HIGH finance is not really my area. Low finance is hard enough to grasp these days. A moment ago I shuffled along my vertiginous shelf of rock and glanced at the global stock market panic caused by China (or not, depending on what you read).

But before I could think of anything sensible to say, I saw the boy trip into the painting.

Now this is more my sort of thing. Perhaps that says something about me. Maybe if I better understood stock markets and the seemingly random workings of capitalist roulette, then I would be inhabiting a more commodious ledge. Or not haunting a ledge at all.

I have tried to think about what might be happening on the stock markets. All those men and women screaming themselves towards a heart attack need someone by their side, I’m sure. But not me. Not today.

This is because I saw that boy fall. The 12-year-old Taiwanese boy was visiting a museum at the weekend when he tripped and broke his fall with a 350-year-old painting. His outstretched hand went through the canvas and punched a hole in a painting said to be worth $1.5 million.

The painting was hanging at an exhibition in Taipei called Face of Leonardo: Images of a Genius. The organisers have released footage showing the boy in shorts, trainers, a blue Puma T-shirt and holding a drink. As passes the painting, he catches his foot and trips over a low rope and falls into the canvas. Then he steps back, looks at the painting in panic and glances around, perhaps thinking: “Wake up now, for God’s sake wake up now.”

The painting by Paolo Porpora was later discovered to have a hole at the bottom caused by the boy’s fist.

The clever thing here would be to make some comment about this being a form of art criticism. To say that the boy’s mishap was a work of art worthy of the Turner Prize. Well, I seem to recall that was once won by a light going on and off in a room.

But no, it’s nothing like that at all. Just the art of clumsiness, nothing more. Life is a wall built of mishaps and misshapes. Sometimes no one sees. Sometimes you notice far too late.

Here is a minor example. Yesterday beetroot picked from the garden was placed in a casserole dish and covered in foil, ready to bake while we went out for a couple of hours. Next to this was another dish topped with foil. This one contained the remains of the creamy potatoes we’d had for lunch. Guess which one I placed in the oven? On our return we were greeted with twice-cooked potatoes a la cock-up rather than slowly roasting beetroot.

As to clumsiness, perhaps we are more prone to this when surrounded by objects of value. I remembered the man and his shoelace when I read about the boy and the painting. This is because shoelaces worry me.

So here he was again, cruelly plucked from obscurity. Maybe he had even stopped blushing until everyone remembered again. A loose shoelace caused Nick Flynn to trip during a visit to the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge in 2006. As he fell he knocked over Qing dynasty vases thought to be worth £100,000 in total.

As an inveterate fiddler with shoelaces, which are too loose to too tight and rarely just right, I felt for that man. There but for the grace of a badly secured shoe and all that. Yes, I can certainly see myself doing something similar. Note to self: please make sure laces are secure when visiting York Art Gallery tomorrow.

In the end perhaps fears about inflation, shares and interest rates following the China crisis stock market crash are merely another shoelace incident. One moment the world is on a careless dash to unending wealth and prosperity. Then someone bends over to tighten a rogue shoelace. And the whole thing comes crashing down.

THE sun shines and the middle boy is up on stage with his friends. The platform on which they are performing is the back of a truck with the side opened up. Behind them is the impressive edifice of the old brewery in Leeds, now a cultural centre known with good Yorkshire brevity as The Tetley.

The truck faces a grassy area across which flattened cardboard boxes are strewn. Some of the boxes have been refashioned into buildings, almost as if this were a refugee camp or people making creative do at a rock festival.

It is in fact neither of these. Instead this is a den-building festival. We don’t join in with the dens, although we might have done when our three were small. We’re here for the band. It’s been a while since the parental groupies were present. That was when our middle boy was 15. The band was called The Frizz and they played around York, including a memorable gig at the old Fibbers in York.

Our boy was on guitar and we went with friends to watch. At one point, he played a solo with the guitar held behind his head. One of the songs contained lyrics about being new in town and drinking in strange bars while looking for love. The incongruity seemed funny at the time, boys singing about being men. Our boy does that half-smile thing at the memory as we chat in the Leeds sunshine. His sister is along for the trip too.

