I CAN’T say I have ever thought of myself as the least bit outré, so it was a surprise to discover an affinity with the singer Lady Gaga.

Seeking clarification of this unexpected state of affairs, I checked the definition online and came up with: “Unusual, strange or shocking, especially in a humorous way.”

Well, it’s not for me to say, but at least three of those adjectives might fall on stony ground if thrown in my direction. As for Lady Gaga, she is known for outrageousness after assorted bouts of ever more extreme attention seeking. She once donned a dress made of meat. At this very moment I am wearing old Levi jeans and a stripy red T-shirt from John Lewis. The only meat about my person is the digested remains of whatever flesh I last ate. As for clothes made of meat, my wife the vegetarian might have something to say about that. It’s a good job I already do my own ironing.

So where is all this shocking stuff coming from? Page 27 of last Sunday’s Observer, in which a long feature said that Lady Gaga had changed her ways and was now “normcore” – and that, apparently, is fashion-speak for normalcy.

Miss Gaga has turned normal. This apparently is news, whereas the fact that most of us have been normal for years isn’t even worth the amount of printer’s ink contained in a boring old full stop.

Incidentally, if we might return to that fashion word for a moment, I fancy writing something in which there is a character called Norm Core. The name has a comfortably deadened ring or more of a clang probably. Perhaps that could be my new nom de plume, although nom de pencil might be more fitting.

Evidence called forth in support of Lady Gaga’s shocking departure to the land of normal includes singing and recording jazz standards with Tony Bennett last year, and then last week being recorded on stage in Switzerland belting out the Edith Piaf classic La Vie en Rose.

Man On Ledge has managed normalcy without resorting to either of those activities. Of course there is normal and there is normal. My old normality was sitting in an office for 27 years until one day at the end of May when someone pressed the button on the ejector seat. My new normal is sitting at home with my laptop, shuffling words and thoughts around.

Whether or not being normal is a good career move for Lady Gaga remains to be seen. The girl doesn’t do anything for me as a singer, but she was lively company on the Graham Norton show a while back, and the thing about people being whacky and weird and flamboyantly out there is that at least their behaviour sets up a gaudy perimeter fence over which the rest of us can peer and tut.

The US crime drama The Wire had different settings for each season – docks, a school and a newspaper being three. In the newspaper segment, the fictional publication was inspired by the Baltimore Sun, where the writer David Simon had worked as a reporter.

One scene in that season has always stayed with me. It wasn’t the most dramatic moment but it rang true to a journalist working on a paper no longer at its peak. An editor or manager climbed on a desk, or he does in my memory, to address his staff at a time of gloom and cuts. The reporters and desk staff stared up at him with weariness in their cynical hearts.

‘We will have to do more with less,’ the editor said. There were groans in the fictional newspaper office at that dispiriting rallying call. And a sigh of recognition in my heart, as I’d been hearing that script for a while.

British politicians usually claim the West Wing as their favourite American drama, but I wonder if the chancellor, George Osborne, might not be more of a Wire man. I do hope not, as I wouldn’t wish to share a TV affection with him.

Yesterday Osborne announced more cuts. That man must cut more often than a hairdresser. What he said was: ‘The usual, sir, or shall I just save the price of future trims by cutting off your head instead?’ Well, no, what he actually said was that the government had to find ways to “deliver more with less”. He has asked departments that are not ring-fenced to cut up to 40 per cent from their budgets from 2019-20

Yesterday he told Parliament: “When it comes to building a Britain that lives within its means, we need to finish the job.” Earlier this month in the summer budget, he set out £12 billion of savings from welfare and £5 billion from changes to the tax system. All this, he says, would deliver half of what is needed to clear the deficit.

Well, maybe in will, maybe it won’t. Often these statements are as much about mood music as hard financial facts. The sub-text here is that Osborne is cleverly painting Labour into a corner – something Labour seems determined to do to itself, in its post-defeat, leaderless, don’t-mention-bloody-Ed panic.

One example of how such cuts will work can already be seen here in York. City of York Art Gallery opens next week after a long closure and splendid-sounding renovation. Entry will now cost £7.50 for visitors and locals alike, with some concessions for residents. Before it closed, entry was free, as it should be for all art galleries, especially when they show works gifted to the city in the past. Galleries should belong to the people and be for the people, which I know sounds a bit old-style socialist, but they just should. As should museums but now, according to a report on my old newspaper, York will be charging visitors to museums too.

