Neil Clark

It’s around 8.10 on a lovely warm summer’s evening on the Isle of Man and the sidecar practice session in the 2022 TT – Tourist Trophy – is about to begin. The announcer at the grandstand asks the sidecar riders to get ready to race in ten minutes. There is the sound of engines revving up, great excitement and then… nothing. There has been an incident in the TT Supersport qualifying session at Ballagarey, it turns out, and other races are suspended. It’s not until around 11 p.m. that we learn the terrible news. A 29-year-old Welshman called Mark Purslow has been killed following a crash on his 600 Yamaha. He had just recorded his fastest ever TT lap, reaching an average speed of 120.

Amid all the Covid-19 coverage, it’s hardly surprising that the collapse of a coach-tour operator last week didn’t make too many headlines. But the end of Shearings, the largest such operator in Europe, could mean the end of coach holidays in the UK, and if that happens, something very special will have been lost. Coach holidays are unique. They engender a sense of camaraderie which is so hard to find nowadays in our very atomised world. You begin the week as strangers, waiting for the departure bay number of your coach to be called out, and end it exchanging addresses.

Václav Klaus has made a habit of saying things others shy away from saying, but it doesn’t seem to have done him much harm in the popularity stakes. Quite the opposite: the 73-year-old ardently Eurosceptic free-marketeer has legitimate claims to be regarded as the most successful ‘true blue’ conservative politician in Europe over the past 25 years. He was, after all, prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1998 and then his country’s president for a further ten years, from 2003 to 2013. So when we meet after a typically hearty Serbian lunch — at the International Science and Public Conference in Belgrade — I am keen to ask if he has any advice for David Cameron and the British Conservative party.

The heat was still sweltering as we headed off at dusk towards the hide to watch wildlife with our enthusiastic guide, Leonie. My wife and I were on our first ever safari — or rather ‘stayfari’. No, we weren’t in deepest Africa, but in deepest Gloucestershire. And we weren’t on the look out for lions and elephants, but beavers. We were staying at Lower Mill Estate, near Cirencester. Consisting of 550 acres of beautiful lakes, fields and woodlands, it’s been described as the most important private nature reserve in Europe. In Lower Mill, the houses fit around the wildlife, and not the other way round: all of them have bird boxes and bat-friendly roofs.

It was late September. My wife and I were feeling overworked and overstressed — our mental states not helped by the fact that we hadn’t managed to get away for a proper summer holiday. We couldn’t face the prospect of middle-of-the-night flights or airport queues, so we looked for somewhere in the UK where we could drive to. We hit upon Wheel Farm cottages near Combe Martin in rural north Devon. The journey there was an adventure in itself, taking us over seven hours from our Oxfordshire home. The A39 coastal road was closed at one point, meaning a long detour along single track roads on Exmoor in the dark. We got to Wheel Farm at 11 o’clock at night but were already feeling more cheerful than when we’d set out.

To say someone was ‘sweet’ used to be quite common in Britain. We didn’t just use the word to describe our mothers and grandmothers, but a wide range of people, including public figures. But not any more. Public acts of sweetness, such as gently warning people that their shoelaces were untied, are now rare. Sweetness seems to be in terminal decline. Having just celebrated Valentine’s Day, now seems an appropriate time to ask why. Sweetness is not just about niceness, or good manners, though both help. Sir Cliff Richard may be nice and well-mannered, but is he sweet? He’s a little too self-regarding — and self-regard and sweetness don’t go together.