Now I like wine very much and you don’t exactly have to force malt whisky down my throat. But if I had to choose one drink, it would be beer. Good beer, properly made is one of the greatest glories on God’s earth.

As the actor Jack Nicholson said: “Beer, it’s the best damn drink in the world.” Jack was a bit of a hell-raiser in his day, and perhaps the beer was to blame, but not all consumption of beer leads to rabble-some behaviour. It would take more than a pint or two to turn this Julian into that Jack.

My beer consumption is moderate (to me, at any rate) and usually amounts to perhaps two bottles and a pint at the weekend, with pretty occasional beery forays in the week. No rabbles are raised by me, although I might wobble on my bike as I return home. Two pints is my personal limit when cycling, and when doing most other things, too, apart from driving.

In a York Brewery pub, I will often choose Guzzler or Minster Ale. My old newspaper reported this week that bottles of both beers are now being produced over the Pennines in Stockport, although the cask versions are still being brewed within the city walls at Toft Green.

Neil Arden, the brand manager for York Brewery, said contract brewing was a “necessary evil” that will help secure the brewery’s future. Now I know less about beer than Mr Arden, but this statement did worry me a little. Perhaps it is my imagination, but the bottles of Guzzler I have bought recently don’t seem as good as they once were.

Does moving the production of a beer 75 miles away affect the taste, or is it just a matter of romanticism – the idea that a real beer belongs to a real place?

In Cornwall, Sharps Brewery makes great play of its local Doom Bar ale, yet this now ubiquitous beer has been brewed at Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire for the past two years. A former Cornish publican told the BBC last year: “I assumed it was made from the local waters. I wouldn’t buy it anymore…”

Sharps Brewery is now owned by Molson Coors, a massive North American drinks company. Last time I looked, Cornwall was a long way from the United States.

Local beer is made from local water, so the beer bore – only sometimes, but I’m not ashamed – will tell you that the water matters. Is the water in Stockport different to the water in York?

Now the York beers are being understudied by Robinson’s Brewery. That brewery produced most of the beer I drank when a little underage – you know, a year or two. Along with Boddingtons in the days when it was good, Robinson’s was my beer of youthful choice. I haven’t had a pint of Robinson’s in ages, but the beer used to be fine – although you did have to take care with the Old Tom. Years ago my father bought in a barrel of this draft barley wine, the consumption of which caused a stairs-stumble incident (not me, by the way, but the culprit knows who they are).

I guess what we are talking about here is the crossing of lines, and the blurring of local distinction. Is a Cornish beer still Cornish if it’s brewed in the Midlands and owned by an American company; is a fine York beer still a York beer if it’s brewed in Stockport?

The danger lies in the companies becoming so big that they end up forgetting why they started making local beer in the first place.

Still on local beery matters, I’ll raise a glass to the efforts of villagers in Murton who are reportedly trying to turn their local, The Bay Horse, into a community pub along the lines of the Golden Ball, York’s first community co-operative pub.

The Golden Ball is a lovely pub, by the way, and well worth a look if you are visiting York. Locals know that already, of course, as locals usually do.

A headlight bulb went on the old Volvo the other day. Following my lazy new custom, I drove to Halfords and got them to do the job. It costs twice as much but saves on rooting around under the bonnet.

At this point the internet complicated matters. Now the internet is not required to replace a bulb; but it is necessary to tell the company how they did. Normally I ignore such entreaties, but the man who served me asked nicely, and also pointed out that he’d polished the headlights on our car and cleared the front number plate.

The car was very dirty – so filthy I drove in shame to the car wash in Acomb, where an efficient team of Eastern Europeans, at least that’s what they sounded like, flushed away the dirt and restored the car to its dinted glory.

Back home I logged onto giveusasteer.com and entered the details I’d been given. Here’s a steer for you, Halfords: have a system that works. All yours did was increase my antipathy towards internet surveys. Your colleague Paul B was certainly helpful – more helpful than your internet page. I filled in the details and a warning told me I’d done something wrong. Same thing second time, so I gave up. Sorry, Paul B.

Perhaps I should Tweet about it now instead. Or bore the arse off everyone I know on Facebook. There must be some modern retaliation available for this situation. Not that I care really or even remotely.

