IT IS a little after 7am and the radio is on. The news rolls out in a gloomy carousel.

This road has been travelled more times than I can remember, so the route is familiar. As the humdrum landmarks come and go, the BBC Today programme reports from Paris and London on the wave of attacks in the French capital.

I wonder about turning off or switching over. Perhaps it would be better to let the iPod shuffle through some tunes by way of random distraction. Instead I stick to the radio as the dreadful news from France loops round.

At the time the scale of the devastation is all too apparent, but the appalling human tally has yet to be computed. Later in the day it will emerge that as many as 129 people have been killed by the gunmen of Islamic State, with many more having been injured, nearly 100 very seriously. Those who died were killed without pause or mercy. The civil war in Syria and the war in Iraq will be said to have provided the warped reason for the murderous onslaught.

As the miles slip beneath the car, my understanding of what has happened or why slips away too. How can one human being do such a thing to another? Music might be better, I think again, but stick with the news. When truly appalling things happen, you want to know the details, even if they are too upsetting to comprehend, even if the unrolling news makes you want to cry.

Many of the victims were young. They died in the Bataclan concert hall, gunned down as they listened to a concert by a Californian band called Eagles of Death Metal. Later it will emerge that they were murdered by four gunmen of their own age, spraying the room with AK-47s. The gunmen will be said to have been be calm. They paused to reload, suggesting that they had been trained to do this terrible thing. One of them reportedly shouted Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) as he fired.

If God is anything he will be greatly angered and sorrowed that his name could be taken in vain for such evil purposes. If God exists at all, and sometimes even the devout must wonder.

Other victims died while eating and drinking in restaurants, doing nothing other than relaxing and enjoying themselves, living the life, meeting friends to share a drink and a meal – engaging in the things that make life worthwhile, lost in the ordinary pleasures of a Friday night.

The old car rolls on. There is that farmhouse that splits the M62, always a landmark of stubborn individualism (‘Build your motorway here if you like, but I’m not budging…’). Soon it will be time to branch off and take the motorway towards the airport and then on to Knutsford where my mother lives.

The radio keeps me company all the way, but there is no comfort in this companionship. Just sorrow and anger, confusion and a lack of comprehension – on my part and the part of everyone.

That is why we listen, why we read, and why we watch at such times. There is a sort of communion in feeling sad, angry and confused. Members of our race did this to other members of our race, so we are involved and shutting our eyes and ears won’t change that. I understand sometimes when people say they don’t watch the news because it is “too depressing”. And, yes, no news recently has been more morally miserable.

But we need to know, we are part of this – as fellow human beings, but also as westerners whose liberal ways and values are threatened.

These values are important and we must defend them: they define us and how we live – and sometimes how we die too, when liberalism comes up against the hard face of rank and unhinged intolerance. Yet you cannot beat intolerance by becoming more intolerant yourself – we can’t match their xenophobia with more of our own. Tolerance doesn’t work like that and tolerance is important.

These thoughts will arise later, but for now the rawness fills my mind. I have arrived and can switch the radio off – something I can’t do to my mind.

THE case of Gayle Newland is almost too weird to get your head round. This is the 25-year-old who duped her friend into having sex by pretending to be a man for two years.

Now you might reasonably wonder how such a thing could be possible. Blindfolds and a prosthetic penis provide the answer to the question you had never thought to ask.

Newland disguised her appearance and voice and persuaded a woman to put on a blindfold when they met. The women had sex about ten times until the complainant, also 25, took off her mask and saw the strap-on penis.

Newland went on trial at Chester crown court in September and was yesterday sentenced to eight years in prison by Judge Roger Dutton, who described her as “an intelligent, obsessional, highly manipulative, deceitful, scheming and thoroughly determined young woman”.

For her part, Newland claimed her accuser was aware of the pretence and that they were engaging in role play while struggling with their sexuality.

