SO WHO you gonna believe? The scientist with a long list of sombre facts at his fingertips or the guy in the ten-gallon hat with his jaw clamped round a cigar and oil stains on his nice white suit?

That isn’t exactly what President Barack Obama said yesterday when he announced sweeping new plans to reduce greenhouse gasses from US power plants. But the implication was surely there in a country more sharply divided than most on the extent and causes of climate change – and traditionally more wedded than most to oil and coal.

Obama’s plan aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 32 per cent by 2030. This will strike many people as a good and sensible initiative. It will also strike some Republicans and backwoods deniers of almost anything and everything as apostasy: the abandonment of a long-held loyalty to oil and coal.

Too many Americans, especially those on the stars-and-stripes right, more or less refuse to believe that climate change exists. Such deniers insist that any suggested curtailment of their right to burn coal and oil however they want, and in whatever quantities they choose, and with however much smoke it makes, is more or less a sin against God and America, etc.

It is thought that there will be legal and administrative challenges from many states, especially those heavily reliant on coal-fired power stations.  So none of this will be easy. And Obama will be long gone before the date he has set for his big environmental clean-up. But good on him for making a stand at last.

Oil, coal and gas from fracking represent the brutal buck, the shortest line to a profit. The free market likes such solutions. That is why Republicans in the US and, increasingly, our own Conservatives so often stand against green-minded alternatives.

The US and China are the world’s biggest polluters and users of fossil fuels. If those two mighty countries show they are prepared to do something about climate change, then others are more likely to follow suit. Also, both are massive countries with the space and potential to push ahead with green energy.

Obama is right to say: “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something” about climate change; right to intone: “We have to get going.”

And good on him too to add a personal note in saying: “I don’t want my grandkids not to be able to swim in Hawaii or climb a mountain and see a glacier because we didn’t do something about it.”

I feel the same about my grandchildren when or if they arrive. Hell, I wouldn’t mind a swim in Hawaii or a sight of a glacier myself right now.

SOMETIMES a crisis makes odd bedfellows of us; and sometimes a crisis might not be all it is got up to be. So it is with the migrant crisis.

The unexpected sleeping partner for Man On Ledge comes in the shape of the Church of England, or more specifically the bishop of Dover, the Right Rev Trevor Willmott.

We have never met, unsurprisingly, as we don’t have bishops round at our house all that often. But the bishop speaks sense when he says: “We’ve become an increasingly harsh world, and when we become harsh with each other and forget our humanity then we end up in these standoff positions. We need to rediscover what it is to be a human, and that every human being matters.”

That is one of the best responses to the migrant crisis Man On Ledge has yet heard. This ledge is a place without a church; this thin shelf of vertiginous rock owes no allegiance to any particular god. But that man of God strikes me as someone who is speaking sense. For the biggest danger at such times is that we forget our common humanity.

It doesn’t help when David Cameron, pausing in one of his globe-skimming political PR exercises, refers to those trying to get into Britain as a “swarm” – a “dehumanising” description, as the Refugee Council rightly complained. Yet it was probably more of a thoughtless slip than a word intentionally dipped in poison, as Cameron doesn’t normally stray into racist ramblings, leaving that to the nastier fringes of his party.

Still, to these atheistic ears the churchman on this occasion speaks more sense than the politician. But making the important observation that we shouldn’t forget our humanity doesn’t solve any problems; it just reminds us of our obligations, reminds us not to forget that those trying to get into Britain are human beings at the sharp end of life’s difficulties, severely put-upon individuals who have suffered much to reach that squalid camp in Calais, not some sort of insect swarm. They are fellow human beings and, as Nick Cohen wrote in The Observer, “In hating those in Calais, we hate ourselves” – another sound comment in a piece well worth reading.

As for solutions, the answer must lie somewhere between allowing in those with a decent claim and realising that not everybody who wishes to come in can do so.