You can’t spend long online nowadays without some company or other urging you to share your experience. Everything is rated and then graded by algorithms or whatever they are. My new approach will be to respond to nothing. These companies only want to monetise the information in some way or other; they only want to know more about you, and – God knows – they already know too much about us already.

All the earnest entreaties to rate this book or that CD; all the faux-friendly messages to share your experience – they’re all just the way business works on the internet. We can’t escape the info-spies, but we don’t have to make life even easier for them.

The effect the internet has had, and is having, on our lives is something that interests me on my little ledge. Mostly my attention has concentrated on the threat to newsprint, but digital platforms have their problems too. Twitter is said to be in crisis, at least according to the financial headlines and the money-grabbing panic merchants of the global stock market.

In the final quarter of last year, Twitter had revenues or $710 million (£490 million) and a net loss of $90 million, according to John Naughton in the Observer; and he knows about these things.

Revenue was up 90 per cent, Naughton pointed out, and losses were down by 27 per cent.

In other words, Twitter should break even and make a profit soon enough. Instead of celebrating that, the Cassandras of what Naughton calls the “technology babblesphere” are gloomily predicting that Twitter might not have a future.

Because of all this, Jack Dorsey, the boss of Twitter, is apparently determined to ape the much more successful, and much more profitable, Facebook.

Now I like both of them, but making Twitter more like Facebook won’t work; it needs to be made more like Twitter instead – keep what makes it fun, and leave Facebook to its unparalleled success.

That said, me and my ledge-bound laptop would be lost without Twitter or Facebook – especially as Facebook is the closest thing to a daytime social life available to a person working from home.

Dear London,

“Once I used to know and love you, but lately we have drifted, as old friends sometimes do. You were there for my student years; there, too, for the first ten years of my working life. You were there when I fell out and into love; there when I met my wife; there, by a whisker, when our first boy arrived late on a hot night in Lewisham.

I may have been born in Bristol and raised south of Manchester, but you owned me. But not anymore; after 27 years in York, my affection for you has dimmed. Partly this is because you’ve changed, or maybe we just drifted, as that can happen too.

You thought you had everything sewn up years ago, all the way back in seventeen-something-or-other when you had Samuel Johnson say those words in your defence, immortal words more or less: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life…” The concluding part of that quotation is not always mentioned, but here it is: “for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Now there is in London little that ordinary people can afford. Soon you will have to be a millionaire to buy a two-bedroom hovel in your less fashionable outer reaches. Or even maybe just to rent one.

Don’t get me wrong, London. For a day or a weekend, my fast fidelity to the north might be temporarily forgotten in the busy rush of your charms. But you have grown greedy over the years – greedier even than in my day, and that’s saying something.

For months now, I have been reading about this garden bridge of yours. This folly says it all really. Dreamed up by Joanna Lumley, apparently, this Garden Bridge was due to have been built by the “philanthropy of private enterprise” as the always readable Ian Jack put it in his column in The Guardian on Saturday. When the cost rose from £115 million to £175 million, the bankers’ pockets turned out not to be so deep. So your mayor on Earth, Boris Johnson, stumped up £30 million of public money from Transport for London, while George Osborne – you know, Mr Austerity himself – said he’d match that with £30 million from the back of the Treasury sofa.

So once more you are snaffling up funds denied to those who live elsewhere – especially in the north.

In his column, Ian Jack wonders how you can have £60 million of public money for such an absurd project, while in Lancashire five museums will close at the end of next month, as the county council has been forced to cut its museums budget from £1.3million to less than £100,000.

Is your river-spanning vanity project really worth five museums in the north? And that’s only to mention Lancashire. Not far away in Liverpool, the city has, according to its mayor, Joe Anderson, lost 58 per cent of its annual budget since 2011.

The thing is, London, you may be an old friend but this has to be said: you just have too much of everything nowadays. And the last thing we need to spend public money on is a plant-populated bridge across a river spanned many times already.

Jane Duncan, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, believes plans for your new bridge should be suspended and scrutinised before more public money is spent. And she is right about that.