Unsurprisingly, this court case and now the sentencing have created a lot of media interest – for the harsh but simple reason that most of us had never heard of such sexual behaviour.

Perhaps I have led a simple life, but my first thought was that the details of this case were almost too bizarre and outlandish to believe. If a novelist had written such a story, the plot would have been rejected out of hand for simply not being believable.

This case has stirred a great deal of prurient speculation: human nature cannot be granted such a glimpse in the land of otherness without wanting to ponder at length on the details.

A number of obvious questions arise. Can a blindfolded woman not tell the difference between a woman and a man? Does a pretend penis feel at all like a real one attached to a real sweaty man? How could such a deception continue for so long? Why didn’t the complainant remove her blindfold long before the tenth encounter? Or was this just part of the sexual roleplay?

There are other questions we could be asking once we have given up tutting and tittering. Perhaps a good starting point is to look at the photograph of Gayle Newland published today as she is led away handcuffed to a security officer. In this court snatch photograph the young woman looks up at the photographer. Often in such situations the defendants express anger or spit fury at the lens. Newland does none of this. Instead she just looks utterly miserable, wretched and perplexed.

The next question to ask is why this young woman has been given such a long sentence. Judge Dutton took into account Newland’s various personality disorders and associated problems, but said: ‘As an aspect of mercy, I do not increase the starting point beyond eight years.” Sometimes mercy wears a hard face.

The judge also condemned her cruel deception and pointed to the psychological harm it had done to the complainant. Concern for the damage done to the complainant is certainly an important consideration. But does it make sense to send this woman to prison for so long? Although Newland was clearly the dominant partner in this strange relationship, it is also possible to see the case as one which features two damaged or sexually confused women.

According to the Prison Reform Trust, ten per cent of men and 30 per cent of women have had a previous psychiatric admission before they enter prison, while 26 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men say they have received treatment for a mental health problem in the year before custody.

Personality disorders are “particularly prevalent among people in prison” the Trust reports, with 62 per cent of male and 57 per cent of female sentenced prisoners having a personality disorder. Maybe this isn’t surprising as having a personality disorder perhaps predisposes one to committing crimes.

But it still makes you wonder if Gayle Newland should be in prison at all or if she just needs some serious psychiatric help.

THE path is dark and wet when it happens. This twisting track runs along the edge of the university, with the open stray to one side and a thicket of trees to the other.

Not much is on my mind, apart from a gloomy analysis of my Wednesday squash match. At least I managed one win, I think, one more than last week. There was even a draw recently. How big these small victories are written.

Perhaps I am too old to get any better and this is the downhill stretch, I think, knowing I’ll never give up until my legs will no longer carry me onto the court. Years ago there was a man in his late seventies who bandaged his knees and elbows to keep on playing. Perhaps that’ll be my golden period.

My trusty Marin takes another bend in the track. Now there are trees on both sides and the shadows have deepened. This is an evening for steady cycling, nothing fast, and anyway the knees could do without the added stress.

That’s when I see the light, jumping and rushing towards me. Everything happens in a sweaty clutch of seconds. I am on the left where I should be. And another cyclist is heading towards me at full pelt, a racing bike by the looks of it. The rider has his head down and he is really going it, body leaning and turning with the bicycle like a pro-cyclist. This track is fun to cycle along. Perhaps he has lost himself in the moment. Or perhaps he is a complete idiot. Maybe both.

He gets nearer, dazzling me with his front lamp. We are both lit up unlike those dim cyclists who play York roulette with the night-time traffic. He is coming right towards me now, still going fast, still on my side of the track.

Don’t the rules of the road apply here, mate – you stick to your side and I’ll stick to mine?

I try to stop, shuddering and sliding in the wet. And he races even closer. A head-on collision seems certain. At the last split shaver of a second he wobbles, swerves and passes within an inch, leaving a long scratch in the air around me. I just manage to stay upright. Stopping I glance over my shoulder. ‘Shit!’ the other cyclist says, almost toppling into the trees. But he stays vertical and wobbles off without another word.

