IT IS early and our latest guest is sitting opposite me, crunching toast. She is from Moscow and will be heading back there later today.

One thing has puzzled me about this visitor. During her stay she has never drawn the curtains. The blind in the room can be tricky and I was worried that she hadn’t worked out what to do. The room faces the road and most people prefer the privacy.

“Ah it is my Moscow ways,” she says when I ask her about this on the first morning. “I live high up in a tower-block and no one can see me. Also, I have views of the beautiful forest in the distant.”

This is the sort of incidental thing that makes Airbnb worth the effort. Who knew that young Russian women didn’t bother with curtains? And not out of exhibitionism but because they like the view and no one could see in anyway.

This guest will be off soon, trundling a suitcase heavier than she is. I am driving the 22-year-old and her new bicycle up to Newcastle. We were out with her in York at a silver wedding party last night and we returned sometime after eleven. Our daughter stayed out with her York friends and returned God knows when. She isn’t up yet.

We wandered through the post-races noise and nuisance like wide-eyed tourists in a strange land. York on a Saturday night is different than in the day.  Loud and raucous, with sirens blaring and racegoers blaring. Men stagger about supported only by their suits. Women stutter on bare feet, carrying their shoes, or bravely pretending they can walk in shoes that make them look ridiculous and cripple their feet at the same time. One middle-aged woman, propped up by her partner, totters and staggers by in a comedy walk that isn’t really very funny. With luck she will have made it to wherever she was going in one piece. When we return home, a glance up confirms that the curtains are open still. Moscow ways again.

So our Airbnb story continues. I read the other day that the Tories like talking up Airbnb, along with Uber, the taxi service, as this showed their modern cred. Or something or other equally as ridiculous. Personally I believe that with Airbnb it was all a misunderstanding. Someone misheard the label.

“Ah,” some Tory probably said, possibly a prime-minister shaped person. “That’s splendid – Heir-bnb. Just what we need to make sure that everything is passed on to all the right people.”

Of course during the Conservative Party conference no one said such a thing. Or not in public at least. There the talk was all of working people and protecting the low paid – while at the same time cutting tax credits. I wonder which face Mr Cameron shows the mirror when he shaves in the morning.

Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, made great mention of his Chinese wife on this topic, when proclaiming that the tax credit cuts would make us work like the Americans and the Chinese. That would be the Americans whose workers have very little protection and few rights; and the Chinese whose workers have very little protection and even fewer rights.

Mr Hunt, you can be assured, smiles at himself when he shaves, just as a reminder of his own wonderfulness.

Post-conference news broke of the worst potential funding crisis in the NHS. Funny how that didn’t get out until after the Tory party conference. For some reason this brings to mind the following scenario. The big and bulging suitcase of inconvenient news is fit to burst.

“Quick,” someone shouts, “get Eric Pickles to sit on that – and Boris too if you can drag him away from the limelight. There that should do it – don’t want that lot getting out. David’s got this line in his speech about the NHS being there for people seven days a week. At this rate we’ll be lucky if it’s there for them for three days a week. There, that’s done it.”

Whatever actually happened, how suspicious that this news should break just as the Tories were leaving Manchester, a city they return to even though no one there shows them the love.

Our visitor is now ready to leave. Her suitcase seems lighter than when she arrived. “I have thrown stuff away,” she says. And with that she is off, another guest gone.

SMOKING in cars or smoking in China? One of these is now covered by a new law in England and Wales. And the other is set to kill one in three young Chinese men.

The statistics for smoking in cars in China do not seem to be available, but as the Chinese are so big on smoking, it seems likely that they would light up in a car.

The law on smoking in cars in England and Wales came into force on October 1. Motorists who smoke in a vehicle carrying a person under 18 are now breaking the law and face fixed penalty fines of £50. Drivers face a double-scoop of a fine if they fail to stop a passenger smoking and are smoking themselves.

The health logic is irrefutable, although the measure presents certain difficulties. It also represents a big step up in the powers of the police to intervene in a private space.

Personally I think that anyone who smokes in a car needs their head dunking in a vat of nicotine. Although thinking again, they are more or less doing that to themselves, bit by tar-soggy bit. Smoking in a car is even viler than smoking anywhere else, and lighting up when there are children in the car is plain irresponsible.