Various bands have been booked for the day. We sit in the sun to watch the first band. They are very young and not at all bad. Up next is the Manchester band our boy now plays in, seven or eight years on from that first band. They are called Sonic Bliss Machine and he plays bass this time.

I’ve never seen him play bass and he is good, as is the band. But in a way I miss seeing him twirl out those guitar solos. It’s probably a father-son displacement thing. I always wanted to play guitar in a band but was never good or structured enough. There was an embryonic teenage band called Aardvark Zyrus, the first and last words plucked from the nearest dictionary to hand. We didn’t progress much beyond the name and a practice or two. Nowadays I strum at home, arrhythmic and alone.

Anyway, in the sunny here and now the band is still playing their set and we are eating our sandwiches. A man with a heavy-metal beard and a beer belly fiddles with the sound-deck, while the muscled compere prowls around with his microphone and his ready-made stock of crowd-teasing banter.

Then the set is over and our boy and his friends cart their gear from the impromptu stage. Members of a young jazz-funk outfit are waiting in the wings. The compere is ready to do his thing again. One or two of the parents are tiring of building dens and are drinking beer instead, a fitting tribute to the industry that once went on here. A boy aged perhaps two continues to dance, little legs jiving, while a straw trilby protects him from the sun.

After ice-creams bought for us by our student daughter, we leave the boy, happy to have seen him play again, and head home. Without getting lost this time in the never-ending one-way loops of the Leeds traffic system.

Later, much later thankfully, long after the bands have gone home and the cardboard huts have been abandoned, it rains. My God does it rain. I take our daughter to the station during an impressive downpour. The drive back is the scariest of my life, the rain so heavy that the roads flood instantly and the windscreen wipers weep with the effort of keeping things clear. The sky is midnight black at eight on an August evening. A headlight bulb went earlier in the day and the one-eyed car goes slowly home, more boat than car almost.

It was like one of those rainstorms you see in films when everything looks just a bit too over the top. No rain ever falls that hard, you think. Now I know that it does.

YOU have to admire Charlotte Church. Not that it’s obligatory or anything, but the woman does have something about her.

The singer and mother of two has already been mocked in certain quarters for joining an anti-austerity march following the election. Her appearance at the protest saw her dunked in a rancid pool of right-wing complaint.

Among those who joined the attack was the Welsh Tory leader, a man called Andrew RT Davis. Who even knew there were Tories in Wales or that they were led by a man with initials for a middle name? Davis accused Church of being a champagne socialist, one of the dreariest slights in the political slang book. She responded wittily by saying that she was more of a “prosecco girl”.

Of course it is easy to mock Charlotte Church as a wealthy woman feigning sympathy with the less fortunate – which is why unimaginative people such as Davis weighed in with their cut-and-paste insults.

The singer was aware that her presence at the rally in Cardiff would attract hostile media attention. As she said afterwards in a piece for the Guardian: “I’m sure that you’ll be shocked to hear that I didn’t do it for some self-aggrandising purpose… I have no wish to be trolled and abused. It would be much easier for me not to engage. I’m not promoting a record or a TV show. My only motivation for attending was to try to make a difference; to further political discourse in my community; to draw attention to a cause that is more than valid, it is vital.”

Now I don’t know about you, but from where I am sitting on my precipitous ledge, that sounds like good sense. Charlotte could isolate herself in her life; she could shrug and think it’s not her problem; but instead she is prepared to stick her neck out, prepared to make a stand. And good on her for that.

Charlotte Church isn’t calling it quits either. On Wednesday she will join a Greenpeace protest outside Shell headquarters in London as its oil exploration vessels prepare to restart drilling for oil in the Arctic.

She will sing This Bitter Earth, a song made famous in the Sixties by the blues singer Dinah Washington, which she describes as “one of the most poignant, heartfelt and heart-breaking songs I’ve ever heard”. And how right she is about that song. Please do seek out Washington’s version: I am listening to it now as I write and it’s remarkable, with her sad, soaring voice backed by plaintive strings and scorching lyrics including the line: “What good am I, heaven only knows.”