You see, London, apart from anything else, that bridge will suck up £60 million in public money, while remaining essentially a semi-private corporate space. The writer Will Self joined a mass protest the other day against the way public areas in London are falling into corporate hands, with open spaces in the City being governed by the rules of the corporations that own them.

And you know, London, Self is right about this. Okay he may too often pick a long word when a shorter one would have done the job, but his thoughts on the privatising of your open spaces are worth listening to.

Personally, London – my old mucker – I don’t think you should get a penny of public money towards your ridiculous Garden Bridge until all the threatened museums, all the closed-down libraries and all the struggling theatres in the north and other ‘distant’ environs have had their fair share.

Sorry for it all to end this way, London. I have fond memories, but really nowadays you are just taking the mick.”

No longer yours, Julian.

JEREMY Hunt is not a popular man and if you ask me he only has himself to blame. But let’s admit for a moment that there are two sides in any industrial dispute, and that both parties can be at fault at times.

Some newspapers have defended the Health Secretary, insisting he was right to impose his new contract on junior doctors: he’s the boss and that’s his right, they said in their leader columns, adding that the BMA had been after a fight and needed bringing to heel.

The trouble with this line is that Jeremy Hunt has behaved appallingly throughout the dispute with junior doctors. He has squirmed and shifted; he has massaged statistics to suit his argument; and he has blundered and blustered.

He has carried on like the worst sort of boss, bullying and blindly not listening; and insisting on the reasonableness of his argument while at the same time being completely unreasonable.

But he will get his comeuppance – and I don’t just mean all those mini-compilations on Facebook in which all the times his name has been comically mispronounced have been brought together for our general amusement. What’s the betting he will be removed quietly when the dispute is forgotten?

At the end of last week Jeremy Hunt announced that the new contract would now be imposed, whether junior doctors liked it or not. In support of this action, he suggested that health truth bosses around the country supported him – a statement which soon began to slip away.

One by one, the bosses of foundation hospital trusts up and down the land piped up to say that they didn’t necessarily support Hunt – and that they could not be forced to impose his deal on junior doctors, and would offer better deals locally.

So once again Jeremy Hunt was saying one thing, only for the opposite to be proved true.

It takes something for one man to have so catastrophically fall out with nearly all junior doctors. One of those he has infuriated is the daughter of a former Tory cabinet minister. Dr Hannah Mitchell wrote to a newspaper accusing Hunt of misusing statistics and alienating “an entire generation of junior doctors”, adding: “Health secretaries have come and gone, imposing measures of varying unpopularity, but not one has managed to alienate healthcare workers in the way he has.”

How true – the man is a disgrace and, I honestly worry, a threat to the NHS he claims to admire. Traditionally, the Conservatives have not been loved or trusted when it comes to the NHS. Maybe that antipathy isn’t entirely fair, but it is there for a reason.

Hunt’s dispute has been over a Tory manifesto pledge for a seven-day NHS – something which many doctors say already exists. One doctor’s wife wrote to a newspaper saying that if the NHS wasn’t operating at weekends, could Mr Hunt tell her where her husband had been every weekend for the past 17 years.

David Cameron habitually expresses his support and admiration for the NHS, and I guess we have to believe him. Yet some in his party disparage the NHS, including the MEP Daniel Hannan, who went on Fox News in the US some years ago to warn America not to make the same ‘catastrophic’ mistake as us by having a socialist health-care system.

Cameron later ticked off Hannan, insisting his views were “eccentric”. A mild telling off if ever there was.

But back to Jeremy Hunt. In an interview this morning, Mr Hunt says that the NHS “remains the single biggest reason why most people are proud to be British” – “Because we were the first country in the world to say it doesn’t matter who you are – rich or poor, young or old, north or south – you should have access to excellent healthcare and it should never be a question of your bank balance.”

Fine words and very true – but they don’t seem to chime with the way he has conducted himself during his protracted dispute with junior doctors. And like Cameron, Hunt can trundle out the worthy words when he needs to, but should we trust what he says? I’m afraid it’s still a ‘no’ from me.

THE disappearance of things is part of modern life. Shops, pubs, newspapers – all can vanish almost overnight.

The impending closure of the Independent newspaper is just the latest example of this trend. The other day I went to buy some new running shoes, only to find a notice on the shop window saying this was now an internet-only business.