The trouble is that making the decision is never going to be easy – especially as we operate at such times by pressing the panic button. And ‘pressing’ is the word for it, in a sense, as the migrant crisis is to some extent a creation of the media.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a problem; it isn’t to say that the media has invented this crisis. It is just to point out that the way the media works is to concentrate huge attention on one story, relentlessly going over and over the same ground, and finding the pictures that confirm our prejudices. The focus is so intense that the media becomes like a magnifying glass left out in the sun:  a fire is inevitable.

In a sense the politicians and the media then become locked in headless panic mode, the one feeding off the other.

Incidentally, in the name of political balance, it is worth pointing out that Labour has been pathetic on this matter, with stand-in leader Harriet Harman merely writing to Cameron to demand compensation for those who have been inconvenienced. Now it is true that Labour has its problems, but surely someone could have come up with something a bit more meaningful, sharp and relevant than that bit of pointless finger jabbing.

TODAY is Yorkshire Day. There isn’t an equivalent day for people born in Bristol who lived south of Manchester for a while, then decamped to London for student life and a post-student decade, before moving to York 27 years ago on a passing whim.

That passing whim became a life, as happens, and here I am parked outside the back entrance of York Station, waiting for our York-born daughter to return from university in Newcastle.

We are kindly allowing her back into the house, having kept the weekend free of Airbnb guests. Her bedroom is hers again. I drive her back home and tell her things that she already knows because I have written about them here. Sometimes I forget what I have delved into while writing about life on this ledge. Some blogs and columns that stray into family territory explore the rows and domestic dingdongs, but we don’t have many of those, so are disappointing value on the home storm front.

Now a day later and it is Yorkshire Day, as the daughter reminded me just now as we were having coffee. Yorkshire is a fine and wonderful part of the country and I feel honoured to be a long-term guest, having lived here longer than anywhere else in a mildly nomadic life. But something about Yorkshire Day strikes me as odd. If you want to dabble in stereotypes, Yorkshire people are bluff, amusing, spade-calling types whose pride in where they live goes without saying. So the fact that Yorkshire Day is full of people going on about how great Yorkshire is seems a little unnecessary.

The idea for the day came about during a meeting of the Yorkshire Ridings Society in 1974, apparently. According to the BBC website, Yorkshire Day celebrates everything Yorkshire. As a visitor who stayed, I’d rather celebrate Yorkshire by getting blown about in the Yorkshire Dales and then going for a pint in pub where there’s a log fire even if it is August.

In her Guardian column today, the York-born Sophie Heawood remembers when my old newspaper, now much truncated in its title but then called the Yorkshire Evening Press, got hot under the colour when Fergie and Andrew, Duke and Duchess of York, had their first baby and he took her a bunch of red roses instead of white – evil Lancastrian roses instead pure white Yorkshire ones.

As Sophie recalls: “There was outrage, which struck me as quite brilliant: who could fail to be impressed by a county that was still determined, in 1988, to enjoy a war that had begun in 1455?”

Well, me in a way. I had just started on the paper and, with a headful of London ways, I was still not up to speed when it came to proud and ancient grudges.

Incidentally, it is  a great wheeze of York Art Gallery to reopen on Yorkshire Day – and to insist on charging everyone £7.50 to get in, including the locals. As Yorkshiremen and women are famed for their willingness to part with money, that is sure to be a great success.

FUNNY FOOTNOTE: Cycling through the station car park, I spot a man standing next to a suitcase and trying to attract the attention of three women some distance off. I wonder if he might be a taxi driver. As I approach the women, I say to one of them: “There’s a man back there shouting at you.” She smiles and says: “That’s my husband, he’s always doing that.” I’m still chuckling to myself as I cycle up the ramp.

I’VE been to lots of them, my son plays them round Manchester and now my life has turned into one. It turns out I am living a gig, or more fully that I am taking part in the ‘gig economy’.

Where gigs once used to be something musicians did and other people went along to watch, now a gig can be a way of life for anybody.