Church will sing the song while others perform a requiem as part of Greenpeace’s month-long protest against Shell’s billion-dollar desecration beneath the ice cap. Well, Shell says there isn’t a problem but if ravaging one of Earth’s last frozen wildernesses in the hope of sucking out more oil isn’t desecration, then Charlotte Church and me don’t know what is. She describes the venture as “unbelievably dumb” and “exploitative and nonsensical” – and aside from a Shell-suited executive, who could argue with that?

As part of the protest, the same four-piece requiem will be played by different groups, from brass bands to bagpipes. Without wishing to be unkind, perhaps if they stuck to the bagpipes Shell might cave in after a week.

As to requiems, well you can’t beat a good bit of remembrance. As something of a musical magpie, I have alongside all the rock, jazz, folk and so on a mini collection comprising requiems by Mozart, Verdi, Fauré and Durufle. Gloomy, beautiful and uplifting they are too – a little like that song Charlotte Church will be singing on Wednesday.

HERE are a few random thoughts for Friday. No particular order attends these jottings other than their arrival in my mind…

George Osborne’s hair: The chancellor’s hairstyle has drawn a certain amount of comment in the past year. Is it a Caligula pudding-bowl cut? Where did George get the idea? And, more importantly, given his enthusiasm for all things oily and gassy, where does he source his hair dye? Is his hair in fact dyed or is it dipped in a vat of crude oil newly squeezed from a spouting teat in Texas? Unsubstantiated reports that George sometimes licks the crude oil hair dye dripping from his Roman emperor-style barnet can be dismissed as just too disturbing for words.

David Cameron’s face: How does it turn that particular shade of pink? Are the rumours true that secretly at night the prime minister is spit-roasted above blow-holes emitting newly released gas from fissures in the fractured earth? That would certainly explain the suckling-pig cast of his physiognomy and his enthusiasm for fracking.

Amber Rudd: Please explain the point of the energy and climate change secretary, using as few swearwords as possible. Solar-powered answers will be ignored by the government-appointed adjudicator but exam papers bearing smudged fingerprints from the chancellor’s hair dye will automatically be awarded 100 per cent. Is it me or is there something contradictory in that job title? Plenty of people, proper scientists and the like, believe that the extraction of energy causes climate change. So isn’t having both in your job title a push-me-pull-me contradiction?

Amber Rudd Again: The energy at all costs secretary said this week that ministers were to be given the power to decide whether or not to approve applications for fracking if local authorities were deemed to be taking too long to process them. So, Amber, what’s too long? Two weeks, three weeks or five minutes? Perhaps local democracy is going to be spit-roasted alongside David Cameron’s face. But never mind, Amber says that fracking is a “fantastic opportunity” and that delays “don’t help the community, businesses or the country”. And if you can come up with an emptier and yet more sinister form of words than that, then you should give up your job immediately and go and join the government. Just don’t sit too close to George and his hair.

Condoms and aspirin: Man On Ledge has no need for condoms following a long-distant appointment with a surgical snipper. Twenty-one years ago a third child arrived and I was booked for a date with the doctor’s scissors. I don’t think they actually used scissors, but to be honest I wasn’t looking that closely. Anyway, the condom machine in the gents at York Station catches my eye. A selection of condoms are on offer, but this isn’t what draws my attention. No, what jumps out is the packet of aspirins in the top drawer of the dispenser. Is this a new development? Perhaps the hopeful man buys the condoms and then aspirins as well, to cover all the bases. Then when his partner says she isn’t in the mood thanks to her rotten headache, he can present her with an aspirin. It’s just another random thought.

POLITICS is show business for ugly people, or so the saying goes. Just who coined the phrase is difficult to say for sure. Some sources suggest a Texas political consultant called Bill Miller.

The two activities do share the need to be noticed. Both tribes thrive on attention: without it their reason for being disappears. Stars want us to see their film, watch their play, and politicians want us to vote for them.

You could also say that politics was show business for boring people. Whether politics actually is boring or not is a matter of taste. It is certainly important, history on the hoof, the history of tomorrow happening right now before our all too indifferent eyes.

But politicians, they can be a grey lot. Perhaps that is why they are prone to being seduced by those from outside their dull circle.