So it is easy to see why Parliament wanted this new law. In political terms it was win-win: it’s hard to fight for your right to expose children to your second-hand smoke. You’d have to be dipped deep in polluting fag treacle to pull that one off. But someone is probably coughing up the liberty excuse at this moment: as in “that’s a bloody liberty”.

Smoking is a private pleasure and a public nuisance. Well, smoking is less of a public nuisance than it used to be, thanks to the ban on smoking in pubs and other places. And all praise to that ban, and never mind what the people shuffling around outside the pub say in between lighting up and stubbing out.

Incidentally, the only annoyance for non-smokers is that the once-pleasant spaces outside pubs are filled with smoke and fag butts, forcing the nicotine-free back inside on a sunny day.

But are there complications with this new ban? For a start the police officer has to spot someone smoking and see that there is a child in the car; and that ‘child’ could be a youthful-looking 19-year-old, for example. Also, e-cigarette are not banned from use in a car and it will be difficult to spot the difference between real and ‘pretend’ cigarettes, as each produce clouds of smoke or steamy ersatz smoke.

The law has considered certain exceptions. For instance, you can smoke in a convertible if the roof is fully down, so that is one escape route for stubborn smokers. Try that one with the sun-roof open and a child on board, however, and you will still face a fine. However, a 17-year-old driving a car alone can light up. You can’t smoke in a motorhome when driving along the road, but you can when it is parked up and being lived in. And so on. Whether or not you can smoke while riding a motorbike is not recorded, perhaps due to the difficulty of pulling this off.

A report in the Lancet today suggests that tobacco will kill two million Chinese by 2030 and could reach three million by 2050 if the government takes no action. According to the Lancet, about two-thirds of Chinese men take up smoking at a young age (the figure is much lower for women).  To grasp the scale of this, China consumes more than a third of all the cigarettes in the world – a further complication being that China Tobacco is a government monopoly that produces seven per cent of central government’s annual revenue. So official measures to curb smoking could set one arm of the government against the other.

But in China as here, there has been some success, and the number of smokers quitting is slowly on the rise. So there is hope.

POLITICAL antipathy runs in the family. A text arrives from one of our three offspring about the Prime Minister’s speech to the Tory Party conference. It reads: “Just seen a clip of Call Me Dave crying at a conference. Crocodile tears pffffffftttt.”

Well it’s a comfort to know we have brought the children up properly. I read the speech online and heard snatches on the radio, but mostly steered away from the television news. There is only so much stress the blood pressure can take.

It was a long speech so a skim was required. While there were meaty bits floating in this thin stew of compassionate Conservatism, two things jumped out – not perhaps the most serious aspects, but there you go. Aside from the inevitable attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – a wet-dream of a target for a Tory audience – Man On Ledge was struck by Cameron’s sideswipe at Twitter, and his reference to being a father of two daughters.

Cameron’s towel-flick at Twitter was headlined “Britain is not Twitter” as the speech was going out. With fitting irony, I read that on Twitter.

What Cameron actually said, rather than the headline, was: “Let me put this as simply as I can: Britain and Twitter are not the same thing.” This was mostly a mild rebuke to journalists who spend too long on Twitter and believe everything they read there. But it set a riff running through my mind.

It is true that Britain is not Twitter. Britain it is also not the Daily Telegraph. Britain is not the Sun. Britain is not Eton. Britain is not the Conservative Party. Britain is not the Labour Party. Britain is not Ukip. Britain is not The Times. Britain is not the Daily Mail (although it just might be, scarily). Britain is not The X Factor (although it might be Strictly Come Dancing or the Great British Bake Off).

You could play this game for ever, compiling a pointed list of what Britain is and is not. It doesn’t really get you anywhere or mean anything. Britain is and is not many things, and its true heart lies in a multiplicity of meanings and definitions, in its many cultures and the many different people and races who have settled here through generations, and in our rich and complicated history.

If you want to turn Cameron’s adaptable phrase into a positive, how about Britain Is The BBC? The corporation can have that one on me for free. Yet while Cameron is happy to trash Twitter, he won’t speak up for the BBC. It is hardwired into the Tory soul that the BBC is wrong and anti-competitive, and “not one of us”, to borrow a doodle from the torn pages of Thatcherism.