This is one tiny aspect of what doing more with less looks like: you still pay your taxes, and then you pay again when you wish to visit your local art gallery.

Incidentally, one weasel excuse dusted off by Osborne for his hymn to more with less was the falling crime rate. Well, crime rates fall for all sorts of reasons, from statistical blips to, say, motor manufacturers improving security systems on new cars. So governments claiming credit for a fall is a little like governments claiming credit for the weather. Mind you, with Osborne you never know he might just go and do that.

I AM on my travels this week, Iceland yesterday and Morocco today, all without leaving my ledge. This is thanks to a welcome spot of freelance work with a travel company.

Perhaps because of that, or thanks to the precariousness of life at present, this story struck a chord. A postgraduate student studying in Manchester could not afford to pay rent on top of tuition costs of £20,000. Evan Eames, 24, came up with an alternative solution. He visited various online forums asking for somewhere to pitch a tent while he studied at Manchester University for a master’s degree in astrophysics. Charley Mantack of Stockport saw his plea on Gumtree and offered him a pitch in her back garden. He erected his small tent and lived there for ten months, even staying put in the snow, according to the Manchester Evening News.

Eames paid for this impromptu camping pitch with maths tuition to help Mantack through her GCSE course at Stockport College. She told the newspaper: “I was looking for a flatmate. I saw he wanted to stay in a back garden and I thought, why not, it was weird enough. I loved telling people about it, I like weird, out of the ordinary things like that.”

Eames accepted his place on the course with no idea how he could afford to fund his stay in Manchester, but he’d already done something similar in Melbourne, Australia. Astrophysics is not geography, clearly, and perhaps Eames had never visited Manchester, where high winds, rain and even snow greeted his ten-month camping stint.

And, yes, the basics were accounted for. Eames promised to use the bathroom facilities at the university as much as possible, declaring himself to be on good terms with his bladder. So no nocturnal bathroom ramblings for him. Camping in the garden is clearly a young man’s game.

Anyway Eames has just returned to Canada after successfully completing his masters. His worst memory of his stay was the time he came home in a snowstorm to find his tent had blown over, and he had to put it up again before he crawled in, shivering. His best recollection was a warm spring day when gentle rain pitter-pattered on his canvas roof.

Good on that man, known to his landlady as her physics gnome, thanks presumably to his chin-straggle beard. Not at easy thing to do, camping for that long in someone’s back garden.

This is a fine example of the alternative economy, of people trading in what they have to offer. And with our Airbnb experiences in mind, I recall that we do have a very big back garden. I wonder if my wife the gardener would notice a tent or two erected amid the blooms and bushes of her blessed plot. Man On Ledge will only introduce that idea from a safe distance.

My own student days were spent down a long tunnel: not a location, just that it was an age ago. Studying at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, south east London, I lived for three years in a hall just down the road from Blackheath. Three or four large terraced houses had been knocked through and turned into student halls more superior to what is offered nowadays. Something with which I have often bored our three children, so I won’t bore you with the details.

WE ALL have old family photographs or film footage capturing a shaky, hazy past, although not all of us are doing Hitler salutes. Man On Ledge has not always been a balding man perched on high and contemplating an uncertain view. Once he was a pretty boy with a cloud of Jimi Hendrix hair and a guitar in his hand, as old family Kodachrome transparencies reveal.

The pictures of the Queen aged six or seven and performing a Hitler salute appeared in The Sun newspaper and were drawn from 80-year-old home movie footage. “Secret 1933 film shows Edward VIII teaching this Nazi salute to the Queen,” ran a sub-head next to a still from the film. Unsurprisingly, all this has caused a stir and raised many pert and pertinent questions.

It has long been an open secret that leading royals in the 1930s had links with the Third Reich and were sympathetic towards Hitler – partly, it is often said, as a bulwark against communism, the greatest evil of the age to some British aristocrats at the time.

In the uncovered footage, the young Elizabeth is shown with her younger sister, Princess Margaret, her mother, then Duchess of York, and her uncle Edward, the Prince of Wales. Edward later became king but abdicated to marry the American socialite Wallis Simpson; he faced many accusations of having Nazi sympathies.

So to an extent what The Sun has done is to bring back out into the open a very old story: one that should have been published 50 years ago, and never mind now.