Seduction is perhaps a fitting way to put it with regards to Michelle Mone, the Scottish lingerie queen who has become David Cameron’s latest tsar. Her story is certainly a good one. She grew up in a one-bed tenement flat in Glasgow. There was no bathroom so young Michelle had to wash at the swimming baths. She left school at 15 without any qualifications, and rose to become what a newspaper profile at the weekend termed “one of Britain’s most visible entrepreneurs” fronting her Ultimo brand.

David Cameron met the lingerie supremo at a Downing Street lunch for Scottish executives before the referendum, and Mone later put her push-up bra cleavage behind the No campaign.

The prime minister was obviously impressed, as he has now appointed Mone as his latest business adviser. You may recall that this follows Carol Vorderman as the so-called maths tsar, Tamara Mellon, co-found of Jimmy Choo, as a “global trade ambassador”. Mary Portas has advised on shops, while the designer Anya Hindmarch was touted as another trade ambassador. Rumours that Miss Piggy was hired to offer dietary advice to the nation can be dismissed.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, seems to be the epitome of the boring politician – or he would do if his thin-skinned tedium didn’t so often result in harsh and unfeeling policies. Anyway, Iain is clearly star-struck or cleavage-dazzled or whatever by Mone, saying: “There’s no one I can think of that’s better qualified to help young entrepreneurs from deprived backgrounds to turn a good idea into a flourishing business.”

Well, maybe or maybe not. Mone is one of those people you hear about occasionally and think, “Oh, yes, her.” Her life seems to be a storybook tale of success built from nothing but her own determination. But like all such tales it contains much clever self-mythology: in the end Mone, like most such people, is her own product. As always with such striking ascents, she has her detractors: all the way from Rod Stewart (“A devious, publicity-seeking son of a bitch”) to Glasgow-based company director Douglas Anderson, boss of the GAP Group, who reportedly wrote to the prime minister to complain that Mone was a “small-time businesswoman” whose businesses were “excessively over-promoted PR minnows”.

Cameron took so much notice of this caution that there is talk of a Tory peerage for the lingerie queen.

Politicians are much taken with gimmickry, none more so than our whim-surfing prime minister. Good luck to Mone, but I can’t see much coming of this. What she knows is how to live the life she’s led. Whether or not that translates into useful advice for people who don’t happen to be Michelle Mone is debatable.

I suspect that she is a tsar too far.

STUDENT accommodation has featured in my life in assorted ways. First there was the rather grand hall I lived as a student in London (very nice, very large terrace houses run together) and then the various places where the Cole offspring live or have lived.

The two boys lived separately in a student dive in Preston and a student dive in Salford, plus rented houses, while our daughter, the only one who is still a student, lived in a hall, followed by two privately rented properties, including her present one.

She didn’t much like the hall, which was modern and superficially smart, but seemingly not a patch on what is being built now (“Flatscreen TVs, chic interiors… and rents of up to £300 a week. Private developers move in on student accommodation market” – The Observer, last Sunday).

Student living has affected me in other ways, and that’s excluding all those journeys conveying the offspring to student digs, and later bringing them back in the over-stuffed estate smelling of dirty washing. We’ve covered some miles the old car and me; one of us has more miles on the clock but I’m not saying which.

Where we used to live in York until five years ago was almost an unofficial student ghetto. Attractive streets and decent houses were taken over, one by one, over-filled bin by over-filled bin, until what had once been an area for families became a transient place for students passing through.

Sometimes they went about being all too transient outside our house at 4am shouting and playing football in the street. Sometimes they dragged chairs and sofas into the front yards, played music and had street parties. Sometimes we minded and sometimes we didn’t. We just moved in the end.

Even my old job was affected by where students live. A relatively new newspaper building, something of a landmark in York, was demolished to make way for student accommodation. The once-proud newspaper was squeezed next door into a building that seemed small, until they started laying off even more people. Now it isn’t so small.

As more and more young people are encouraged to go to university, it is possible to wonder where this might all lead. One destination is evident: in smart but surely too luxurious student residences.

Once universities built functional halls, but now much of that provision has in effect been privatised, with universities passing the job onto private developers. These forms build what sound like very decent and top-end residences or apartments, some of which can cost up to £10,000 a year to rent (a smart new block in Exeter, according to The Observer report).