That would have been a hospital job all round, a two-bike pile-up. Why are other people such idiots? Probably because we are all idiots some of the time. But that thought is too calmly philosophical for the moment. My heart is racing and something is thumping in my head. Taking a deep breath, I resume my ride.

At the end of the twisting track there is a short section of road, then a gateway to Walmgate Stray. This route is newish to me and crossing in the dark is a challenge. Many students walk across here, most of them dressed entirely in black. There are no lights, so night sky and black-coated student merge into one wall of darkness until you are almost on them.

A serve or two more, a wobble or three, and the stray is crossed. After that there is the long stretch between the barracks, dark as sin and with hidden bollards at the end. And more students in shadows.

Now I have reached the main road, still in once piece. The lights change and I go down the dead-end road that leads to the millennium bridge over the river. The Ouse has broken its banks and floodwater covers the path to the right of me. Luckily I am turning left and heading over the bridge, which is lit up at night, unlike the students. Home is reached without further incident.

The dedicated cyclist learns to be wary. You expect the cars that come too close. You live in fear of those giant rubbish lorries like a house on fat wheels. You dread the silent electric buses. You remember that taxis are prone to sudden U-turns at the drop of a traffic queue.

And in all this you completely forget that sometimes other cyclists can be the problem.

AN indication of what David Cameron is up against on Europe was yesterday quickly illustrated by one pretend pig and a bowl of thin gruel.

Oh you can’t get better than an angry Eurosceptic Tory when it comes to laying on the quaint old sayings with a trowel.

Jacob Ress-Mogg did his usual Dickensian turn in the Commons, saying of Mr Cameron’s announcements on Europe: ‘This is pretty thin gruel. It is much less than people had come to expect from the government.’

Then he swept off in a snowstorm to make sure some pesky young immigrants found their way to the workhouse rather than sneaking into honest people’s homes to sit before the fire without proper invitation.

Sir Bill Cash, veteran Eurosceptic and a splutter on legs, described the proposed reforms on our relationship with Europe as a pig in a poke. You could almost see the spittle on the television screen.

Who on earth says things like that nowadays? Only ancient MPs whose faces come in different shades of purple. A pig in a poke, if memory serves, was a cat hidden in a bag and being passed off as a suckling pig. It means to buy something blind without having a peep.

The other useful contribution to the language that this animal has given us, apart of course from the bacon sandwich, is its ear. A pig’s ear is the most worthless part of the animal, and the expression usually means to botch something.

Mr Cameron’s speech mostly gets a hostile reception in this morning’s newspapers, many of which are deeply Eurosceptic – while at the same time, ironically, being deeply anti-Corbyn and generally pro-Tory.

I’d say that Mr Cameron did what could be expected of a man trying to negotiate a middle way in a general hope of staying in Europe. The trouble is that many members of his own party are such mouth-foaming anti-Europeans that nothing he could have said would have appeased them.

Like over-sensitive members of a family, they are pre-programmed to take offence. Never mind how vaguely Mr Cameron tries to frame his thoughts, some of them will storm home in a huff even before the first course is on the table. That’s politics for you. And family politics too sometimes.

The prime minister’s main demand was for flexibility over the negotiations on Britain’s future in Europe. Many of the anti-Europeans – not all of them Tories, as this issue cuts across parties – will see this as code for Mr Cameron being all too ready to bend over backwards to accommodate Europe.

The difficulty he has lies with those touchy relatives. Nothing he can say will assuage them. Even if he’d said we were banning Camembert, outlawing lager and attaching a big outboard motor to Britain so that we could proudly sail further away from the Continent – they would have still have accused him of going soft on Europe.

There is little sense in much of what is said. Anyone who remains unsure about what Britain should do is unlikely to find much mental sustenance in this debate. Both those who wish to remain in Europe and those who want to leave tend to paint extreme scenarios.