What else does the footage tell us? Nothing much about the Queen, who was only a child at the time. As for the salute itself, was it done in sympathy with Hitler or was it a small act of mockery? It is not possible to say at this distant juncture. But it is possible to point out that this is where being too secretive may well get you in the end.

Access to the royal archives is grudging and tight-lipped, with no 30-year rule as operates with British political history, which does at least allow historians and journalists to rake over very cold coals. As a rule it is reasonable to say that if things are hidden, they will eventually be exposed. So why hide the past behind a high palace wall of secrecy? Partly to maintain the myth and magic, to keep from the public gaze anything that might cast the royals in an unflattering light or spoil the illusion.

People who live behind high walls don’t in general appreciate the lower orders, or nosy journalists working on their behalf, scrabbling up to peep over. That is why, alarmingly, the Government has launched a review of the freedom of information legislation. Labour introduced this openness 15 years ago, and it is fair to say that Tony Blair, so enthusiastic at first, grew less keen later on.

Apparently, ministers now avoid writing down information for fear of exposure under the act – and are said to believe the act stifles creative thinking among officials. And is that not the biggest pile of weasel words flecked with maggoty excuses you have ever seen?

The more openness the better should be the rule. It would be a poor step into a darker past if the Government closed down some rights to freedom of information.

That said, not everything unearthed turns out to have been worth the digging. The legislation was used by The Guardian in a ten-year fight to publish the “black spider” letters the Prince of Wales sent to government ministers, telling them how to run the country. A noble fight was won; and the letters turned out to be rather less interesting than everyone had hoped.

Also, freedom of information can lead to a boring branch of journalism in which the reporter dreams up requests and waits for the answers, rather than going out and grappling with more human stories.

But it’s mostly been for the good. It is only right that we should know as much as possible about everything, and the corridors of power should be opened up to scrutiny. As too should red-carpeted corridors along which the royals once trod, Nazi salutes or not.

TWO sunny days in Harrogate and now the rain is falling like sin, upsetting the ritual. The run will have to wait and so for now at least the knees have been reprieved.

Man On Ledge has been attending the Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival for years now, as a journalist, crime fan and, as it happens, the writer of two published crime novels.

I dipped in and out of events yesterday and on Friday. Time and the train timetable did not allow me to see everything, but plenty of crime talk was listened to and absorbed. Crime-writing conversations were had, writers met, a pint or two swallowed.

The thing about this festival is that the readers just love their crime novels. They are fanatical about crime, many reading little else, and this creates a community feel. Strange in a way that blood should stir such fellowship, but it does. The festival is a big club of criminality, with writers caught blinking and drinking in the light of day, happy for once to be away from all that lonely typing.

Some of the best events are the conversations, the head-to-head encounters between two writers. There is an evenness and democracy to these elevated chats, and when they work a proper bit of chemistry bubbles up.

Val McDermid, more or less the patron saint of this festival, talking to Sara Paretsky was one such engaging chinwag, with McDermid paying tribute to the American writer who, she pointed out, did so much to pave the way for other women writers. Paretsky it was whose VI Warshawski novels inspired McDermid to be a crime writer, showed her how it could be done, pointed a torch down a dark alley, as it were. There is genuine warmth between the two women and that came across.

Other one-on-one encounters relied less on the personal link, but worked just as well. Festival chair Ann Cleeves, author of the Vera and Shetland novels, had a lively and engaging talk with US author Lisa Gardner, even though, as Ann told me later in passing, they had not met before.

The comedian Fred MacAuley proved an inspired choice to interview fellow Scot MC Beaton, author of the Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth novels. With his stand-up skills and easy charm, MacAuley was highly engaging in his own right – and then there was Marion. The onetime Fleet Street journalist and veteran liver of life was warm and amusing, batty and forgetful, and just lovely to listen to.

I missed Eddie Izzard in conversation with Mark Billingham and Rory Bremner interviewing Lee Child. Child popped up earlier to on a panel about Yorkshire Pride. This seemed to surprise everyone, as the Jack Reacher author has only tenuous links to Yorkshire, but never mind, he had much to say. Peter Robinson, as Yorkshire as they come even after all the years in Canada, was good value as always. Hull writer Nick Quantrill sat in the chair and handled everything well, and was later due to take part in the north versus south football match (result unknown at time of writing).

Fertile discussion was had in a talk led by Christopher Fowler, author of the lovely Bryant & May novels, on whether or not the past really is a foreign country.