Working a gig, according a professor of business writing in last weekend’s Observer, is making the choice to do bits and pieces of work rather than working fulltime.

This choice was pretty much made for me and I am still working out the rules and exploring the bumpy terrain. Of course sometimes it is the case that something new has existed for ages under a different name. So a journalist, writer or musician working in the gig economy is just doing what members of their tribe have often and always done, which is to work freelance; to work for themselves rather than being employed by a company.

The roots of the word are interesting, with freelance dating back to the free companies of the Middle Ages which were, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, “free to sell themselves to any cause or master”. Interestingly, Brewers suggests that we probably owe the word to Sir Walter Scott as it first appears in his 1820 novel Ivanhoe “as a term for a knight with no allegiance to any single cause”.

The same source has no entry for ‘gig’ other than “gig-lamps” which is “an old slang term for spectacles, especially large round ones”. The allusion was to lanterns attached to a ‘gig’ or one-horse carriage.

As for the musical gig, Cambridge Dictionaries Online offers: “a single performance by a musician or group of musicians, especially playing modern or pop music”, which is one of those definitions that hardly need spelling out.

The gig economy is more than being a freelance, more than knitting together lots of single performances. To boil down what that business professor wrote: optimists sees the gig economy as an opportunity for boundless opportunity and innovation; while pessimists think ‘sod that’ all is portends is “a dystopian future of disenfranchised workers hunting for their next wedge of piecework”.

Why the gig economy is now a buzzword is down to digital technology, the curse of our age or the liberator of our age, depending on your outlook.

Ever since we started doing Airbnb, I keep reading that we are part of something or other, and now I discover that we are playing gig economics. Airbnb is a new spin on the more traditional way of doing things, in this case offering short-term accommodation to visitors.

The service couldn’t exist without the internet, and what this new digital channel does is link people with a need (a desire to stay somewhere) with those who have a service to offer (a spare room or a room vacated by a daughter away at university). This channel links the two together and arranges an exchange of mutual benefit (well, apart from having to scramble eggs at short notice). In other words, you don’t rent a room from Airbnb; instead you just visit that platform to see who can offer what.

If the gig economy ends up being a way for companies to avoid having to pay employees regular wages, then that won’t be for the general good. But if it allows people to pick and choose and fit work round their lives, rather than the other way round, then it might be beneficial. Early days yet, I guess. One obvious disadvantage is that those gigging away on the margins allow politicians to talk up all the new jobs being created.

What will all this mean for the future shape of life and work? Not sure anyone has that one mapped out yet.

“Your computer will restart several times. Sit back and relax…” Relax! I’ve got a column to write on this here ledge. How can I do that and relax at the same time? And aren’t these infantile messages just a teeny bit bloody infuriating? A photograph in The Observer last weekend showed a bench with a National Trust sign in front it. This featured an exclamation mark above the words: “PLEASE DO SIT HERE. It’s such a lovely spot.”

Oh, stop being so cute. It’s a bench, if we like the look of it we’ll sit down. If we don’t we’ll walk on by and find another less needy bench. It’s as bad as those buses that say: “Sorry, I’m not in service.” Better, though, I guess than: “Sorry I’m not in the mood to stop right now. Can’t be arsed.”

Anyway my laptop has been taken from me, stolen for the upgrade to Windows 10. So now I am back on the old computer. No sitting back and relaxing for this keyboard-bashing seeker after, well, not the truth so much as something to write about.

Before I was so rudely interrupted by Microsoft, I was about to turn my eyes towards Calais. I see that some of the tabloids regard the migrant chaos as an excuse to inflame ancient wounds and send the Army in. Invade France – what a splendid idea. While we’re about it why don’t we reclaim Calais for the English, as our monarchs did once claim sovereignty there? Never mind it that was back in 1346, what are a few centuries when our national pride is at stake?

As for the migrant crisis, well it does seem to be a mess for people wishing to reach France for their holidays or for business reasons. Circumstances have ruled out foreign travel this year, but last summer’s quick break to Lyon would likely have been sabotaged by what is going on now.