What do I think? Oh, gosh is that the time already?

Okay, I’m for staying in Europe, partly because it seems more sensible and partly because, well, have you seen some of the antis? Anything Nigel Farage believes in so passionately has got to be regarded with suspicion in my book.

As for David Cameron, he made a sensible but timid attempt to set out his demands. Further storms over Europe are forecast.

IT’S a little early but let’s pull a pint. I’ll have what he’s having.

This morning The Guardian reports that sales of Greene King IPA are on the rise in China, thanks to David Cameron taking the Chinese president to a pub. One drinker at a Chinese bar reportedly demanded: ‘Bring me another glass of IPA beer – the one that Big Daddy Xi drank!’

Perhaps there is a cultural difference here. Can you imagine a British drinker asking for the beer that Big Daddy Cameron drank? The dedicated ale man is more likely to grumble over the rim of his glass and order a different brand out of contrariness. Or wonder out loud why on earth the prime minister was drinking that stuff (more of which in a moment).

You may recall that when Mr Cameron was putting on a show for China, there was a bizarre moment when he took President Xi Jingping along to his ‘local’ pub, The Plough, which is near Chequers, his official country retreat. The news footage showed Mr Cameron at the bar saying: ‘Good evening, good evening – how are you? I think we’re going to have two pints of IPA…’

Is this is really Mr Cameron’s local or just the place he takes visiting dignitaries? The landlord, Steve Hollings, should know and he is quoted as saying that the Camerons do pop into his pub – ‘When they come here it’s just Mr and Mrs Cameron, not the prime minister. He’s not working. You couldn’t wish to meet a nicer person.’

So anyone not wishing to meet the Prime Minister knows which pub to avoid. Again according to Mr Hollings, Mr Cameron usually drinks IPA, which is why Xi also tried it. The president ‘absolutely loved it, really, really enjoyed it’ and wanted another, ‘but was told they didn’t have time’.

Sales of Greene King IPA are said to be soaring in China following that one pint – and I do like the suggestion that Xi fancied more of a session, just imagine the truths that would have tumbled out if they’d got blathered.

That would have sealed the deal for the Communist Party spin doctors who wished to portray Xi as a man of the people. ‘Look he is still standing after five pints – more of a man than his friend Dave.’

Our leaders have often called on a pint as a populist prop. But this sort of spin is hardly new. Labour PM Harold Wilson was generally photographed with his jaws clamped round a pipe, but was said in private to have preferred cigars.

In The Guardian report, Peter Bloxham, who imports Greene King beers into China, says that ‘within two days of the great bar scene… people from all over China were ringing: agents, restaurants, bars, hotels. They wanted this beer.’

Behind this story lies another tale in which dedicated beer drinkers have for years disparaged Greene King IPA, condemning the beer as too bland and too weak and not really an IPA at all.

TWO soldiers prop themselves against the muddy wall of a trench. Dawn is just around the corner. They have been told to stand-to in readiness for possible enemy attack.

‘Soon be rum time,’ the first soldier says, shivering.

‘Best bit of the day,’ says his companion.

Their feet stand in slopping mud and there is a terrible smell. The latrine has overflowed into the trench again. All along the line other soldiers stand in readiness or as ready as they’ll ever manage.

‘Sometimes,’ says the first soldier, ‘you forget what life was like – you know, before all this shit.’

‘Aye,’ says his companion, ‘but one day we’ll go back, and even if we don’t make it back, someone will.’

‘Do you think one day people will remember us?’

‘What, you and me?’

‘No – all of us, remember all of us?’

The other soldier starts and swears. ‘One of them rats,’ he says. ‘Big as a cat it was, a muddy horrible cat.’

‘All of what we doing, for King and country and that, it’ll be worth it if they remember us.’

‘Happen. God my head is itching.’

The soldier removes his helmet for a scratch, and his dirty fingers scrabble through his sore scalp. He finds a louse and crushes it between the muddied nails of two fingers.