So I went out for my Sunday morning run, pounding into York still wearing old shoes that hurt my feet a bit. York Minster glowed in the early sunshine, a glorious sight to lift a middle-aged jogger’s soul – even perhaps his feet. Nearby I saw that the Viking Loom had shut, a shop selling wool and stuff (my knowledge of this establishment is second-hand). After that I ran down Stonegate and past the now empty Mulberry Hall, a shop selling china and stuff.

What a sad sight – even though I hardly ever went in there, fine china being beyond my reach and my interest. I liked the kitchen shop, although again it was expensive. Still, I was saddened to see the place shut up and empty.

A little later, my weary feet took me up Micklegate, passing a fair number of closed shops, although some are waiting revival, including a planned pub from BrewDog, brewers of very splendid bottled beers (the consumption of which makes a Sunday morning run all the more important).

Back home, the sweat salting my skin, I sit down to write this blog, thoughts of gone things filling my mind. The Independent is ending print publication and going online-only, after selling its very good tabloid i-newspaper to Johnston Press, owners of the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post.

Now this makes me sad because I like newspapers, yet I didn’t buy the Independent all that often. So as with Mulberry Hall, I am mourning the passing of something I didn’t bother to support.

I don’t feel guilty about all that unbought fine china, but the copies of the Independent I didn’t get round to buying do lie heavy on my soul. It’s a good newspaper, but there are only so many pages of newsprint one pair of eyes can skim and scan.

Most weeks I only buy two newspapers, a Saturday Guardian and the Observer on a Sunday. The rest of the week my smart-phone keeps me in touch with what’s in the papers and being reported on the BBC.

The crumbling of the Independent is only the start of it, sadly. All traditional media have been hit by the digital tsunami – digital news being cheaper to supply than printed news.

The Guardian is also struggling, with sales of the newspaper slipping while use of the website rises all the time; it has plenty of readers but few of them pay for the privilege (including me, Monday to Friday).

So are newspapers dead as long prophesised or just moving into digital versions of themselves; and can any newspaper boss work out a decent way to make a living from the internet?

Other print newspapers will fall, and that will be sad to readers who like the rustle of newsprint – but the printed word is expensive to produce. Yet a good newspaper is more than words on print; it is a collaboration between bright, competitive and sometimes argumentative people; it is the sum of its awkward, quarrelsome parts; it is the reach of its long and intrusive roots; oh, it is many things, and maybe eventually the digital world will capture all that and keep newspapers alive in a different way.

Maybe one day.

A newspaper headline caught my eye the other day. It wasn’t dramatic or anything, but I liked what it had to say: “Banish those midlife blues – the secret to happiness starts with the little things in life.”

This story was in the Observer, which remains one of the little things in my own life. It’s there most Sundays and has been since the mid-1980s when I used to do Saturday shifts at the newspaper. Afterwards I’d meet my girlfriend/now wife for a meal and a film, then later I’d buy a first edition of the paper at Charing Cross and point out my contributions as we caught the rattle train home. My efforts on that newspaper’s behalf were small but perfectly formed, as used to be said of a long-ago editor of the Observer.

Anyway I like the idea of finding happiness in the little things. The story quoted Paul Dolan, author of a book called Happiness By Design and professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics.

Professor Dolan had been called on to comment about the recent survey which concluded that we are at our most miserable between the ages of 50 and 54, and have to wait until we are 65 for things to perk up again.

Too much was made of the so-called U-shape dip of our 40s and 50s when misery is said to collect, said the professor, adding: “It’s more about actually changing what you do to do more of the things we like – listen to music, go outdoors, meet friends and new people. If everybody did that every day, we’d be a lot happier.”

Listen to music, go for a walk or spend time with friends – well I do all of those and reckon they make me happy; or less unhappy than I might otherwise be. Maybe there are music-hating hermits with no friends who always have a smile on their face, but it seems unlikely; and besides no one is there to say for sure.

Small things make us happy because big things make us nervous – even good big things cast a shadow of expectation. Also happiness prefers to surprise us rather than being sought out; happiness can slip away when it sees its name in the diary.