Of course, Cameron thinks that Britain is the Conservative Party, as he made clear in a bit of Blairite rhetoric early on in his speech yesterday. On the morning after last May’s election, he said that: “As dawn rose, a new light – a bluer light – fell across our isles.”

Cameron has never quite shaken off the desire to be the ‘heir to Blair’, and here he echoed Tony Blair’s victory speech in 1997 when Blair said that “a new dawn has broken”.

Winning the election in May certainly went against expectations, yet that ‘bluer light’ is going it some, isn’t it? A small majority win does not turn the whole country blue, just slightly bluer than if it had turned a pale tint of red.

The next part of the speech to jump out was Cameron’s Dad Moment. The day before we had Jeremy Hunt’s Wife Moment. How these politicians do like to drag their families into everything.

What Cameron said in his daddy aside was this: “I’m a dad of two daughters – opportunity won’t meant anything to them if they grow up in a country where they get paid less because of their gender rather than how good they are at their work. The point is this: you can’t have true opportunity without real equality.”

The colloquial mateyness of that phrase – “I’m a dad of two daughters” – is both clever on a cheap emotional level, and meaningless too. Fair points as far as they go. But, Dave, those girls are the daughters of a rich and successful man from a wealthy family, and therefore they are unlikely ever to be troubled by lack of equality or opportunity. Insulated by wealth and privilege, they will almost certainly follow the same gilded path as their father.

This isn’t right or wrong, but it is true, so David Cameron was using his daughters to exemplify a problem they are unlikely ever to face. I am the father of one daughter and two sons, and it doesn’t make me any better or worse a person than a man who has no children. Dragging the kids into your debate adds a bit of emotion, might even raise a tear or two, but it shouldn’t win any arguments.

Now in my own dad aside, I should reply to that text: “Ah how true. Do read today’s blog. It has you written all over it. Daddio.”

WITH the Great British Bake Off final in mind, it is fair to say that there was nothing soggy-bottomed about Theresa May’s speech at her party’s gingham altar yesterday.

The home secretary claimed that migrants posed a threat to national cohesion. “When immigration is too high,” she told the Tory party conference, “when the pace is too fast, it’s impossible to build a cohesive society.”

At the time she was wearing a black asymmetrically cut dress that didn’t look all that cohesive to me. Thus clad she trotted out the usual unfriendly Tory stuff about immigration, cynically dressed up as concern for social cohesion. She blamed the weakest and newest members of society for threatening to bring the house down around our heads – somehow forgetting all her banker friends who were bailed out from the public purse by the billions. It also slipped her mind to mention cutting tax credits and slashing local funds for libraries and education – both of which provide strong social glue. Or the straining health service. Or the big hammer her party wants to take to the BBC.

May also outlined what she called her “tough new plan for asylum” by saying that the UK would not offer asylum to anyone wealthy and fit enough to make it to this country. In other words, sail across as many rough seas as you like in all those leaky boats; tramp through as many hostile deserts as you wish; walk endless footsore miles through Europe if you want to – but you’re not getting in here because all that shows you’re too fit to be considered for asylum.

It’s funny how logic can be turned on its head. Except that it’s not funny at all.

May’s speech was condemned as “thoroughly chilling” by the Refugee Council, which is only to be expected. More surprising was the criticism from the Institute of Directors which said it was “astonished by the home secretary’s irresponsible rhetoric” and accused her of pandering to anti-immigration sentiment. And so she was – piling her speech with nasty flourish after nasty flourish. She added more extras to that sugar-free speech than Flora did to her cakes on Bake Off.

I hardly have the stomach to mention Jeremy Hunt. Well, he often sends me for the Rennies. The health secretary got in before Theresa May with his own bit of right-wing baking for the gingham groupies by proclaimed that Britons will work as hard as the Chinese and Americans because the government was cutting tax credits. So never mind the poorest workers losing up to £1,300 a year – a policy which even the usually Tory-supporting Sun opposes – they should thank the government for making them work harder in what is “a very important cultural signal”.