‘Got the bastard.’

The first soldier smiles at the second. ‘Always a good feeling that. All I hope is that when this is over and men gather to remember us that they learn how to bow properly.’

‘You what?’

Before the second soldier can say anything further, a bullet furrows through his itchy scalp and he drops dead into the mud. His friend screams…

What a lot of fuss and nonsense yesterday about whether or not Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn bowed sufficiently while laying a wreath for Remembrance Sunday. Poisonous stuff – mustard gas for the social media age, a toxic waft of bitchiness.

You surely don’t have to be a supporter of Mr Corybn to think this. I count myself as a puzzled observer, a leftie more or less for ever, yet someone still trying to work out the new Labour leader. But really – this was virulent. And in itself hugely disrespectful.

What better way to honour our war dead than to ruffle through the book of etiquette. Just what is the right degree of back inclination when laying a wreath? My God we can get carried away in this country sometimes. What a gap there was between the importance of this sombre occasion and the spite of those claiming that Mr Corbyn didn’t convey sufficient respect.

Today’s Daily Telegraph really has consulted an etiquette expert, one William Hanson, who says that Mr Corbyn’s “slight tip forward” was not up to the occasion and should have “gone down around 45 degrees from the waist”.

There is a gruesome comedy to such rules, in which there is a correct tilt of the back to mark the millions of men who have died in wars. If you look at photographs of the offending gesture, Jeremy Corbyn looks suitably sombre and his bow is solemn but undemonstrative. What’s wrong with that?

There is something morally queasy anyway about the way that honouring the dead of many wars now takes the shape of a contest to see which of our politicians is the most suitably sombre. Are David Cameron’s florid roast-beef features more fully set in sorrow than the ascetic bearded chops of Jeremy Corbyn?

All of this is like attending the funeral of a loved elderly relative and spending the entire time looking at people’s feet to see who has shown respect by cleaning their shoes  – and in doing so quite forgetting to honour the life of the deceased.

But back to our surviving soldier.

The fresh tears have dried on his face now, along with all the other tears. This soldier lives while his friend has died, even if inside he feels blank and dead.

Getting the last pull of smoke from his cigarette, he tells himself: ‘Perhaps if they ever to assemble to remember us, they should just tell the politicians to stay away. Fair to say that them bastards got us into this mess, ain’t it?’

WRITING a blog doesn’t take long. The words are released from quarantine and scurry onto the screen. It is, on the whole, a lot less trouble than changing a duvet cover.

Some people are good at these things and others are not. I am not one of life’s natural duvet changers, but in my new role as an accidental B&B host, sometimes that feathery monster has to be wrestled with.

Yesterday morning I must have spent almost as long fighting the duvet as I did punching out my blog. I know the theory: it has been explained to me on a number of occasions. You turn the cover inside out, reach inside to the bottom corners, grab hold of the duvet and give everything a vigorous shake. And hey bloody nothing it’s got tangled again. So duvet are cover are separated again, not that they had every really got it together.

Next you check the cover and notice that some of those stupid little buttons haven’t been undone. So you fumble and fiddle with fingers seemingly designed for other tasks. Then you try the inside-out trick again. You get hot and bothered. You swear because no one else is in the house to hear. And you wonder when life got so annoying.

Deep breath, another shake and the duvet curls up inside the cover, lurking like a dog hiding in a basket of washing.

Do dogs do that? They do in my imagination.

Eventually duvet and cover are more or less in harmony, the one inside the other, no lumps or rucks that I could see. Not that I am a perfectionist when it comes to duvets, more of a resigned realist.

Just now our guest came down for breakfast. She says she was awake at 3am. For a moment I worry about this: was my duvet scrum to blame somehow – and had she been lying awake thinking that whoever was on duvet duty didn’t know what they were about?

She doesn’t mention the duvet but does say that she sleeps badly most nights, although usually she manages to sleep until 4am. In our sleepless house, it’s a wonder she didn’t bump into one of us at that hour.