And behind all this, behind the political huffing, are human stories of people so desperate to come here that they are willing to endure mammoth journeys, endless suffering and possible death – all to land a foot on British soil.

Some people complain that this isn’t our problem and it’s all to do with the French. No it isn’t this is Europe’s problem and we are part of Europe, whatever Nigel Farage might wish. And if you still wish to scrub Europe from your mind, it’s the world’s problem and we are part of the world, no getting around that one.

If migrants are trying to get here, if we are the dreamed-of destination, then we have a duty to be part of the solution. And we need to come up with something better than potty notions about sending the Army in.

And surely the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has a point when it says that the extra £7 million announced on Monday by the government should be spent in processing asylum applications rather than building higher fences. When people are so desperate, fences won’t hold them back.

Incidentally, in the time that I have been sitting back and relaxing while writing this blog, my Windows upgrade has reached 21 per cent. Perhaps I should go and find a National Trust bench to sit on. 90 minutes later… done at last!

I’M not usually one for a social media backlash, but is this the queue for Cecil?

Cecil the lion had a price on his head. A US dentist is reported to have paid $50,000 to take part in a hunt in Zimbabwe. In hunter’s terms, Walter Palmer got lucky; the lion less so, as he was shot by bow and arrow and reportedly took 40 hours to die.

Sometimes people have too much money for their own good and the good of the planet. If a dentist from Minnesota can splash that much on killing African wildlife, there must be an awful lot of dollars in molars.

Not content with shooting each other, Americans – or at least the wealthy ones – are now taking their love of weapons abroad and finishing off endangered wildlife instead, all in the name of sport.

If you want to feel annoyed and upset, read up on Cecil the lion and see how he was skinned and beheaded after that lingering death.

In some reports you will find a photograph of the US dentist with another hunter getting pally with a dead lion. Palmer has his arms round his companion’s shoulders. The lion lies before them, eyes closed and great paws resting on a mound of red earth, looking as if he might be taking a nap. Well, he is – the last and longest, the big sleep, thanks to the hunter’s bullet. Or maybe arrow, it isn’t clear from the picture, although no arrow appears to be embedded in that particular once-proud lion.

The lion in that photograph isn’t Cecil, just another magnificent big cat with the misfortune to find himself on the wrong end of an American man’s horrible hobby.

Just what is it about people who have the money to indulge their dreams and desires? At what point does someone think: “You know what would make my life better? Going to Africa and shooting a lion, that’s what…”

Palmer was reported to be “quite upset” about the Facebook furore his actions had unleashed. Not as upset, at a guess, as the dead, skinned and now headless lion. The dentist issued a media statement in which he said he’d hired several professionals and secured the proper permits for a trip that was to his knowledge “legal and properly handled and conducted”.

Cecil, locally celebrated for his black mane, was popular with tourists and was wearing a GPS tracking device as part of a study by Oxford University into his movements. The lion is said to have been tempted out of a national park by bait, at which point Palmer got out his bow and arrow.

The dentist issued a statement in which he said: “I had no idea that the lion I took was a known, local favourite, was collared and part of a study until the end of the hunt.”

He added that he deeply regretted that “my pursuit of an activity that I love and practice responsibly and legally resulted in the taking of this lion”.

So not all that contrite, then. Palmer had no idea the lion he shot was a local favourite. But he did, at a vague guess, know that it was a lion. You know, one of those big cat-shaped mammals that are increasingly said to be endangered. As apologies go, that hardly rises high enough to ring the sincerity bell, being in effect an admission of sorrow for shooting the wrong lion – “Look, I dearly wish I’d shot some other goddamn lion and not that one everyone is making such a fuss about.”

Should we feel in any way sorry for Palmer? Well his actions have put him at the centre of a social media hate-storm, which isn’t a good place to be. He did think he was doing something legal, and perhaps he would have been if he had killed some other unfortunate lion instead. But isn’t there is difference between the legal and the morally responsible?

