More from life

There’s a warning buried in the detail of the new report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on why top companies employ so few applicants from comprehensive schools: ‘Though this study provides valuable insights into barriers to the elite professions, there are nevertheless some limitations associated with the chosen research methodology. As a small-scale qualitative study, the aim is to explore issues and generalisability is limited.’ But most pundits who’ve commented so far missed this caveat. ‘New research… reveals the privileged choose and look after their own,’ wrote Owen Jones in the Guardian. ‘They don’t like accents that sound a bit, well, “common”.

I wrote last week about a swarm of bees that had attached itself to a wall of my house, as if this were a rare and momentous event; but since then there have been three more swarms, and the men in spacesuits have been back again to remove them. Well, they’ve actually removed only two swarms, for I don’t know where the third one ended up. I only know that Stan, my nearest neighbour, knocked on my front door last weekend to report that a swarm in flight had just crossed his house and was making a bee-line (yes) for my garden. But whether they stopped there, and if so where they settled, I haven’t managed to discover. Anyway, the experience has turned me into a bee-crisis sceptic, as some people are climate-change sceptics.

Getting to Goodwood last Saturday was an achievement in itself. On the Bank Holiday weekend I calculated a cross-country route from Oxfordshire to avoid the traffic. All went well until my satnav threw a hissy fit at my variations. Its female voice, that of an eager hockey mistress contemplating a career change to dominatrix, instructed me to take the fourth turning off a roundabout that possessed only three. Shortly afterwards came a peremptory order to ‘turn right’ off a long straight road that offered no exit, so I switched her off and navigated the old-fashioned way with a map.

I have rather a poor record for speeding over the years. I have been caught by cameras quite often, sometimes getting points on my licence and paying modest fines, and twice avoiding further points by attending speed-awareness courses to be educated in the dangers that speeding can cause. It has all sort of worked; I am now much more careful. But imagine if I was Finnish? According to a report I read recently in the New York Times, a Finnish businessman called Reima Kuisla was fined €54,024 (about £39,000) for driving at 64 mph in a 50 mph zone. This, Mr Kuisla pointed out, was enough to buy a brand-new Mercedes. But this was not his first speeding fine. In 2013 he drove at 76 mph in a 50 mph zone and was fined even more — €63,448 (about £46,000).

Back on political duty with CNN in election week, I came across a dead rat in Downing Street. It had to be an omen, but had the rodent been leaving or arriving when he met his fate, presumably in the jaws of the lean-looking fox who loped across the No. 10 doorstep shortly afterwards? Perhaps my furry ex-friend, too, had been misled by the polls but then we all have to make do with the best information we have available, as I did with our list of winter jumpers. After that heady summer of 2014, when our Twelve produced a profit of £171, I feared a setback and so there has been, but not on the Lib Dem scale. A tenner on the winter twelve every time they ran (choosing just one when two of our selections clashed) would have seen a profit of £19.

It’s more than four months now since my 75th birthday, but I’m still waiting for a ‘cold call’ from the NHS to ask if I have ‘thought about resuscitation’. This is what the Daily Mail warned me last week that anyone over 75 might now receive. As it so happens, I do quite often think about resuscitation, though only in the sense that I would like to be somehow revived when I fall asleep at my desk. But the Mail was talking about something different: NHS guidelines by which doctors are required to ask their elderly patients if they would like to be resuscitated when they suffered a heart attack or a stroke or other such life-threatening events.

At Sandown Park last Saturday an era ended. Twenty thousand of us turned up to cheer on Tony McCoy as he took his last two mounts and collected his 20th trophy as champion jumps rider. We cheered, we clapped, we decided there was nothing to be ashamed of about a certain moistness of eye, noting that even the ultimate iron man himself wept a tear or two as he rode back on the third-placed Box Office. Over the past 20 years, the riding of racehorses has become ever more professional, but not once during that period has anybody else been champion jockey over jumps. For once the old cliché works: we will never see his like again. Just look at the statistics: AP rode in 17,630 races and won 4,357 of them, an extraordinary strike rate of 24 per cent.

There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the second child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It is hardly a very exciting event. Babies are born all the time, and there are already quite enough descendants of the Queen to ensure the survival of the Windsor dynasty on the throne of the United Kingdom for a long time to come. Yet there are many people in this country for whom this commonplace event will be more thrilling than the forthcoming general election, even though it could presage the dismemberment of the country itself. The British monarchy continues to enjoy enormous popularity.