Now it struck this man on a ledge as a good thing, back in the days before ledge-living became a necessity, that more and more people were being encouraged to study at university. This Labour-led boost seemed to me to be a way of democratising university, making it available to students of all backgrounds.

And maybe it was and maybe it is.

Yet it is easy now to worry that young people are being packaged up as a ready market, forced to carry huge debts to pay for an education that may not benefit them as much as advertised. And all the while ploughing far too much of that loan into supporting companies that build unnecessarily luxurious places for them to live in.

More students than ever now have jobs while at university (not in itself a bad thing, but it does indicate that wallets are tight). And, according to a report released today, more graduates are ending up in jobs they don’t really need a degree to do. Over-qualification is at saturation point, with nearly 60 per cent of graduates doing jobs deemed to be non-graduate roles, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Okay, that is one report. But it does add to concerns that while a good degree is a passport to a decent job, a mediocre degree might just see young people doing the sort of job that in the past no one needed a degree to do.

But never mind. Big money, including North American, Canadian and even Russian investment, is going into building somewhere for students to sleep off their hangovers or lie awake at night worrying about all that future debut.

Something in all this doesn’t quite add up. Unless you’re a company that builds what once used to be known simply as student halls.

AFTER a warning from the appearance monitor (“you look scruffy”), the stubble of shame went. My cheeks were mostly smooth when I worked on the newspaper. Wednesdays were razor-free thanks to an early start and a heavy deadline, but other days were respectable.

This redundant summer has seen me shave less often. Perhaps those bristles are a statement, facial stigmata to signify my present circumstances. Either that or I have been a bit of a lazy arse as I sit here writing.

The razor-meet-face encounter yesterday came about because we had a day out in Salford to see the middle boy. Our eldest son hitched a lift as a surprise for his brother, and during the day we met our daughter, who was in Manchester with her grandmother/my mother.

Such a family occasion warranted a shave. A day later the face is smooth with only the slightest rasp, so there will be no repeat set-to in front of the mirror this morning.

Beards may be all the hairy rage nowadays but I won’t be going that far. Too many suspect hairs in there for a start. You could call them blond but that would be to do grey a disservice.

I have had only one outbreak of facial topiary in a lifetime. The evidence exists in old photographs best forgotten. If you want to know what I looked like, picture a garden gnome with a suntan. The beard sneaked on to my otherwise youthful face during a long and long-lost holiday to Australia. It was removed on my return and remains nothing more than a ridiculous memory. So no to beards, although stubble has its manly attractions, or so some of us shave-dodgers maintain.

It is interesting that stubble should for me be connected to lack of full employment. On Thursday I have an interview – not, as my squash partner misunderstood, a job interview but the other sort. Asking questions instead of answering them; another spot of freelance work. So the razor will definitely be out again by then.

After a few days off, we have a new guest tonight, visiting from Australia. The past two weeks were given over to a teacher from Spain who stayed with us not through Airbnb but another source, while on a course in York. A friendly and engaging man, he sported greying stubble.The stubble of holiday, perhaps.

After a few shaky starts – “I so sorry, can you repeat” – many good conversations were had with César. It was enjoyable to have someone in the house to send mealtime exchanges in a different direction, nudging us away from the comfortable bumps and furrows of habitual chat. Even if a lot of decent meals had to be provided instead of the usual whatever waltz or fridge/freezer shuffle. I have never cooked so much at a stretch.

Under different circumstances we wouldn’t have entertained our good man from Spain. And we wouldn’t have filled the house with guests from all over the world or met so many interesting people. Something good arises from something bad. Even if a bit of stubble comes along too.

Like an unmown lawn, the bristles will grow back. Perhaps a lawn metaphor is not the best choice as my wife does that job. But not the shaving. You will be glad to hear I do that all by myself.

A ‘shaver’, incidentally, is an old term for a young lad, one who has only just started shaving. Nowadays the shavers grow beards and the older men shave (when they can be bothered, that is).

