Melanie McDonagh

So, the Manchester United footballer Mason Greenwood has not been found guilty of the offences of attempted rape and coercive behaviour that he was accused of, but he’s still very sorry for unspecified behaviour that he did engage in.  Have you ever read anything more confusing than the following?  ‘In a statement, Greenwood accepted he had "made mistakes" and took his "share of responsibility", but added: "I did not do the things I was accused of”.’ ‘Today's decision has been part of a collaborative process between Manchester United, my family and me. The best decision for us all is for me to continue my football career away from Old Trafford, where my presence will not be a distraction for the club.

Let’s hear it for the Beano, 85 years old this week. Lucky readers can get a commemorative issue featuring Charles and Camilla, Dua Lipa and Lewis Hamilton. It’s also a chance for those who haven’t read it for decades to register how much it has changed. Lately, the Bash Street Kids welcomed five classmates: Harsha, Mandi, Khadija, Mahira and Stevie Starr. There’s a hijab alongside the stripy shirts and school caps, plus a scientist in a wheelchair. Fatty, the boy who ate all the pies, and Spotty, who had pustules and a long tie, have been renamed Freddy and Scotty to ensure young people who have freckles, weight problems or acne are not taunted by their peers. Censorship works best when it’s internalised.

Is rewilding, where nature is allowed to take its course, all it's cracked up to be? Alan Titchmarsh, the nation's joint favourite gardener along with Monty Don, appears to think not. In an intervention in the House of Lords' horticultural sector committee inquiry, Titchmarsh said that rewilded gardens are bad news for wildlife. 'With their greater plant diversity, domestic gardens offer sustenance and shelter to wildlife from March through to November,' he told peers. 'Nine months' of nourishment. A rewilded garden will offer nothing but straw and hay from August to March. A four-month flowering season is the norm.

All things considered, probably the least of George Osborne’s concerns on the occasion of his second marriage was being showered with orange confetti by a woman apparently sympathetic to the Just Stop Oil protestors. Bingo: a whole new form of protest came into being. What is the whole confetti thing about anyway? You used to be able to tell if there’d been a wedding at a church by the amount of pastel-coloured horseshoe and bell shapes ground into the pavement outside. It was sold in boxes decorated with wedding motifs. Nowadays, no eco-chic guest would throw paper confetti; dried flower petals are the way to go, available in tasteful cones and a useful way of recycling dead flowers. (Really, the protestor should just have thrown marigolds.

So, which country is putting health warnings and calorie counts on bottles of alcohol for the benefit of its citizens? Nope, not Canada or New Zealand. But you’re getting warm… It’s Ireland, the country that gave us Guinness, Jameson, Bushmills and, for those who like that kind of thing, Baileys. That’s right: a health warning just like for cigarettes. But instead of rotting lungs, presumably there’ll be a lovely picture of a liver with cirrhosis. What effect will it have on me? None, dear reader, none. I drink to forget this sort of thing. But that’s the way Ireland is going (actually has gone) for a generation: not so much the nanny state as the Miss Trunchbull state, one that would swing you round by your pigtails.

Disney’s latest remake of The Little Mermaid, out this week, has, it seems, a message for the royal family. When the prince wants to know the name of the mermaid, played by Halle Bailey, he tries to guess. ‘Diana?’ Nope. ‘Catherine?’ She pulls a face. Cue royal watchers identifying a snub of Kate, the Princess of Wales. Disney’s 1990 take on The Little Mermaid wasn’t quite the story that Hans Christian Andersen wrote – not having much to say about the mermaid’s quest for an immortal soul – but it did find one fan. As Meghan Markle observed in her interview with Oprah Winfrey: ‘Who as an adult really watches The Little Mermaid? But it came on… and I went “Oh my God, she falls in love with the prince and because of that loses her voice.”’ If only.

There's been an interesting discussion about the Archbishop of Canterbury's addition to the coronation service, but has anyone actually tried to parse it?  It goes as follows: 'Your Majesty, the Church established by law, whose settlement you will swear to maintain, is committed to the true profession of the Gospel, and, in so doing, will seek to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely. The coronation oath has stood for centuries and is enshrined in law. Are you willing to take the oath?' The King: 'I am willing.' Wouldn't it be clearer to ask the King to swear directly that he will protect people of all faiths and beliefs? Right. We get the gist, but it doesn't make sense. 'The Church is...committed to X...

My own relationship with the gambling industry is almost entirely framed by horse-racing. If I’m at a race, I’ll put a couple of quid each way on a horse I like the look of with a bookie. If I’m absent from the event, I’ll go for an Irish trainer and a name I like. My family had a weakness for betting on races; my grandmother spent happy hours studying form, and my grandfather had his own stool in the betting shop. As an activity, this does have the possibility you can lose your shirt – and lots of people did and do. But it’s a world – a whole world – away from contemporary joyless gambling on fixed-odds betting terminals, where the scope for human skill and insight is precisely zero. You can never, ever, beat the system.

Dirt, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, 'matter out of place'. For her, 'there is no such thing as absolute dirt' and 'no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit'. It is a label for 'all events which blur, smudge, contradict or otherwise confuse accepted classifications'.   This is a long way of getting round to saying that the Royal Horticultural Society is now encouraging us to embrace weeds. Four of the dozen show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are to include them. Indeed Sheila Das, the garden manager at RHS Wisley, is anxious that we should eschew the derogatory term 'weeds'; she prefers 'weed heroes' or 'superweeds'. 'We used to call them plants in the wrong place', she said. 'They are not.