As for all those unkind comments about his own teeth and lack of anaesthetic, perhaps the next time Palmer hears the word “Open wide, please” he will find his head inside a lion’s mouth.

IT HAS been raining all day and I am standing in the garden with a young man from China. We only met an hour ago. I didn’t just bump into him out there or anything. It’s a big garden but not that big.

He has been taking photographs of the house on his phone and now he wants to have a look round the garden. So here we are, covered in drips from the trees and wetted by that English meteorological phenomenon known as summer holiday rain. I don’t bother trying to explain about the rain that falls once the schools break up. It will take too long and we are getting wet.

We duck beneath the dripping rose arch, the blooms now tattered or gone, and walk past the greenhouse, where the tomatoes are at least beginning to appear, like hard little green full-stops.

Pushing through more water-dressed branches, we come to the big pond, then walk round the smoke bush, fiery against the soggy blanket of a sky.

I show him the veg patch and the wildish area at the end, then we trudge back, damp and delighted. Well, we are both damp and he is delighted. Everything about our house pleases our guest. He tells me that he has never been in an English house before. He likes the decoration, he tells me. I decide not to take the credit. The pictures are to send to his mother at home in China. ‘But not now,’ he says. ‘In China it is midnight.’

At first I couldn’t catch what he was saying, but now we understand each other better. Our guest was a late booking, there on the computer first thing in the morning when we thought we had a free night. It seemed a shame to hit the decline button, so here he is.

Life has changed in many ways since I shuffled onto this vertiginous little ledge. Not having a regular job is the biggest change. Next up is opening our house to strangers via Airbnb.

Our young man from China is a 24-year-old postgraduate student attending a summer school somewhere or other. At first I don’t understand and just nod, but then my ears un-stuff themselves and I catch what he is saying: ah, Oxford. He has come to York by himself for the day and that strikes me as quite brave in a way. Here I am doing what I normally do and here he is, spending the night in an English house for the first time.

Two other guests stayed at the weekend. First up was the young French academic who spoke in a loud cartoon-gabble and gesticulated wildly. He stood in front of the bookcase with all the old jugs and vases on the shelf, arms waving all over. He stepped back and we held our breath. Was he going to dislodge something with his waving arms? Thankfully not.

Then came the British-based young man from Israel, in York for a wedding, who was friendly and interested and interesting.

Now here I am making small-talk with a young man from China. My wife is out at her choir. I begin to worry it might be a long evening of stuttered half-understand exchanges. But the young man is friendly and charming and just so pleased with everything. He is studying English and politics and he looks along our bookcase. I show him my two published novels, out of vanity or maybe just something to do. He looks at the books and tells me that he doesn’t think there are crime novels in China. Then he lays the books flat on the table and takes a photograph to add to his collection.

Soon after this he smiles and asks if it is all right if he goes up to his room now. Perhaps the conversation has worn him out too.

I sit and half watch something on television while playing around on the laptop. All this still feels strange, but good strange.

IT’S happened to us all. There you are innocently going about your daily life when an attractive young prostitute comes over all charming, offering you drugs.One minute you are keeping your own counsel, and the next you are spilling more beans than a Heinz factory.

Only the other day I was sitting on my ledge feeling at a loss when just such a thing happened. Fortunately the wind got up and the cocaine was blown away. After that I gave the pretend prostitute cum undercover reporter a gentle push, and she tumbled off and disappeared into the clouds below.

I confess to feeling nothing much about Lord Sewel, who has resigned as deputy speaker of the House of Lords after being clandestinely filmed taking cocaine with sex workers. This is partly because until last night I had never heard of the man, not a whisper or a whistle, nothing. Now he is all over the papers for his scandalous behaviour. He has resigned as deputy speaker of the House of Lords, and I can tell you that we are petty cut up about this in our house.