A session led by David Mark explored why people read certain books, and what influences readers. While the writers taking part – Isabelle Grey, Anya Lipska and James Oswald – were all interesting and had much to say, it was a minor masterstroke to include on the panel the Orkney librarian Stewart Bain, a Twitter star whose influence extends well beyond his own bookshelves.

Manchester writer Cath Straincliffe tapped into a rich vein with a delightfully chewy discussion on the morality of murder, with great contributions from Belinda Bauer, Wiley Cash, the Guardian journalist and thriller writer Jonathan Freedland and the husband-and-wife double act Nicci French. Cath asked great questions, and told me later that she’d really done her homework, down to nerves. The homework showed, the nerves didn’t.

Broadcaster and writer Mark Lawson, always a genial and amusing host, led a great discussion on extreme environments, and whether weird landscapes can take readers into bold new territory. He expressed surprise about his selection for this role as his books are set in Buckinghamshire. Interestingly, one of the writers, the Swede Hakan Nesser, sets his novels in a fictitious city in a made-up country – a bold imaginative move, but one that, as he said, does remove the need for research. You just make it all up instead.

An intriguing thread ran between two of the talks. Both Ann Cleeves and Glasgow writer Louise Welsh mentioned how important it was for writers to earwig other people’s conversations, especially in restaurants or on public transport. Louise suggested that writers should do away with the headphones when on public transport, and instead surrender to nosiness. Ditch the noise for the nose. Ah, hard words but good ones. I do like to listen in to what people say, but I also like my music.

So, yes, I was still plugged in on the train back. Well, that line is very noisy and there is little chance to overhear people above the rattle and creak of the train. And sometimes your iPod throws up a nice juxtaposition. Fancying a walk, I got off the train one stop early. As I walked away, Bruce Springsteen’s Badlands came on. The disjunction made me smile, which you will understand if you have ever been to Upper Poppleton.

I had to wait at the crossing while another train came through. Then the station master or whoever he is pushed the white gates back and the pedestrians and the little cue of cars could move on. Badlands indeed.

BY NINE this morning I should be sitting in a room full of people with crime on their minds. That’s so long as there isn’t an Agatha Christie-style murder on the 7.54am train from York to Harrogate…

The man on the train cannot quite remember when he began to feel like this. He looks across the flat fields bumping by the window, but their uneventful passing doesn’t help. Maybe it was that afternoon in the office a few weeks ago. The Friday that saw the end of everything. The man tries to close the thought down. Thinking about some things isn’t helpful. Better to look ahead, he thinks. Anyway you’re on a train heading for Harrogate instead of sitting in that office again; that’s got to be an improvement.

The train rattles and gives off an engine-fart diesel smell. The man is heading away from where he used to be. He doesn’t know the destination yet. No one seems sure where this journey will end. Well-wishers lined the tracks at the beginning. They still wish the man well but they aren’t around as much. The man doesn’t mind because that’s just the way things go.

He looks along the carriage. A few seats up ahead, to the right and facing in the opposite direction, there is a man without a face. Even without any facial features, he still looks unsettlingly familiar. “One of those executives,” the man thinks, grimly. He sees that the faceless man is holding a report. The man wants to stretch his legs but mostly he wants to see what it says the front of the report held by the man with no face.

He gets up and walks along, yawning exaggeratedly in the hope that this might be a disguise or a distraction. He peeps at what the faceless man holds and sees that is a report is for the No News For You Corporation. The title below the heading is How To Bury Journalists.

The man goes back to his seat, sits down and reaches into his black shoulder bag. He has never killed anyone before. He hadn’t thought the opportunity would come so soon. He thinks about what to do. He can still taste that overpriced cappuccino he bought on the station platform. A faint bitterness has stayed with him.

“I should do this thing,” he thinks. “Some things just should be done. There is a time and a place, now is the time and this is the place.”

As the man feels the cold curve of the gun’s handle, as his mind concentrates on the dark hole of his determination, the train pulls into Harrogate. The man lets the gun fall back into the bag. He has twenty minutes or so to get across town to the big hotel. Val McDermid is interviewing Sara Paretsky at nine and that should definitely be worth a listen. As the man gets off, the train shudders into motion. The carriages pull out of the station and the faceless man passes by. He must be off somewhere else with that scythe, the man thinks.

