Nation Survey, also published today, one in six young people eat fast food twice a day, and the average person has two takeaway meals a week. We must be far from average in this house as we don’t eat two takeaway meals a year. The only takeaway I like is fish and chips, but even that is a rare treat.

Where Jeremy Hunt has a point – and dear God those words were hard to write – is that people eat out a lot nowadays. In this sense we are not ‘people’ as we eat out rarely, although our three twenty-something children eat out more often, far more often than we do.

The BBC study of 5,000 people also found that half thought “a meal isn’t a meal without meat”. Now I used to think that once, but living with a vegetarian for years put paid to such attitudes. I still like a good meaty feast, and did a top roast chicken only the other day, but I am happy with meat-free days. Occasionally I smuggle a piece of salmon into a vegetarian meal, a tasty bit of contraband among the lettuce leaves.

My solution to keeping Jeremy Hunt’s nose out of my plate is simple, but it won’t be popular with many people, I guess. The answer is to cook decent food at home. Nothing flash or MasterCheffy. Just proper good food. Eat treats more at the weekend. Don’t obsess about what food is bad for you and never say things such as “Can I have a gluten-free skinny pancake to go, please.”

I don’t understand the modern obsession with gluten, something which is a problem – and a very serious problem – for approximately one per cent of the population. Hardly anyone has a problem with gluten, yet gluten-free food is a fast-growing area, and most of it is mass-produced and packed with fat and sugar and the like.

My rule, although not a scientific one, is that anything which is free of something is to be avoided. Fat-free, gluten-free, sugar-free – no thanks, I’ll just have a proper mouthful if that’s all right with you.