AFTER a warning from the appearance monitor (“you look scruffy”), the stubble of shame went. My cheeks were mostly smooth when I worked on the newspaper. Wednesdays were razor-free thanks to an early start and a heavy deadline, but other days were respectable.

This redundant summer has seen me shave less often. Perhaps those bristles are a statement, facial stigmata to signify my present circumstances. Either that or I have been a bit of a lazy arse as I sit here writing.

The razor-meet-face encounter yesterday came about because we had a day out in Salford to see the middle boy. Our eldest son hitched a lift as a surprise for his brother, and during the day we met our daughter, who was in Manchester with her grandmother/my mother.

Such a family occasion warranted a shave and the bristles went. A day later the face is smooth with only the slightest rasp, so there will be no repeat set-to in front of the mirror this morning.

Beards may be all the hairy rage nowadays but I won’t be going that far. Too many suspect hairs in there for a start. You could call them blond but that would be to do grey a disservice.

I have had only one outbreak of facial topiary in a lifetime. The evidence exists in old photographs best forgotten. If you want to know what I looked like, picture a garden gnome with a suntan. The beard sneaked on to my otherwise youthful face during a long and long-lost holiday to Australia. It was removed on my return and remains nothing more than a ridiculous memory. So no to beards, although stubble has its manly attractions, or so some of us shave-dodgers maintain.

It is interesting that stubble should for me be connected to lack of full employment. On Thursday I have an interview – not, as my squash partner misunderstood, a job interview but the other sort. Asking questions instead of answering them; another spot of freelance work. So the razor will definitely be out again by then.

After a few days off, we have a new guest tonight, visiting from Australia. The past two weeks were given over to a teacher from Spain who stayed with us not through Airbnb but another source, while on a course in York. A friendly and engaging man, he sported greying stubble, as it happens. The stubble of holiday, perhaps.

After a few shaky starts – “I so sorry, can you repeat” – many good conversations were had with César. It was enjoyable to have someone in the house to send mealtime exchanges in a different direction, nudging us away from the comfortable bumps and furrows of habitual chat. Even if a lot of decent meals had to be provided instead of the usual whatever waltz or fridge/freezer shuffle. I have never cooked so much at a stretch.

Under different circumstances we wouldn’t have entertained our good man from Spain. And we wouldn’t have filled the house with guests from all over the world or met so many interesting people. Something good arises from something bad. Even if a bit of stubble comes along too.

Like an unmown lawn, the bristles will grow back. Perhaps a lawn metaphor is not the best choice as my wife does that job. But not the shaving. You will be glad to hear I do that all by myself.

A ‘shaver’, incidentally, is an old term for a young lad, one who has only just started shaving. Nowadays the shavers grow beards and the older men shave (when they can be bothered, that is).

IF a novel contains a good twist, do you want to know about it beforehand? If not, look away now.

Personally I think it is much better not to know, but sometimes you can’t escape being told. A popular crime book of the moment is I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh, a former police officer turned writer, a thriller based round a hit-and-run incident in which a child dies. Her first novel has been a great success. The cover has a quote from Peter James: “Compelling with an astonishing twist”, while Mark Billingham obliges on the back with “a twist that made me green with envy”. Val McDermid said something similar while introducing Clare on her New Blood panel at last month’s Theakstons Old Peculier crime writing festival in Harrogate.

The blurb for this novel says: “Did you love Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train? Now lose yourself in the twisty, enthralling psychological thriller that everyone is talking about.”

I haven’t read those two or Some Other Book With Girl In The Title either. The last book with a titular girl I read was The Shining Girls by the South African writer Lauren Beukes, which was very good, if rather gruesome.

I like a good twist as much as the next reader, and one of my favourites leaps from the pages of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, a lovely salted tale of thievery on the streets of London in the 1860s.

Reading Fingersmith benefited from knowing nothing about the narrative turn-around, which jumped out precisely because it was a surprise.

No such mystery surrounded I Let You Go. This was a shame as I guessed the twist within a few pages and then had to wait for many chapters before finding out that I was right. This is not to boast. This is not to suggest any particular perspicacity on my behalf. It’s just that if you are told a book contains a twist, you set about trying to work it out. I kept hoping that Clare Mackintosh was going to trick me with a surprise I hadn’t seen coming, but it wasn’t to be.