“My wife in Chinese,” Hunt added, as if that clinched it. No disrespect to Mrs Hunt, but the only response to that is a big fat ‘so what?’ How infuriating it is when politicians drag their personal circumstances into an argument; infuriating and irrelevant.

As for the Bake Off final, my chocolate money is on Nadiya. According to Quentin Letts, this choice makes me guilty of political correctness. Letts wondered in the Daily Mail if the contestants were “chosen because they fitted some Twitter-influenced metropolitan wish-list”. While elsewhere in the Mail, Amanda Platell suggested Flora was “kicked off because she wasn’t PC enough for the Beeb”. No, Amanda, it was because she kept sticking bloody macarons on everything and didn’t listen when Great Aunty Mary and vain old gimlet-eyed Uncle Paul told her to stop doing it.

As for saying that Flora might still be in the show if she had made a chocolate mosque instead of a chocolate carousel, that’s as cracked as an over-baked speech by the home secretary.

In answer to suggestions that the poor white middle-classes have been expunged from the Bake Off final, I offer in evidence Ian’s quail eggs. From his own quails. I think the middle classes are probably safe.

It comes to something when a fantastically popular show about baking is used as yet another example of political correctness gone mad. Bake Off hasn’t grabbed me quite as much this year, but I’ll still be sitting down at eight for the final. No cakes, though – eaten too many of those lately.

IT’S funny what you discover while sitting on a ledge and working freelance/looking for a new job.

For instance, did you know that the people who assemble your food in Subway are known as “sandwich artists”? I spotted this on a list of jobs that pops daily into my inbox. Subway is so proud of this phrase that it has even trademarked it.

Now I don’t know why this one ended up with me. Perhaps the filtering system doesn’t work. I don’t have anything against sandwich artists, but neither do I wish to be one. Actually I do have something against them: that ridiculous name. How does it work – do they use baguettes for paintbrushes, dipping the end in tomato sauce and then daubing wall or canvas? Well, who knows, not me for certain.

In truth this is just another fancy tag for a mundane job. I imagine the boss who dreamed that one up is paid a lot more than the people who put the fillings into the sandwiches. But at least the sandwich makers aren’t called creative layering executives or anything.

If you assemble sandwiches, why not just be called a sandwich-maker? Perhaps ‘artist’ makes the job sound more creative than it really is and gives the worker a boost.

An online search produces the definition mentioned above followed by a further clarification: “A person who, in real terms, is unskilled and can’t see it, despite thinking they have a ‘talent’. The person often makes inappropriate, obtuse or simplistic comments, to everyone else’s amusement.”

Now that definition strikes me as snooty and unkind. The version I found online also contained a few spelling mistakes. I edited these in my role as a words artist (shuffles them about a bit, polishes when required, nonsense humanely destroyed and so on).

Definitions that assert one person’s superiority over another are unpleasant and unnecessary. Yet we shouldn’t forget that a label such as ‘sandwich artist’ will not have been coined by the person doing the job. They just have to pretend to enjoy being a sandwich artist, as doing low-paid jobs with a smile and a song in your heart seems to be what is expected nowadays, especially where young people are concerned.

I did discover another definition. This one slumps sleazily against the wall opposite Subway, flashing its eyes. A sandwich artist under these terms is “a person who is masterful at arranging threesomes or other group sex scenarios”. Well I suppose there is a degree of layering involved there too.

I assume this doesn’t go on in Subway shops. Never been in one myself, although I have glanced through the window while passing by on the food-snob side of the street. I wouldn’t have said there was enough room for a threesome in those places.

Because a sandwich involves one thing pressed up against another, many slang meanings tend to the salty. ‘Sandwich brushing’ is a term of sexual endearment, although I should add an ‘apparently’ in there somewhere. For all I know people could just be making this stuff up on the internet.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable does not, I hope, make things up, but the wordy bible hasn’t moved with the times on such matters. The main entry on this topic concerns the 4^th Earl of Sandwich, the “notorious ‘Jemmy Twitcher’. He passed whole days in gambling, bidding the waiter to bring him for refreshment a slice of cold beef between two pieces of bread, which he ate without stopping play”. I have heard this story disparaged, but it’s a serviceable tale, and the ‘Jemmy Twitcher’ part was new to me.