This guest, incidentally, works in a job centre. When told of my predicament, she wondered why I wasn’t claiming Job Seekers’ Allowance. ‘After all you’ve paid in all those years,’ she said. The reasons are complicated, but mostly to do with wounded pride – and my alleged career as a freelance journalist. The work has dried up at the moment. People tell me that this is what happens. So I’ll hold off a little longer. And anyway I am still writing the novel, the one that will solve all my problems – either that or the Lottery ticket I will buy this morning.

If things get really bad, I can always look for work as a duvet shaker.

SIDEBOOBS or speed cameras? Oh go on, let’s go for a twin-track approach here. A skim through the newspaper headlines on the BBC website produces evidence of both.

In pointing us towards the front page of today’s Daily Mail, the website uses the bold-type words: ‘The Mail leads with fury…’ Well doesn’t it just every day of the week – in Mail World there is a superfluity of annoyance.

The Mail lead accuses police forces around the country of pocketing millions from drivers attending speed awareness courses. They reportedly received £54 million last year alone by sending more than 1.3 million drivers on the “controversial one-day sessions”.

Just to drop a pebble fact into the fury pool, they don’t last a day but half a day. And I should know because I was one of those 1.3 million shame-faced drivers forced to sit in a hotel and be condescended to among a ‘classroom’ of other motoring miscreants.

Many drivers attend these courses because they cost slightly less than a speeding fine and avoid three points on your licence (and possibly a more expensive insurance premium).

In the eye of the Mail’s fury is Olly Martins, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire Police who has threatened to strictly enforce the 70mph limit on the M1 to raise funds and fill gaps left by government cuts.

This would upset the motorists’ favourite urban myth that the 70mph limit is really 80mph, as any fast-moving fool knows. Except that if you go on one of those courses you will be sadly disabused of such notions, and one of the ‘teachers’ will put on a primary school voice to tell that this is not the case.

My offence took place on the road out of Skipton, while heading to Cartmel at the bottom end of the Lake District (lovely village, full of food and the prettiest racecourse anywhere).

After a slow stretch the road opened up, the traffic got moving and we swooped down a steep dip. At the bottom of this rollercoaster hollow a speed-camera van had parked at just the point where passing vehicles would be travelling their fastest. I was doing 66mph. Yards later, as the incline bit, the old Volvo slowed and slipped below the speed limit.

Was that dangerous driving or a momentary lapse? Bit of both perhaps. But that camera had definitely been parked in a lucrative spot and was there to milk motorists. Such cameras record your speed at that moment, unlike the average-speed cameras on motorway roadworks, which in effect tot up your speed.

What did I learn from the course? Mostly that a roomful of grown-ups being treated like naughty children tend to look uncomfortable and mildly pissed-off. I did pick up something useful though. I knew this once, but these things fade. On a main country road that isn’t a dual carriageway the speed limit is 60mph (and not 66mph or other approximations).

Since that dull morning in the conference rooms of a York hotel I have kept to 60mph on such roads. On motorways I stick to 70mph apart from when I don’t. Occasionally the needle nudges eighty while overtaking. Driving at 70mph on a motorway does confine one among the slow squad, but there you go.

What I didn’t do was drive at 192mph. Even fine old Volvo estates can only manage so much. The engine with its 140,000 notches would have exploded long before then. No such worries for a speed-loving driver from Northampton, who filmed himself reaching that speed.

That fast and furious moment earned him two years in prison and a ten-year driving ban. His daughter was banned for driving for two years for encouraging the offence.

Now to those partially glimpses breasts of the beautiful and famous. The newspapers are much taken with the fashion for dresses with an open panel at the side. Sideboobs are everywhere and there is something vaguely smutty about all those photographs. Yet isn’t it all a bit Carry On too? Perhaps that is because ‘boobs’ is a funny word, a snigger in five letters.