Other politicians have leapt on this careering bandwagon and demanded further punishment. Well, I guess that’s what happens when you are filmed snorting cocaine through a rolled-up fiver while cavorting with sex workers (note to self: no, just no).

During the Sun on Sunday video, Lord Sewel says all sorts of rather splendidly incautious things, including the observation that David Cameron is “the most facile, superficial prime minister there has ever been” and that Boris Johnson is “a joke” and a “public school upper class twit”.

Gosh, don’t some people talk a surprising amount of sense when they are snorting cocaine in the company of pseudo-prostitutes.

In an attempt at balance, Lord Sewel is also heard to describe the Labour leadership contest as being in “a ****ing mess”.

These affairs are always puzzling to Man On Ledge. For starters, the victims are often not exactly top-flight candidates for exposure and ridicule. Why did Mr Murdoch’s newspaper chase after this particular man no one had heard of – and wouldn’t it be more of a scandal if you recognised the victim? The suspicion here is that a fairly soft target has been picked for a big-scale fuss. It’s not a fuss about nothing, but it is a fuss about someone most people don’t really care about.

The template is nearly always the same. A middle-aged or elderly man is flattered into doing something stupid and damning by attractive young women. That saying about there being no fool like an old fool springs to mind, I suppose. And these tawdry tales do so often display the capacity of old men to do foolish things.

Then there is the trickery involved, the pretty lure dangled before the selected fool. The victims have almost always been coerced in some way in what seems a grubby sort of journalism. Couldn’t undercover journalism be put to higher ends than this, to exposing real scandals and genuine lapses?

Anyway, in the name of sanity I shall regard with suspicion all prostitutes who inch onto my ledge with rolled-up £5 notes and a bag of white stuff, unless it’s sherbet of course.

AMBER Rudd – what a name that is. Fossilised tree resin for a first name and a freshwater fish for a second. Connected with nature, or so it would seem. Perhaps that’s why they gave her the climate change brief.

Ms Rudd’s full title is Energy and Climate Change Secretary. Let’s just stop there for a moment. Lumping those two together seems wilful. After all, doesn’t the first cause the second? And if so, how can a minister have responsibility for both? She was on the radio yesterday, batted about in the day’s bulletins. And each time she came on a strange sound could be heard. That was me growling.

Here is part of what she said: “The Conservatives are committed to action on climate change and we are clear that our long-term economic plan goes hand in hand with a long-term plan for climate action. Climate action is about security, plain and simple – economic security.

“The economic impact of unchecked climate change would be profound. Lower growth, higher prices, a lower quality of life. It is the ultimate insurance policy.”

In short, it isn’t about climate change, it’s the economy, stupid. Yet surely the economic motors help to cause climate change, don’t they?

Now I don’t claim to be any sort of a Green. I have voted for the party once. I drive a big old car, trapped by circumstance in an ageing Volvo that is now bigger than we need (good old car, though) and thirstier than is sensible. I do like to cycle, and that’s as green as you can get.

But I can’t claim to be a Green evangelist or anything. Just someone who thinks that the more green energy we can generate, the better. Yet Ms Rudd and her party seem hell-bent on quickly doing away with as many green policies as possible – creating a bonfire of their past green vanities.

Onshore wind, solar energy, green homes, flogging off the green investment bank, reducing the incentive to buy a greener car, giving up on zero carbon homes – all this and more comes with an unhealthy obsession with old-style energy grabs such as fracking. Ms Rudd and her party seem happy to go about smashing up low-carbon policies, with the weasel excuse that the government has met its international climate obligations more or less. Even if that’s true, why stop there – and why not lead the way in green energy instead?

She also said that it could not be for one part of the political spectrum to find all the solutions – adding that too often energy change was seen from a left-wing perspective. Well, it wasn’t when David Cameron used to bang on about it all the time, but now that his party is in sole control of the government he seems happy to have kicked off the green wellies.