Below this entry Brewer’s also defines ‘sandwich man’ as: “A perambulating advertisement displayer, ‘sandwiched’ between a pair of advertisement boards carried before him and behind.”

You still see people shuffling along as the human meat in an advertorial sandwich, although this role has been overtaken by one just as demeaning: standing by the road and looking miserable while holding pizza placards.

Well, all this typing is making me hungry. Perhaps it is time to go into the kitchen for a spot of sandwich artistry. No, please – the bread kind. Our kitchen is very small.

HILLS come into it a lot. Early yesterday I failed to run up a steep hill in the Dales. Later I failed to cycle up an even steeper hill.

We’ve been going to the bunk barn at Halton Gill in Littondale for years now – our best guess is eighteen years. To do this sum you take your 22-year-old daughter and minus four. Our youngest nearly shared my birthday, but came a week early. Because of this we have both celebrated our birthday at the bunk barn a few times. I missed by a day this year, and our daughter hasn’t been for a while.

In bunk barn lore, she is remembered for the Difficult Walk Birthday. She was seven at a guess. The walk was tough and one of the adults went feet first into a big water-filled hole, going up to her chest. After that there was a mini-rock-face to climb. Or possibly a steep rise with a waterfall: versions of this story vary. What is certain is that our daughter exclaimed loudly: “This is the worst birthday I’ve ever had in my whole life!” People still remember this today, and each year someone brings it up.

The bunk barn holds up to 40 people or so and the weekend follows a pattern. Some people arrive on the Friday evening to chat and eat or drink. Others arrive on the Saturday morning, just before the walk. We usually all walk together, returning in time for tea and cake. In the evening we share the food we have brought, drink wine and talk.

On the Sunday morning, some of us cycle and others go on a shorter walk. At lunchtime we eat whatever was left over from the night before.

This weekend dates to the late 1980s and was originally organised by doctors living in Leeds. Two of the doctors moved to York, other doctors came on board, then the invitation spread round friends who had children at Park Grove School, which was where we came on board.

Often it rains, sometimes it pours. This year Saturday morning broke and the sun shone out of a blue sky above Littondale. And you don’t often see that. By the time we set off for our walk the mist had rolled in and didn’t lift all day. Frustrating, but it did provide the sight of the weekend. As we drove up the steep hill out of Arncliffe, the one I would push my bike up on the Sunday, the car rose above the mist. We could see the hills opposite, the sun shone for a moment, and the valley below was stuffed with layers of fog. It felt like we were in a plane looking down at the clouds.

We parked on the roadside in thick fog above Malham Cove. Half our party had gone missing. We waited and wondered when we should set off and how to get a message to the others. Then they emerged through the curtain of foggy droplets. Turned out they’d parked 150 yards away and had been waiting for us in their patch of fog.

This walk included Gordale Scar, a limestone ravine a couple of miles from Malham. A daunting prospect, especially when you stand at the bottom and look up at the waterfall. We’re meant to be going up there how? It’s tricky, but fun and not as bad as it looks. Some in our party panicked part-way up, but they were helped by others. Not, shamefully, by Man On Ledge. I panicked at the beginning, then shot up and found a ledge on which to prop myself. Memo to selfish streak: slow down and hang around.

A few hardy joggers go for a run before breakfast each year. My ruse to get out of this has always been to forget to pack the running shoes. This year I gave the run a go. Those hills were a lung-stretching challenge, but it was lovely to be trotting across the misty hillsides, even if someone had put a pneumatic drill in my heart.

Each year the cycling contingent go on the same 20-mile ride, along the valley bottom to Arncliffe, then up the cruel hills towards Malham. Yesterday morning a pro-cycling type shot down the hill as I struggled up on my old hybrid bike. “Morning,” he said, with a smile. “It’s a tough one, this.” With a whoosh he was gone. And I was left to wobble up the incline, before giving in as always, and pushing. A couple of hours later, a push or two later, and it was downhill all the way to Halton Gill, scarily fast but great fun. Perhaps the biggest threat lies in wayward sheep. Fortunately the sheep behaved or I might not have survived to another birthday.

Over the years the bunk barn weekend has become a cornerstone of life. You spend time with good friends, or meet up with old friends you only see once a year. You do reasonably energetic activities. You go to the pub (didn’t make it this year myself). You eat and drink a little too much. And you laugh and chat.