On the Daily Mail website you will find its now-infamous sidebar which is filled every day with pictures of famous women either wardrobe malfunctioning or wearing skimpy bikinis. Today’s column of mild shame includes the actress Jennifer Lawrence at the Hunger Games premier wearing a dress with a bit at the side gone missing. I had a glimpse in the name of research.

So there you have it. Sideboobs and speed cameras.

EACH is represented by a three-letter acronym that needs little further explanation, even if the familiar letters span many knotted complications.

Conservative governments don’t much like the BBC and are nervous around the NHS. An irony here is that to small ‘c’ conservatives, both of these institutions represent much that is good about Britain.

Since the election the government has been engaged in much hostile battering of the BBC, and without warning or consultation enforced a budget cut equating to 20 per cent when George Osborne passed the £650 million cost of providing free TV licences to the over-75s from the Treasury to the BBC.

Just what logic was there for this bit of dodgy accounting other than to harm the BBC – an institution which, for all its faults, is loved by many and admired around the world? This was in effect a massive cut forced on the BBC to give a questionable benefit to the elderly – and, incidentally, another example of how older people are in general now better looked after than the young.

True, some elderly viewers may need the benefit brought by this act of official largesse – but so too will plenty of wealthy pensioners who could easily afford to pay the licence fee.

The hostility to the BBC among many on the right of the Tory party runs like a fever that sends their brains into meltdown. One example, as quoted by Nick Cohen in The Observer, is that some on the right believe that “BBC journalists asking business leaders if they think Britain should stay in the EU is evidence of bias”. Are these people completely bonkers or just so wedded to their one-track ideology that they can’t see anything beyond the end of their gin-soaked noses?

Apologies for the cliché – it’s quite possible that the noses will be wine-soaked or even dipped in the finest brandy. There is, I find, nothing like a reassuring cliché to lift the spirits when you are feeling annoyed.

If governments are to be judged on what they leave behind, and not merely on how they juggled the figures and how supinely they prostrated themselves before the Chinese moneylenders, then an administration which weakens and knobbles the BBC can only be said to have done harm to the cultural life of the nation.

Is that really what Conservative supporters with a small or capital ‘c’ wish to have as a legacy? Imagine the questions in the future. ‘So what did you do in the second Cameron government, Daddy?’ ‘What’s that you say? Oh, I see – well I helped to make sure that the BBC was nowhere near as good as it used to be. Proudest achievement in my life. Then I started on the NHS…’

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt is embroiled in a long and badly staged fight with junior doctors about his plans for a 24-hour NHS. Before pushing on further into this thorny thicket, let’s stop right there for a moment. That phrase about an ‘open all hours’ NHS is trundled out all the time – and yet in many senses that’s what we already have. So the label is toxic as it implies that if you disagree, then you must be against something that is obviously for the general good.

This week, Hunt escalated the dispute by offering what he says is an 11 per cent pay rise for 40,000 junior doctors – a crude but smart move, as 11 per cent sounds a lot. The doctors say the ‘rise’ is in fact a bad deal that will leave many of them worse off, and accuse Hunt of negotiating by soundbite and megaphone – or even, perhaps, by shouting soundbites down a megaphone.

Should we feel at all sorry for Hunt? Well that would go against the grain, but it is fair to say that a health secretary charged with facing down junior doctors in their pay negotiations is unlikely to make many new friends.

For many patients, junior doctors are the face of the NHS, and in an argument over a relatively small amount of money, Hunt has alienated the mass ranks of young doctors, leaving many to say that they would rather leave the country than accept the new contracts.

Incidentally, here’s a contrary thought, but should doctors even be allowed to go and work abroad so soon after all that money has been spent on their training? That will surely strike many patients and voters as less than fair.

Yesterday Hunt dragged his party’s manifesto commitment to a 24-hour into the argument, saying: ‘I cannot negotiate about a promise we made in a manifesto. I have an obligation to deliver that manifesto.’