As he walks towards the Old Swan Hotel the man frets about his lack of action. Perhaps he should have pulled that trigger. Later that day he decides that he made the best decision. Safer instead to concentrate on fictional bullets.

Yes, it’s time for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival again, and I am heading over again and taking my ledge with me. That McDermid-Paretsky encounter certainly sounds good. Today’s events also include a 6.30pm talk entitled Yorkshire Pride, featuring among others Peter Robinson and Lee Child – the latter a surprising choice, seemingly, although the author of the Jack Reacher novels used to buy toffee in Harrogate as a lad, apparently, and later studied in Sheffield. That particular discussion is chaired by Hull writer Nick Quantrill, who was on a panel with me in York last month. Nick, author of the Joe Geraghty novels, told me he thought it was a joke when he first got the message asking him to chair this session.

After sitting next to Nick in that line-up in York, Man On Ledge is sure he will do well in that role today.

As for the lovely beer-washed festival of the bloody written word, that’s always criminally enjoyable.

DOES David Cameron really wish to go down in history as the prime minister who finally saw off the BBC? The mood music makes it seem that way.

Picture the saloon bar piano, bashed about a bit and decorated on top with rings from careless glasses. Cameron joins George Osborne for an anti-BBC bash at this old piano. After a disagreement about who gets to use the one stool, they both agree to play standing up. While Cameron uses two fingers to tap out a light and seemingly inoffensive melody at the top of the keyboard, Osborne is stalking up and down the deep end, composing a doomy riff made up entirely of bass notes.

God what a depressing racket. Where’s Jools Holland when you need him?

Yesterday a long list of celebrities and media types signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph calling on Cameron not to diminish the BBC. The signatories included JW Rowling, Chris Evans, Daniel Craig, David Attenborough, Clare Balding, Brian Cox, Judi Dench – oh, all sorts, too many to list.

This all-star warning came after the culture secretary, John Whittingdale, revealed that he had reached a deal with the BBC to pay the cost of free licences for the over-75s. This dubious arrangement was widely reported to have Osborne’s inky fingerprints all over it. Today the process goes in deeper, with a government green paper debating the size and scale of the BBC.

The public figures said in their letter to Cameron that as the government and the BBC were now entering the charter review, “We are writing to place on record at the very start of the process our concern that nothing should be done to diminish the BBC or turn it into a narrowly focused market-failure broadcaster. In our view, a diminished BBC would simply mean a diminished Britain.”

Unaccountably, no one asked Man On Ledge to sign, but I would have done in a flash.

No one pretends the BBC is perfect: just tune into The One Show for proof of that. For if hell really does exist, my guess is it will be a never-ending edition of that programme, clod-hopping inanities spun into a perpetual loop of mundane misery. Well, it’s not for me, as you can see. But the BBC is important, far too important to box into a dull corner, as those who hate it or oppose it would like to do.

The charter review sets the scope and size of the BBC and, by agreement, it has to be sealed by the end of next year. One aspect of Mr Whittingdale’s review that has already been much leaked by generally hostile forces (see the front page of The Sunday Times last weekend) is the belief that the BBC has been chasing mass ratings at the expense of its public service brief. So what is this statement really saying – that the BBC should only make boring programmes nobody wants to watch? And if that dire prospect was achieved, the same voices would then say that the BBC should be scrapped because it broadcasted shows of such unremitting tedium.

How would Rupert Murdoch react is he was told by the government to only produce boring newspapers that no one was likely to want to read? And does all this imply that the Beeb should abandon popular shows such as Bake Off and Strictly? The Voice is mentioned as a format that other broadcasters could have bought in instead, which is true, but the BBC made a good fist of that show, if you like that sort of thing. Also the Beeb having The Voice keeps ITV on its toes with The X Factor – and vice versa. Broadcasting needs an ecology of competition, and the BBC has to be a proper player in that, not merely a public-service drudge.

The letter-writing celebrities say that during the course of the charter, they would continue to make the case “a strong BBC at the centre of British life”. Among those who signed was the actor Mark Rylance, who with his performance in Wolf Hall earlier this year provided a one-man validation for the purpose and occasional glory of the BBC.

As for whether or not Cameron wishes to be remembered as the prime minister who finally sank the BBC, this is unlikely – but it could just happen anyway if the dark noises off are allowed to grow ever louder, and if George Osborne pulls any more devious tricks. And Osborne telling everyone that he really loves Strictly won’t cut it if he’s forcing a big squeeze behind the scenes.

