David Behrens

The harm done by cigarettes is something we can get our heads around; it’s been drilled into us for years. So if we suspected our children of chain-smoking in their bedrooms we’d have something to say about it, pretty darned quick.

Even in their darkest hour, Henry Nowak’s family conducted themselves with decency and dignity. What, though, of the mob that gathered outside Southampton police station to ‘avenge’ his murder?

Americans are famously obsessive about being bigger and better than everyone else at pretty much everything and that now includes, it appears, hypocrisy. Well, to what else could you credit the memo from the US Embassy in London suggesting that our ban on social media for under-16s would threaten free speech and the viability of California’s tech industry?

Unless you have in mind the past participle of stirring from sleep, ‘woke’ is a dreadful word. It should in any case be ‘woken’ but that’s not the sort of thing they teach you in schools these days, apparently.

Bishops and elders have assembled in York this weekend for the General Synod, the legislature that calibrates the nation’s moral compass. It is entirely as fusty as you might imagine. The House of Commons is a Tupperware party by comparison.

It took just four weeks from the by-election in Makerfield to the arrival of Pickfords at Number 10. That’s how fast we can remove a powerful figure from office when we set our minds to it. So why is it taking so long at Yorkshire Water?

We seem to have crossed a threshold in national life. The promise of what is possible has begun to burn off the miasma of what is not. I may be jumping the gun; check back in a year to find out.

It’s those involuntary reflex actions that knock you sideways when the water goes off: reaching for the kettle, trying to flush the loo or wash your hands when you pick something nasty off the floor. It took me nearly 24 hours to get used to it.

Fifty years ago, when I first came to work in the West Riding, people complained that if they carried on building houses at the rate they were going, the whole area would merge into a single, soulless settlement. There was even a name for it: Cleckuddersthorpe.

There’s a fine line between comedy and condescension. Someone really should explain it to the people at the Met Office who thought they could make us all laugh by naming acts of God after cartoon characters.