Sometimes people are living through worrying times, as we are at the moment; sometimes people are coping with tragic loss, as one of our friends is. But the bunk barn is there and the people are there.

One difference this year came with the choir. A group of girls from Boroughbridge High School were staying in a nearby barn. Through a mutual connection, they asked if they could sing. As the food was about to be served in the big hot kitchen and dining room, the 11 girls and their teacher trooped into the bunk barn. They giggled and shuffled into a line. Then they sang three a cappella numbers for us, everyone cheered and clapped and the girls filed out again. A happy moment in a happy day.

THERE is a quotation from American politics that pops up often over there and over here. Now that more people lie dead from a yet another mass shooting in the States, these familiar words should be put to new use.

The original phase can be dated to Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign in 1992 – “It’s the economy, stupid.” These words were coined by election strategist James Carville, although the original slogan was simply: “The economy, stupid.”

Now after another school shooting, this time at Umpqua community college in Oregon, these words should be repurposed. Here is a suggestion: “It’s the bullets, stupid.”

It’s almost as if the gun-loving contingent in the US cannot join the dots between the weapons they feel it is their constitutional right to carry and the deaths that occur because of that right.

This is reported to be the 45^th school shooting this year. A gunman named as Chris Harper Mercer, 26, murdered as many as nine people and wounded seven more at the Oregon college, before he was killed by police.

The shooting took place in the rural town of Roseberg in a state where the open carrying of weapons is permitted.

Hours after the shooting, President Obama was faced with making his 15^th statement on shootings since taking office. Seeming grey with weariness and anger, and clearly agitated, he said: “There’s been another shooting in America.”

The President then added: “As I said just a few months ago and I said a few months before that and each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It does nothing to prevent this carnage being inflicted some place in America, next week or a couple of months from now. Somehow this has become routine.”

Obama said the US was not the only country on earth that had people with mental illnesses or who wanted to do harm to others – adding: “We are the only advanced country on earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”

He praised the UK and Australia for having come up with ways to prevent such mass shootings, adding that the US had made a political choice to allow the mass killings – “We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”

Obama said much more that was wise and sensible, and his speech is worth looking up – Obama’s words are playing now as I type on my laptop.

Many Brits just don’t understand the pro-gun lobby in the US: I’d certainly count myself among that puzzled throng. Part of the difficulty lies in a skewed perception of risk. Gun-toting lovers of ‘freedom’ believe that their rights to carry a weapon outweigh all other considerations.

Yet if fewer people carried weapons, then the risks would fall: if everyone has a gun then there is more likelihood of them using it. If you make guns easy to obtain, then it logically follows that someone will eventually turn their weapon against innocent people.

One telling comparison in the reports of this latest shooting is that guns are said to kill more people in America every six hours than terrorist attacks did in the entire year of 2014. So instead of fearing the other and the unknown, Americans should fear those around them – which is far scarier.

Here is a clean and simple statement: if Chris Harper Mercer had not be able to arm himself so easily and readily, then he would not have been able to shoot innocent people at their college.

Clear and simple to this Brit at least. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Well it does to me, but you can bet any dollars you may have on the certainty that at this very moment, some gun-rights lobbyist is arguing that the answer to the problem lies in more guns. They always say that, after maintaining a ‘respectful’ silence for a few days after each new atrocity.

Obama addressed this in his speech, saying that the gun lobbyists were probably writing their press releases already: “We’ll need more guns, they’ll say. Does anyone really believe that?”

Well they shouldn’t. And to say it again, and Obama can have this one on me: “It’s the bullets, stupid.”

MUDDY-BOOTED saviours or interfering idealists?

Townies who like a good walk in the countryside can be seen in different lights. They help preserve the working countryside with their visits; or they are outsiders who pop by with their sandwiches and flasks, sticking their metropolitan noses in.

My old boots have trampled some miles. And at the end of each trip, they are brought back to suburban York to be cleaned up and waxed on a diligent day. Or left sitting in the conservatory in a lazy week.