QUITE by accident I am a man with one foot in the future. I discovered this in an article in last Sunday’s Observer, headlined “12 ideas that could help save the Labour party” (13 if you count scrawling out all memory of Ed Miliband, 14 if everyone promises never again to mention Ed Balls and 15 if the next Blairite in the room to suggest being more like the Tories is hit over the head with the Ed stone).

Anyway, I come in at number four. This isn’t boastful pride or anything. It is simply that I have become part of a social movement. Who knew that could happen?

Charles Leadbeater, who came up with the 12 ideas, says that Labour needs to “stand up for the social self, where the desire for individualism and choice meet an appetite for collaboration and sharing”.

And number four? That is the sharing economy and one of the platforms mentioned is Airbnb. In my non-collaborative life before redundancy, Airbnb was nothing more to me than a puzzling advert encountered at City Screen. In this a young woman was seen popping up all over the world while she nipped into other people’s houses in an odyssey of overnight stays. What on earth was all that about? Well now I know.

This summer of reinventing myself (as described here two days ago) has included a new role as a B&B host, thanks to the internet service Airbnb. We rent out our daughter’s bedroom to people who want to stay in York. And, yes, we have told her so she won’t be coming home from university to find a visitor in her bed.

Our house is on the website and anyone who wants to stay sends us an email through Airbnb. After that we decide whether to accept or decline their invitation. This week we are accommodating our sixth visitor in little over a month. Last week was particularly busy, with one visitor from Sunday night to Friday morning, then one night off. On the Saturday night we put up two young Japanese women, on the Sunday a young Chinese woman and her friend. O the Monday these visitors were replaced by our guest of the moment, who is in York to visit her postgraduate student son. Next weekend has been blocked off as a guest-free zone. The website lets you put up the equivalent of a “No vacancies” sign. We fancy a mini-break from guests, but we are enjoying the company of different strangers in our house.

In his Observer article, Charles Leadbeater says that Airbnb is “creating a relationally rich economy, which helps those with limited resources find better solutions”. Well, it’s funny how you can be part of the solution without having a clue.

Other suggestions in the article include diverting education away from teaching children to diligently deliver the right answer to instead preparing young people to be “adaptive, persistent, collaborative problem solvers, capable of coping with uncertainty with only limited resources”. That sounds exactly right for Labour or anyone else, instead of being locked into a sterile tussle over standards and university degrees for everyone.

There are other sound ideas, including the creation of a Fair City Movement, designed to ensure the development of cities doesn’t only benefit the highest paid. The article is worth seeking out online.

Sadly, such suggestions often float in on a raft of idealism, and then float back out again by the same means. Oliver House in York might be seen as an example, due to be sold by City of York Council to a builder of retirement homes, when one proposed ‘fair city’ solution had been a more creative one of a grassroots social housing group taking over the place. In the end money speaks, partly because that’s what money does, and partly because the system is set up that way.

Must dash, it’s nearly breakfast time.

I SEE that an old controversy has bobbed back to the surface of the Westminster pool. This is the Tory plan to relax the ban that presently restricts the hunting with dogs of impoverished young people. The chaps in their scarlet coats are ready, the hounds are restless. All that it needs for England to be free again is that the unwashed young should start running and then the hounds could be released. A strangled toot on the hunting horn, and they are off in pursuit of merry old England.

Man On Ledge could carry on in this vein, as it is rather enjoyable. But now is the time to admit my mistake. It was wrong to suggest that people on horseback wish to set the hounds on young people. It’s really all those pesky foreigners they are after.

Enough with the satire, however tempting this avenue may be. Hunting foreigners with foxes was only ever a glint in the eye of the madder supporters of Ukip (further satire alert, hopefully).

Anyway, there is no need to mock the foibles and shortcomings of political life when the Conservative Party is willing to do the job for free. It seems hot-headed of the Tories to jump in and resurrect an issue that bloodied them in the past, and one that all too easily brings up the sort of associations more modern Tories would rather everyone forgot.

A free vote on repealing the law is due in the Commons tomorrow*, as promised in the Tory manifesto. It is good to keep promises, but the noisy glee with which some Tories approach this matter is unseemly, especially as plenty among their number disapprove of hunting and may well vote against the contentious motion.