It would have been more gratifying to read this novel without knowing it was “the one with the twist”. That way I wouldn’t have been trying to second-guess the unexpected development and would have been genuinely surprised at the revelation.

In publishing there is a tricky balance to be struck, I guess. Advertising a thriller as being a member of the twist club intrigues and stirs up interest, while at the same time devaluing the reading experience.

Is it better not to know that Ian McEwan’s Atonement contains a shocking twist or that Gone Girl does too? Almost certainly, but most readers come to such books already armed with that knowledge.

I Let You Go is worth reading, not so much for the plot turns (there are one or two more in there) but for the interestingly choppy narrative that moves between characters, voices, perspectives and periods without explanation. This builds up the tension, and allows for a taut psychological study. Of exactly what it is better not to say, as that would spoil another slowly revealed surprise.

So if a writer’s doing the twist, do you want to know? Book groups can have that one for free.

Incidentally, Clare Mackintosh has a big advantage over many crime writers. As an ex-cop, she knows the behind-the-scenes details of police work. This means she doesn’t have to do wearisome research/make all that shit up. Mind you, I once read that the great Ruth Rendell said she had never been in a police station in her life, and preferred making up that aspect of her novels. So if it was good enough for Ruth…

SO members of the paparazzi have been criticised by the royal family again, this time for using underhand tactics to obtain photographs of the toddler prince. Here is my solution to this perennial problem. Life would be much simpler if more of us belonged to that sensible group known as the couldn’t-care-less-arazzi.

I am a long-time agnostic when it comes to the royals. I wouldn’t cross the road to see one of them to be honest, not that they come down our road very often. This stance is not one of hostility, or not so much nowadays: the hostility burnt itself out years ago. It is just a giant shrug in the face of their pomp and circumstance, and in the face of their occasional pretences to be just like the rest of us.

I can only recall ever having seen one member of the royal clan. It was at the Great Yorkshire Show and Prince Charles was being ushered around amid a tweedy throng of security people and show dignitaries. Everyone else was eased out of the way so that Charles and Camilla could stroll by. And that was enough royals to last a lifetime for this loyally disinterested subject.

The latest fall-out with the media does not really concern our own newspapers. Most British editors have agreed not to publish unauthorised pictures of Prince George and Princess Charlotte while they are growing up. Instead access is granted to officially sanctioned photographs. These often show young George wearing embroidered toddler pantaloons or something of the type. Such curious garments were last worn by non-royals around 50 years ago, if even then.

Admittedly he is a very cute looking boy. The role he has been born to is not his fault and he should be able to live out his rather gilded childhood in a degree of privacy.

Using other young children as lures, hiding in sand dunes, hiding in the boots of cars – all of these and other such low tricks have apparently been employed by paparazzi snappers. The reason is simple enough: a ‘good’ shot of young George will be worth a lot of money, with various continental and US publications happy to pay top dollar.

There is a tricky balance to strike here. In this latest counter-attack, Kensington Palace issued the strongest worded warning yet to the paparazzi (and what a great word that is, a wonderfully fizzy word for what some see as a lower lifeform), accusing photographers of using “increasingly dangerous tactics” to get their pictures. Mention was even made of the danger that photographers could be shot. Whether this was in error or just because the royals don’t much like photographers is open to debate. Well, no it isn’t, not really. I don’t think anyone is yet suggesting that illicit photographers should be shot. Although Prince Charles might sanction a warning shot or two over the head of the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell.

While young George should be free to live as normal a life as possible, there are different shades here too. Jason Knauf, communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, complains about people attempting to profit from images of a two-year-old boy. He is probably right, but there is also an undercurrent here of presenting and preserving the royal brand.

The royals are kept in the public eye by the media, yet they also wish to control the media. A sanctioned picture is not an intrusion, by its nature, but it is also doing the job of presenting an “acceptable” face of the royals.

Trying to live a simulacrum of an ordinary life can’t be easy under those circumstances. But privilege does have its price too. Mind you, if everyone joined me in a big jaw-cracking yawn of a shrug, then there wouldn’t be a problem at all. Sadly that’ll never happen.