Professor Dolan has been a well-being adviser to the government, but don’t hold that against him. One piece of advice he offers is never to read self-help books, as they “don’t work but merely encourage people to go and buy another self-help book”.

Well I’ve helped myself by never reading one of those and I don’t intend to start now; never been on a diet either, and I plan stay off those for as long as possible too (or for as long as the buttons on my Levi’s will do up).

Yes, little things can make us happy. Music, walks and friends. And snubbing the prime minister. Just a moment ago a party political broadcast for the Conservative Party popped up on the television screen when I was least expecting it. Before David Cameron’s faux-matey posh tones had finished saying: “This country is full of hard-working people…” I’d turned the TV off. And I felt much better for it. Cheered me up no end to escape whatever Mr Cameron had been about to say.

Now it’s time for a coffee. That mug of obliterated, brewed and plunged coffee beans will make me happy, unless it keeps me awake and then it won’t. This happiness lark is complicated.

FIRST thing each morning my face is reflected in the black screen of the laptop. Once that worrying sight has gone, I run my fingers over the rocky outcrop of headlines. Does this bump appeal more than that one?

Sometimes I look inwards instead, but introspection has its limits. There is only so much of value to be squeezed from the tattered soul of a middle-aged freelance/jobless person with money worries, limping ambitions and a late but stubborn desire to earn money from putting words on top of each other.

Occasionally I spot a new category into which I might fit. This happened the other day with the discovery of the “skipped middle”, a label for British parents in their 50s who, according to a survey, see their inheritances diminish as their ageing parents either spend the money on the grandchildren instead, or set it aside to pay for their own social care.

According to the Social Market Foundation, the “skipped middle” are those most likely to lose out financially as parents live longer and move from leaving money in their wills to handing it out while they are alive.

The think-tank found that four in ten older adults now believe their grandchildren are more in need of help than their own offspring.

So should those of us in the “skipped middle” feel hard done by? Oh, not really. Sometimes these surveys are specious at best.

This one, for instance, is reported to have found a move away from bequests on death to lifetime “gifts”, with the proportion of ‘in-life’ gifts from parents to children growing from 6.1 to 8.2 per cent of parents. Now that doesn’t sound a lot to me, and it hardly amounts to moving away.

Time for an honest confession. Down the years, we have been given ‘in-life’ help – and, by the way, isn’t that a horrible coinage?

Being in the middle, skipped or otherwise, is just what it is. My own midway point sees me with both parents alive and in their eighties, and three offspring in their twenties. My wife’s parents are still around too, and heading for 80, so between us we have a full set.

Sometimes we wonder what we might one day inherit, then we push the thought away, upset by the unseemly calculation.

But in the middle we definitely are. Early on we were way back in the shuffling queue, but not so much nowadays. Not everyone wishes to have children, but seeing a generation below is a comfort – and a worry sometimes too, as is having a generation above.

Thinking about it a few paragraphs in, such surveys are really rather annoying with their invention of dubious social categories. A whole industry has been built round sifting the soil of life in search of unremarkable nuggets.

With skipping on the agenda, here is a quote from the American journalist and humourist Arthur ‘Bugs’ Baer. He died as long ago as 1969, but his words still smart nicely.

“It was as helpful as throwing a drowning man both ends of the rope,” Baer wrote once.

There is as I know only too well another affliction of the skipped middle – the skipping of sleep. With that in mind, here is another line from Arthur Baer: “His insomnia was so bad, he couldn’t sleep during office hours.”

I can summon up a colleague or two who used to nod off at their desks occasionally, but it wouldn’t be fair to name names.

THE answer to the question “Are newspapers biased?” belongs in the same category as the one about the Pope’s religion and the woodland toilet habits of bears.

To no general surprise from this ledge-bound observer, a new YouGov poll across Europe finds that British people are the most likely to say their press is right wing, and also too negative about immigration.

The polling organisation reminds us, in introducing its results, that journalists are often thought to be biased. Such criticism is directed often at the BBC, it points out. During the last election, the Corporation was criticised by Labour for giving too much prominence to fears over a deal with the SNP, and also ticked off by Nigel Farage when the Ukip leader became outraged after being booed on Question Time. A harrumphing Farage declared the audience remarkable “even by the left-wing standards of the BBC”.