Oh here we go again. Governments either ignore their manifesto pledges at will – or, when it is convenient, bang on and on about them. Most manifestos aren’t worth the price of the passing cloud they were written on. I’ve said it before, but here goes again: winning an election with a slim majority may give you the technical right to do what you want, but it doesn’t suggest that the whole country supports everything you wish to do.

So by the end of this government’s tenure, which of those two treasured acronyms will be struggling to keep those three letters stuck together? It’ll be a tight finish, but the BBC will take the biggest hit.

SHOCKING news – Blur frontman Damon Albarn thinks that the new Adele album will sound “middle of the road”. Well split me in half and sprinkle me with cinnamon.

I thought Adele being middle of the road was pretty much the point of Adele, along with the reason for her astonishing success.

People adore Adele for many reasons, and I can fathom few of them, but the way she stands astride that line down in middle of the road is one of them. She has a great voice and can belt out a song. And people seem to love that.

Everyone does become very excitable around Adele, and a touch fawning too, I’d say. The other morning there was a lengthy piece on Woman’s Hour – look, I was washing up, okay – in which the music journalist and academic Jude Rogers talked enthusiastically about Adele. The singer herself was nowhere to be seen or indeed heard. This was just a studio love-in about the fantastic nature of Adele. It was all a bit hagiographic for my tastes, but there you go.

Adele not being present on Woman’s Hour added up, in the sense that her popularity is allied to a certain reticence. Although she has a lively presence, and said also to be gloriously profane, she mostly prefers to let her music speak for her, which is fair enough.

Going by reported comments in the media, there has been a falling out or cooling off between Adele and Damon after they collaborated on her forthcoming album, 25.

Adele is reported to ‘regret’ working with Albarn, while he has been quoted as saying that their sessions had not been a success – ‘Will she use any of the stuff? I don’t think so.’

As well as saying the album would be middle of the road, Albarn added: ‘The thing is, she’s very insecure. And she doesn’t need to be, she’s still so young.’

For her part, Adele is said to have taken exception to being labelled insecure, telling Rolling Stone magazine: ‘It ended up being one of those ‘don’t meet you idol’ moments. The saddest thing was that I was such a big Blur fan growing. But it was sad, and I regret hanging out with him.’

Collaboration can be the soul of good music – just ask Jools Holland, who has pretty much built a career out of working with often unlikely seeming musical partners.

Yet some unions are hard to take. Even all these years later, I still struggle to think of Van Morrison singing with Cliff Richard on Whenever God Shines His Light. Van has always been a hero to me – an irascible soul, I know, but his often lovely music has been there for me since the 1970s – and that pairing just didn’t seem right, even if Van was in his God phase at the time.

For his most recent album, Duets, Van took this idea further, re-recording a collection of his songs with assorted guests, but not Cliff this time.

The unsuccessful partnering of Adele and Damon set me thinking about/Googling other strange partnerships. Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue on Where The Wild Roses Grow, which works because of the contrast between the two personalities, one seeming pure and good natured, the other rough and a bit of a junkie, to use Cave’s own description. And what a great melding of voices too, the one slight and sweet, the other deep and dark.

David Bowie and Bing Crosbie doing a Christmas get-together in 1977, a month before Crosbie died. ‘You’re the one that sings, right?’ says Bowie, turning up at Bing’s door, adding that he sings too. A true slice of Christmas cheese.

And more recently Tony Bennett singing with Lady Gaga on The Lady Is A Tramp – which is great fun, especially on the video, on which Gaga truly gets into the swing, blue wig and whisky glass and all. She can sing, she can act up – and Bennett is just as cool and metronomic as he’s ever been.

One of my favourite collaborations is a familial one: Richard Thompson and his son, Teddy, singing Persuasion, a song written by Thompson Snr and Tim Finn.

If you go online you will find assorted versions, including the pair singing at Glastonbury in 2010. Well work a look.