Mostly I am with the muddy-booted saviours on this matter. So my boots were twitching with indignation about a new report from the National Trust. This suggests that some of England’s most beautiful landscapes are seeing inappropriate development because planning rules are not being followed properly. The trust claims that local planners are not always applying planning law correctly in England’s 34 areas of outstanding natural beauty (AONB). One example of concern is the building of housing on the edge of Bath, not far from where we were walking last week, while others include chicken farms in Shropshire and solar panels in Thomas Hardy country in Dorset.

ANOBs were originally established under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. They lie outside of national parks, where the protection is stronger. Examples in Yorkshire include the Howardian Hills, that lovely area surrounding Castle Howard, where the flat-bottomed Vale of York rucks up into rising and dipping hills.

Other geographically local areas include the North Pennines which lies between the national parks of the Yorkshire Dales and Northumberland. There is also Nidderdale on the eastern flanks of the Yorkshire Pennines, stretching from Great Whernside towards the Vale of York, and including Brimham Rocks, where my old boots trod recently.

Because these areas lack the fuller safeguards afforded to national parks, the need for protection is open to greater debate – and is therefore particularly important. In its report, the National Trust accepts the need to build more houses, acknowledging that “ANOBs are living and working landscapes” but adds that local needs can be met through “high quality development in appropriate locations”.

The problem here is knottier than a muddied bootlace. It’s all open to so much interpretation. One man’s inappropriate site is another’s perfect plot; one man’s quality development is another’s misplaced eyesore, and so on.

A government spokesman was on hand today to tell The Guardian something utterly meaningless: “We welcome the National Trust’s recognition of the strong protection we have set out for areas of outstanding natural beauty and other protected areas…”

Let’s analyse those weasel words – “We will only answer your question by turning it on its head so that we appear to be doing everything right on this matter…”

The supplier of slippery government words added that “local authorities should ensure they play their part in protecting these valued areas…” – analyse that and you get: “It’s not our fault, it’s all down to those local authorities…”

The trust in turn points out that AONBs are under strain because planning and managing teams in those local authorities have been cut by 40 per cent in the past five years, making it harder to ensure that quality developments are passed. In other words, the problem has been caused in effect by government cuts to local authorities.

Now in a troubled world all this might seem a small matter. Yet if you only consider the ‘big’ problems, and often we don’t handle those well anyway, it is too easy to forget smaller matters that can have a big impact. Much of what truly makes England is to be found in the beautiful working countryside. This should be allowed to be both beautiful and to be a place of work, something which requires a properly run planning system.

Well, that’s what me and my muddy boots think. And here’s looking forward to the annual Dales trip this weekend.

THE other day a glance in the mirror revealed I was wearing Geoff Hamilton’s jeans. Maybe it was the stance. It certainly wasn’t the belt or snags from rose thorns or anything.

A little context may be useful here for some of you. Not for my wife the gardener, who worshipped Hamilton more or less, and felt on his death in 1996 as if a favourite, slightly muddy, uncle had died.

Geoff was the presenter of Gardeners’ World, an everyday sort of green-fingered guru. And he often wore jeans, not as a fashion statement so much as a practical choice for the job at hand. Perhaps you could call them dad jeans comfortably cut for the middle-aged body.

Anyway I looked in the mirror and saw Geoff Hamilton’s jeans – my jeans, obviously, but reminiscent of what Geoff used to wear. And it must have been the stance as I wasn’t carrying a rosebush or anything.

A more up-to-date denim reference point for the no longer exactly young man might be Jeremy Clarkson. But if I’d looked in the mirror and seen myself in Clarkson’s jeans, it would have been a ridiculous sight. The former Top Gear car bore is a lot taller than me, and a deal fatter round the middle, so his jeans would swamp me in unnecessary folds of car-creased denim. But Clarkson is a useful example as he usually still clads his smart arse in denim.

These thoughts arise from a nasty little worry worm about the wearing of jeans. Is there ever a point where a man becomes too old for denim? I think the answer to this question has to be ‘no’, mainly because it begs another: if not denim, then what? Jeans just seem to do the business. They solve without fuss the daily problem of what a man should wear. And most of the alternatives are lacking in something. For me the jeans are always Levis. I usually have a few pairs on the go, running from ‘best’ to falling apart at the yellow-threaded seams. A recently abandoned pair had a wallet-shaped hole in the back pocket.