I reckon that booing Nigel Farage ought to be as natural to a proud Briton as mumbling the words to the national anthem, but there you go. Since the election, incidentally, supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have spent much time laying into the BBC for being institutionally right-wing.

The BBC was not, however, in the brief for this YouGov survey. The research asked people in seven European countries to assess newspaper bias in five areas. The pollsters concluded: “At most 32% of British people say the media gets the right balance (on crime), falling behind the European average on housing, health, immigration and economics.”

The poll also decreed that on average British people are “more likely than any other country to see the media as skewed towards the right (26 per cent compared to 23 per cent for Finland and 19 per cent for France)”.

The poll then subtracted the percentages for those who thought newspapers were biased to the left, and Britain’s media was still viewed as having a right-wing bias.

I’d say the bias of newspapers moves in an out of focus depending on the election cycle. When an election looms, The Sun, the Mail, the Times and Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Express will all point their big smoking guns at Labour. Only the Mirror will attack the Conservatives, while the Guardian, the Observer and the Independent titles may offer qualified support to Labour, although that is not guaranteed.

Outside of an election, the bias subsides a little but never evaporates.

An interesting question, not covered by the YouGov poll, is whether any of this matters. There are two areas to be looked at here: reader sophistication, and the internet and social media.

Someone might read The Sun, say, because they like the style of the newspaper and feel it fits the shape of their day – and they might even do that if they usually vote Labour. They will be smart enough to spot when the newspaper is being biased.

Once this mattered more that it does, because once newspapers, TV and radio had the news agenda sewn up. Today opinion spawns online in wild mushrooming profusion. Much online comment is more biased than anything in any newspaper; but at least it is out there, offering a balance of sorts.

Perhaps a bigger question, and one that undoes some of what I’ve just said, is that seeking a balanced view is too much effort for many readers and consumers of news. They prefer to stay where they are comfortable and where their prejudices fit like the contours of an old armchair.

The bias of newspapers is further complicated by the way they are owned, with a mogul such as Rupert Murdoch having a world political view he might wish to ‘share’ with his editors.

As a rule, media moguls tend not to have left-wing opinions. Robert Maxwell did once own the Daily Mirror, but his example is far from shining. According to onetime Mirror editor Roy Greenslade, “Maxwell was impossible to work for, a mercurial man with a monstrous ego.” After his death at sea, Maxwell was also found to have misappropriated the Mirror pension fund.

As for newspaper bias, just remember not to swallow every inky word. Stay sceptical, stay wary – but don’t get obsessed about it.

Last Tuesday on my little ledge, I lamented the fact that the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is to snaffle up the Royal Photographic Society collection from the National Media Museum in Bradford.

Since then the row over the photographs has intensified – and the museum has also abandoned the Bradford International Film Festival (cancelled last year and now gone for ever more).

This has led a local MP to criticise the “great and the good in London” for pushing ahead with these plans, and possibly changing the museum’s name to Science Museum North, without consulting anyone in Bradford.

Judith Cummins, Labour MP for Bradford South, said: “I was shocked to learn that the decision to transfer the world-renowned Royal Photographic Society collection, the abandoning of the international film festival and the move to rename the museum were all made over 200 miles away in London.”

As I mentioned last week, the National Media Museum has said it will now “focus on the science, technology and culture of light and sound and will retain material relevant to that”. And good luck trying to sell that one to the puzzled punters of Bradford.

London has, as I lamented here last week, too much cultural clout already. This view is not uncommon among those of us who live some distance from the capital, and now it is echoed in a report called A Policy for the Arts and Culture in England – The Next Steps?

According to The Stage newspaper, this report is intended to influence the government’s new white paper on culture, expected later this year. The intro to the Stage story says it all really: “Organisations in London receive almost twice as much arts funding as the rest of England combined, despite accounting for just a third of the country’s cultural offering.”

In other words, London gets more of everything than everywhere else, which is as many of us have always feared. This Next Steps report also reveals that the average London organisation receives £2.1 million, compared with £495,000 for those outside the capital. Again according to The Stage, “the authors of the report claim the imbalance between London and the regions is ‘static’ and shows little sign of change”.

