John Sturgis

Half a lifetime ago, I was, briefly, an occasional royal reporter – and watching The Crown, season four has revived memories of that inglorious chapter.  It began with my one and only encounter with my favourite Crown character, Princess Margaret, on a sweltering July evening in 1997. I had arranged a trial night shift on the Evening Standard, starting at 5pm, which only allowed me ten minutes to get from my day job at the Old Bailey across London to their offices in Kensington, by bicycle, in 90-degree heat. I arrived breathless, only for the news editor to spin me straight back out, saying I had just five minutes before I needed to be in Regents Park, prompting another frantic ride across the scorching city.

Where the Chilterns rise over Roald Dahl's family home, which is now a museum, diggers are at work, tearing up the beech woods that inspired one of his greatest books, Danny the Champion of the World, to clear a path for HS2. In the wider world, however, it is Dahl’s reputation that is being dug into.  Dahl’s family recently issued a quiet apology for infamous anti-Semitic comments he made in interviews in the final years of his life. ‘I’m certainly anti-Israel,’ he said in 1990, eight months before his death, ‘and I've become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism’.

At the risk of sounding like Sid James in some late period Carry On, I currently have two birds on the go. One in the garden, one at the allotment, both real beauties — both robins. I’m smitten and I suspect I’m not alone. With much of the nation either working from home or on actual gardening leave, robins have become more familiar than ever. Most species of garden birds are horribly in decline (around 60 per cent of house sparrows, for instance, have been lost since the mid-1970s), but the robin has stubbornly stuck around in great numbers. While those other great survivors, magpies and pigeons, are brash and ungainly, the robin is a delicate little gem: magpie song is shrill, pigeon dumbly repetitive, but robin chirrups are a delight.

There's an old joke from the nineties: The A1 walks into a bar. The barman says ‘Are you with him?’ and nods in the direction of the C1. ‘I'm not going near him,’ the A1 replies. ‘He's a cyclepath.’ Ho ho, how quaint – combining the novel idea of cycle lanes with the un-PC evocation of ‘psychos’. I mention this because the government's big non-Covid idea this autumn, the so-called ‘Green Industrial Revolution’, contains a key provision ‘to make our towns' and cities' cycle lanes worthy of Holland.' I broadly think this is a very good thing – as long as they don't waste any more money building tokenistic ones.