So jeans it is, unless I am out on a work visit. I never wore jeans in my old job, although lots of people to go to work in their Levis, Wranglers or whatever.

Women probably have more worries about what to wear at what age, but such insecurities do buzz around a man’s head too. The other night we were watching the Hairy Bikers off being silly somewhere chilly, Finland if memory serves. At one point the pair stripped naked and jumped into a cold lake. I asked my wife for reassurance that I didn’t look like that from behind. The good news is that I don’t.

Years ago there was a line of dialogue in the great American cop series NYPD Blue. Veteran detective Andy Sipowicz was being teased about his lack of fitness by a male colleague who pointedly said he went to the gym because he didn’t want cottage cheese for a butt. Well we now know that those hairy bikers are plentifully supplied with cottage cheese.

Male vanity also arises over baldness. For instance, did my wife really have to take that holiday photograph displaying the top of my head quite so prominently? To everyone else that is just what my scalp looks like. To me it was an unwanted reminder of long-lost glories. Although I should be used to this depletion as there has been more pink than brown for pushing 30 years now.

As for the jeans, I’ll be sticking to the Levis for a while yet, however often Geoff Hamilton invades the mirror.

SCHADENFREUDE is a good place to start, but we need a new social media coining, schaden-facebook-freude perhaps.

The original word means finding pleasure in the misfortune of others, or ‘harm’ and ‘joy’ creamed together as the sour sauce in a German sandwich. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable offers the translation “a malicious delight in the bad luck of others”.

Playful malice was much in evidence yesterday when Facebook crashed for the second time in a week. Twitter was awash with jokes at its mightier cousin’s expense, with outbursts of self-mockery too, as people complained that they would now actually have to talk to their partner. Or they would go to bed without knowing what their friends had for tea. Or whether they’d gone for a jog. The streets would be filled with people carrying photographs as they sought approval, maniacally asking for those they passed in the street to ‘like’ what they’ve been up to.

Some of the Twitter quips were quite funny. “Twitter,” someone tweeted, “has agreed to take in 30,000 Facebook refugees.”

The site crashed for 40 minutes, following a similar disappearance last Thursday, and Facebook shares fell by nearly four per cent.

Once all this would have passed me by, but now I am one of the nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide who use Facebook. I’ve been on it, or whatever it is that you do with Facebook, for a while but only started visiting every day after being made redundant.

Facebook has been both a comfort and a mild nuisance to me on this ledge. The comfort comes with the support of other people, including rediscovered old friends; and the nuisance lies in the twitchy obligation to keep having a look, the needy urge to stay in touch.

Yet without Facebook, no one much would read this blog. Despite my longer term loyalty to Twitter, my blog statistics show that Facebook is the most common link to these ramblings. So all power to Facebook, until someone invents a better way to fritter time. On second thoughts, please keep that invention to yourself.

The sense of connectedness does help when you are sitting at home alone batting out words – helps and distracts, too. Yet the links of modern life can be a bind. We spent the last week in Devon and then Bristol. My laptop ledge came with me and I carried on as normal, tapping away early in the morning before anyone else was up.

That’s the sort of thing I do for fun, or one of them, so I was happy with that. Less joyful was the need to check everything I normally check, Facebook, Twitter, the statistics for my blog and my two email accounts. The emails were irksome, one or two especially. I kept checking for a reply to one email to do with freelance work, and there was no reply at all. This left me irritated when I should have been happily unaware of the failure to respond.

On the plus side, I did receive an email about an application form that hadn’t been filled in properly, and was able to sort the minor mistake as the toast browned.

In the past I have departed without a thought for home or work. This was the first holiday where I took the cares with me, and it’s not as relaxing as casting off completely.

A while back now, I went on a press trip to Bordeaux for the wine festival. Lots of food, plenty of good wine, an outing or too – and not a care in the world for three or four wine-soaked days. That was me anyway. One of my companions was the deputy editor of the Scottish Sun. He was on his mobile the whole time, trying to sort out problems on the paper. And he left a day early. Sometimes not knowing is the way to go.

We had a good break, but being in touch made for a different sort of holiday. Maybe next time I’ll sever the links and leave the laptop at home. Along with all those likes.