Among the findings in the report was the claim that Londoners receive £65.10 per head for the arts organisations in the capital, while the rate per head outside of London was £4.91 – which I reckon must be about the price of a pint in one of London’s more ‘reasonably priced’ pubs.

A capital city will always receive a greater weight of funding, a bigger slice of everything – but the regions should not be forgotten. After all, you can’t fuel the cultural wing of a northern powerhouse on crumbs.

Incidentally, while we are in the artsy arena, the education secretary Nicky Morgan is always saying with one breath that the government doesn’t undervalue the arts in schools, then adding with the other that pupils should shun the humanities and study science, technology, engineering and maths.

Surely a better education system would encourage children to do both – to study the technical subjects alongside the arts. For if you take a broad definition – literature and theatre, dance and music, cinema and computer games, television and social media – the arts are a huge earner in this country.

And aside from that narrow monetary focus, it is just better if people know as much about everything as possible, and sometimes and interest in the arts can really lift up a life.

Sometimes the news is massaged like a big, wet lump of clay. So it is this morning with a series of government-issue reports of a speech David Cameron will give today about prisons.

The Daily Mail takes one aspect of the proposals in order to lay down a typically robust headline – “LOCK UP PRISONERS JUST FOR WEEKEND” – above a report suggesting that prisoners near to the end of their sentence would only be behind bars at the weekend.

The Independent goes for a more nuanced approach – “Treat prisoners as assets not liabilities – PM” and its report says Cameron now believes prison reform must be the “great progressive cause” of British politics.

The Guardian, meanwhile, goes with: “Cameron to give more power to governors in prisons shakeup”, and reports that the prime minister will introduce prison league tables and improve education in prisons.

Such league tables already exist for schools, but it seems unlikely that the effects will be quite the same, with parents of prisoners lobbying for them to be sent to one jail rather than another, but you never know.

On one level, what the prime minister plans to say today is encouraging – a lot more encouraging than his previous Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, who was by most accounts a disaster in the job, antagonising everyone inside and outside of prisons.

Michael Gove took a similarly combative approach to education, annoying the hell out of teachers, but since succeeding Grayling he has shown a more intelligent approach in his new brief. He has also spent much of his time clearing up the mess left by Grayling’s belligerent blundering.

David Cameron likes a big speech full of sweeping statements. Today he will say that the “failure of our system today is scandalous”, adding: “Forty-six per cent of all prisoners will reoffend within a year of release; 60% of short-sentenced prisoners will reoffend within the same period. And current levels of prison violence, drug taking and self-harm should shame us all.”

He will also say that in “a typical week, there will be almost 600 incidents of self-harm; at least one suicide; and 350 assaults, including 90 on staff. This failure really matters.”

He will argue that reoffending costs the country up to £13bn a year but could be cut through education and rehabilitation. For too long, Cameron will say, governments have adopted an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to prisons.

In another pre-announced section of his speech, he will add: “When I say we will tackle our deepest social problems and extend life chances, I want there to be no no-go areas.”

All of this is good. It is better to hear a prime minister talk about prisons rather than ignore them; better to hear a Tory prime minister attempt some intelligent compassion, rather than spluttering the old “lock ’em up and throw away the key” line generally favoured by his tribe.

It is more usual in the Conservative Party to hear the likes of Lord (Michael) Howard insisting that “prison works” – a view he repeated in December 2010 when Kenneth Clarke as Justice Secretary attempted to reform sentencing. Howard said Clarke’s plan to send fewer offenders to prison was “fatally flawed” and accused him of having an “aversion to imprisonment”.

Now David Cameron seems to believe that prison doesn’t work. He may well be right about that, but it is easy to see why voters sometimes end up confused. Here is a prime minister whose previous Justice Secretary antagonised everyone; a prime minister whose party usually favours locking up as many people as possible. And now he is saying what appear to be sensible, liberal-minded things about prisons (while overlooking the cuts he has made to the system, as is his way).

The catch with Cameron – the Cameron Catch, if you like – is whether anything substantive will follow the fine words. A cynic passing by, or indeed sitting on a ledge, might pause to wonder this: when David Cameron makes a speech, it’s almost as he silently goes “Ah, job done”, forgetting that the real work hasn’t even begun.