The Conservatives have a majority of twelve, a small advantage, although any majority helps. Such a lead in the Westminster mathematics allows a party to push matters in the desired direction, but it shouldn’t be taken as a blanket mandate from the country. People still don’t exactly love the Tories, but when it came to voting they trusted Labour even less. Such a slight victory should leave sensible heads to acknowledge that they are not loved by all but are instead tolerated in the name of pragmatism.

Victory in tomorrow’s now shelved vote wasn’t certain to start with, thanks to those Tory MPs who oppose foxhunting, including sports minister Tracey Crouch. It was even less certain after SNP members decided to vote against lifting the ban – even though it only covers England and Wales.

According to one report, Scottish MPs have been inundated by English voters saying they would holiday in Scotland and buy more whisky if they vote against the repeal of the hunting ban. Well, who doesn’t like malt whisky or holidays in Scotland? However, the logic here does seem to be malleable, allowing SNP MPs to cause problems on the slimmest of excuses.

The bigger reason is that the SNP feels the Scotland Bill imposing English votes for English laws would make representation of Scotland a second-class affair at Westminster.

Amid all the loud politicking, one part of my satirical scenario risks being forgotten. Last week’s Budget really did hit the young, and especially the impoverished young, hardest by targeting money and resources at the older generations.

And it’s not me saying that, but the Intergenerational Foundation, which reports a widening of the so-called fairness index between people under 30 and over 60.

Man On Ledge is much nearer to the second of those figures than the first, but still believes this to be an alarming finding.

* True at time of original publication, yet hours later the Government withdrew the vote because they feared losing it thanks to the SNP intervention. This matter is expected to bob back into the Westminster pool in the autumn, at which date these satirical asides and other observations should still apply.

“THE artistic director of the English National Opera is quitting,” I say, glancing up from the newspaper in my lap. The television is on and my wife is playing with her phone in that way she does. I am half-reading the lap-located newspaper in that way I do.

It is fair to say that the comings and goings of opera directors is not the normal stuff of conversation on the sofa of an evening. Man On Ledge doesn’t know a lot about opera. Years ago, there was a visit once to the ENO in Covent Garden to see Orpheus In The Underworld. The production was designed by the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. Other than that I don’t remember a lot, except that the can-can was in there somewhere.

I let my eyes skitter over the report. It seems John Berry might have jumped or might have been eased out. Either way something at the end catches my eye. “I am looking forward to spending the summer deciding on my next role,” Berry says.

This is the bit I read out to my wife. Until then she has been puzzled, clearly wondering why I am chuntering on about a departing opera director she’s never heard of. Then the penny drops and she says: “And is he also telling people that he is reinventing himself?”

Ah, yes. That is the line I have been using. Well, you have to say something, don’t you? On the TV series Masterchef, a great cause of time wasting in this house, the budding chefs have to do an invention test. Being made redundant a few weeks ago has left me facing the reinvention test.

How does a man go about reinventing himself or are those just words put out there as a screen to deflect the inevitable questions that squash there like flies on a summer road trip? This man is writing lots of words. That isn’t so much a reinvention as a renovation. Shuffling words around has always been what I’ve done, only now far more are being produced in the name of something or other. Keeping busy and keeping hopeful. A spot of freelance work is coming up this week, allowing me to step away from the ledge for a day or so.

The first draft of the thriller is almost there. Some days it is looking good; some days it isn’t. Further drafts and redrafts will follow, more words being shuffled around, added to and taken away. Somewhere in the middle of all that editing and scrawling and thinking there is a book, or so I hope, fingers crossed, although not while typing.

If you write words, you have to read as well. Writers should always read. Otherwise you’d be like a baker who only ever toiled over a hot oven and never got round to eating any baked goods. And it has to be other people’s baked goods, other people’s words. Other writers, other columnists, just to see how they knead those words.

Lately I have been re-reading Saul Bellow, the great American novelist and a hero of mine years ago. First up was the wonderful Humbolt’s Gift and now I have plunged back into The Adventures Of Augie March, Bellow’s picaresque outing from 1953, a great billowing novel packed with words. In the novel Bellow explores the immigrant Jewish avenues of his Chicago, as March is buffeted from catastrophe to catastrophe, woman to woman, while managing to live off his wits and good looks.

Years later, Bellow was asked what the book was about. “About 200 pages too long,” he replied.