I have touched on this subject before but events have now moved on a little and the battle lines are drawn. But first, a little personal history.

When I was a kid I used to play outdoors – most often in the forest that we lived beside. In warm weather and when school was out, my friends and I would disappear early in the morning and as long as I touched base at home from time to time it was likely to be sunset before I returned. We had a ‘play’ area that stretched for many miles and on those hot, lazy days, we would get cuts and bruises, eat the blackberries growing in the hedgerows and get dirty and covered in the detritus of the forest floor. The cuts miraculously healed themselves, the blackberries didn’t poison us and the dirt? Well, what was wrong with a bit of dirt. It washed off. Childhood was an experience, slowly pushing the boundaries of our independence and the odd medical emergency was a necessary part of learning to cope. We learned which adults to avoid, which ones we could rely on for help if needed and mourned a wasted day if the weather forced us inside.

As a young teenager I still remember buying my first pair of headphones. I bought them in a local hi-fi shop where the guy behind the counter not only had good product knowledge but was quite happy to impart it because he wanted you to go away happy with your purchase. And he wanted you to come back some day and buy something else. So I got advice. But more importantly I got to handle the goods and try them out for comfort and sound quality. That’s right, they went on my head and I put the earpieces over my ears. My actual ears. I guess many people before me had tried on some of those phones and guess what… I didn’t catch any diseases. My ears didn’t fall off two weeks later and the world as I knew it did not come to an end. This was a truly serious and risky business – my life was at stake. But I survived and, what’s more, ended up with a pair of headphones that were just what I wanted, fit perfectly and eventually gave me years of service.

Wind forward to today and I am in need of a new pair of headphones. You already know what this is about. There they are on a rack in John Lewis, all bubble packed in that stiff plastic you need to take an axe to and no – you can not try them on before you buy. You can not test for comfort, fit and, above all, you can not test the sound quality. So says the evil Health and Safety Executive. So – I naturally ask – what happens if I get them home, manage to prise them out of the packaging and when I get back from the local Accident and Emergency department find they don’t fit? Well – said the guy at John Lewis – you get your money back less 10%. I kid you not – that was what I was told. I bought them – those ones in the picture – whilst making a verbal declaration at the till that I expected a full refund if I had to return them. You know the rest. Got them home – there was much swearing and searching for industrial strength tools to penetrate the packaging which, in the end I managed to do with no blood being spilled and do they fit? Of course they don’t. For a £69 pair of phones from a respected manufacturer like Denon they are bloody useless. If I put them on and someone asks me a question to which I nod my head – they fall right off. When my wife tried them on, the ear cups dangled somewhere around her lobes missing the actual ear altogether. Did it say on the box that they were for people with really big ears and long heads? Did the guy in Lewis’s inform me they were no good to me because my head just wasn’t big enough? How many petty laws might he have broken of he had done?

So – as I said at the top – the battle lines are drawn and these have got to go back. Now forgive me for this but I am about to say something hypocritical. I have ranted enough in the past about petty regulations that strangle our every moment and dictate our every move but sometimes you just have to bite your tongue. What I want to know is who wins between the appalling Health and Safety and the office of Fair Trading who dictate that what I buy has to be fit for the purpose?

I guess I am about to find out.

I have made no secret over the years of the twin facts that I am a smoker and that I use a MacBook Pro. What I have probably not mentioned is that most of the time I roll my own ciggies.

This means I can be endlessly entertained as stray bits of tobacco and ash disappear without trace between the keys on my laptop. They have even managed to work their way down the side of the trackpad. But, amazingly, things still work. Which is not the case for the MacBook belonging to my other half. She doesn’t smoke and probably the worse thing to get lost between her keys are small particles of Green and Blacks. And I do mean ’small’ as any Green and Blacks that might get lost would automatically register as a tragedy and I would have heard about it. Her MacBook, despite being newer than mine and not subject to tobacco abuse, had sticking keys and the odd one that had to be hit firmly with a small mallet to function.