Solutions can come from many sources, as witnessed, say, by the efforts made by the motor industry to produce more fuel-efficient cars, hybrid cars and battery-powered cars. But governments set the mood music, and right now the Tories are reverting to climate-sceptic type and jamming their fingers in their ears while singing Money, Money, Money.

FROM this ledge at this moment I can see swirling seagulls causing bloody mayhem, a middle-aged couple harming themselves with a cheeky drink or two and a grey-bearded man apparently intent on bringing a political party to its knees.

Yes, it’s one of those pick-and-mix days.

Seagulls have long been a bit of a nuisance, but thanks to a bout of overheated reporting this summer, they are now public enemy number one.

A woman in Cornwall was attacked while walking her dog and a boy eating a sausage role had his finger injured by a swooping gull. Such incidents have led to a cry on the nation’s newsdesks of: “Get me a killer gull.”

In the days when nothing happened in the summer this time of year was known as the “silly season”. Stories which would normally not be considered worthy of newsprint or air time would be elevated for the want of anything else being available.

“Killer seagulls” fall into that category. All sense goes out of the window and everyone goes gull crazy. Even David Cameron has stepped into the great gull quandary, saying during a visit to Cornwall, where he likes to holiday, that we needed “a big conversation” about gulls.

Don’t you just love the way that man is ready with an important-sounding quote for every possible situation and scenario. I wonder what a big conversation about gulls would sound like. Will it be different in tenor to a small conversation about sparrows? Will the prime minister order a gull task force or will he perhaps send in the RAF armed with tiny gull-dispatching missiles?

Now I admit that gulls are a nuisance. I once saw one swoop and steal an un-licked ice-cream cornet from a woman’s hand. In Helston, meanwhile, Sue Atkinson was reportedly pounced on as she walked her dog. The attack left her bleeding and in shock, although not so disturbed that she couldn’t come up with an obliging quote for the newspapers: “It was like a scene from the film The Birds.”

Although in that case it was crows not seagulls. Perhaps if Alfred Hitchcock were still around today he would instead make a film called The Seagulls.

Apparently, gulls attack or make a nuisance of themselves at this time of the year as the birds have their young to defend. Also they often attack because of man’s behaviour, sitting and eating fish and chips within beak’s range, for instance. Man On Ledge loves alfresco fish and chips, but I guess you do have to admit that the harbour wall or wherever is shared territory.

People often have it in for birds. York is infested with Canada geese and their droppings at certain times of the year. But is a cull ever the answer?

There is a new report out. Where would we be without those? Report-less and less prone to anxiety, perhaps. Anyway, this one warns that middle class middle-aged people are most likely to be the ones drinking too much, especially if they are healthy, active, sociable and highly educated. I guess this isn’t surprising: people in that category are free to do as they wish, and that includes drinking to excess. Drinking too much for men is officially regarded as more than 21 units a week, which translates as nine pints. Man On Ledge probably drinks that much beer in an average month, although to be strictly accurate there is some wine in there too.

The study was based on responses to a survey by a body called the English Longitudinal Study of Aging. Now there’s a name to love. I am worried? At present finances are too tight for excess, so no I am not. But it is possible to see the dangers here.

Finally, Jeremy Corbyn, a man regarded in some quarters as little better than a swooping gull. Only the left-wing MP is not filching fish and chips. He wants to grab the Labour leadership, with one poll suggesting he might be on course to win.

This has led to plenty of wrangling and the sort of internecine wrestling that occurs when a party is on the skids. There was even a silly suggestion from the Daily Telegraph that its readers should join the Labour Party and vote for Mr Corbyn as a way of ensuring that Labour elected a leader who would damage the party.

I don’t think he will win and a very left-wing leader wouldn’t do Labour much good at the polls next time round. But at least Mr Corbyn has clear-cut beliefs and none of the Tory-aping manner of other candidates.

Incidentally, in conversation the other night one of our Airbnb guests expressed his admiration for David Cameron and said he just felt safer with him in charge. He wondered if I agreed. A polite silence ensued.