So – always helpful and thoughtful – my eldest son came over to Swordfish Towers at the weekend armed with his compressor and airbrush to gently blow – at round 50 psi – the muck from our Macs. That’s him in the first picture doing just that and the second is an enlarged area of my screen where you can see some of the stuff that was being blown out.

Great fun was had by all as we watched hairs, fluff and other unidentifiable particles coming back out from their resting place. The good news is that my wife now has a fully functional keyboard. We did not, however, retrieve enough tobacco out of mine to give me a smoke.

The picture, snapped on a mobile phone in our local Sainsbury, says it all really.

I am not one of those old farts who wants to preserve traditions. I might be saddened by the widespread loss of courtesy and politeness, I might be shocked that so many people these days seem unable to speak coherent English and I might make a lot of noise regarding the systematic dumbing down of our culture and education. But that doesn’t mean I disdain ‘progress’ – whatever that means – or wish to preserve old ways and traditions just for the sake of it. But really…. there are some things that should remain sacrosanct.

A decent pair of shoes should come in a box. A silk tie should be gently wrapped in tissue paper. Quality cigars should not come encased in cellophane. And wine…. ah wine. It was bad enough slopping plonk into a plastic bag inside a cardboard box – but this?

I am lost for words.

The big news story over the last couple of weeks or so has, of course, revolved around not so honourable members of parliament caught with their hands in the public till and the general and predictable melt-down of the Brown government. Many thousands of words have been written on this subject by professionals and amateurs alike so nobody really needs my contribution. But I am going to give it anyway and it was prompted by visiting the BBC news website this morning only to find that for a change politics was not the main story. Swine flu has made a comeback as the lead.

I found the whole media frenzy over MP’s expenses to be both indicative of what is rotten in UK politics but at the same time found the public outrage to be somewhat hypocritical. Fiddling expense claims and trying to reduce income tax liability have long been considered an English sport from the hiring of advisers and accountants by the wealthy to the loading of overtime by the rank and file. Who can honestly say that at no time in their working life have they claimed a dubious expense, put in an overtime claim for work they did not do or even stolen a pencil from the stationery cupboard? A matter of degree perhaps but it is the same form of corruption. The difference, of course, is being found out so we can all sit sanctimoniously back and point an accusing finger while conveniently forgetting our own small victories against our employer or the tax man.

What was of real interest while these revelations were being published, was the frenzied reaction of various politicians. For a while there, many of them exposed our democracy for the sham it really is. Suddenly we were being very publicly told what is fundamentally wrong with our system of politics – an inherently corrupt system that so favours the government of the day that any election victor will automatically choose to maintain the status quo. In particular there were sudden placatory calls for alternative voting systems; for an ending of the ‘whip’; for back-benchers to have more say in law and policy making and for fixed term parliaments.

All of these proposals, calls for which have recently come from all shades of the political spectrum, would greatly enhance true democracy in the UK. A voting system that allows a government to be formed without a majority of nationwide votes is by it’s nature suspect. The whipping system that keeps MP’s in line with party policy has nothing whatsoever to do with representation of their electorate or with the convictions that drove them into politics in the first place. Fixed term parliaments would remove the advantage a sitting Prime Minister has to call an election based on current public opinion. And giving the majority of those who call themselves the nations representatives the actual tools they need to represent us could be the one, single act that could change our form of governance for ever and for the better. I suspect that the majority of our population do not fully understand the difference between ‘government’ and ‘parliament’ which is the way any incumbent government like it – but over the last couple of weeks, if they were listening properly, they should have found out.

There is, I believe, very little likelihood of real change. The route from being an earnest and honourable candidate, through to a back-bencher drone making up the voting numbers, on to a junior minister, a cabinet member and finally Prime Minister is littered with compromise and an acceptance that without those very undemocratic processes at play life for a government would not be so easy.

And yesterday signalled quite clearly that we were back to business as usual. Gordon Brown announced a placebo enquiry into our voting and electoral system while another Labour party spokesman made it clear that any referendum on the subject would not be binding. But it was left up to David Cameron to hammer the nail into the coffin of the short-lived hopes for proper reform when he responded to Brown’s statement with the infantile and fallacious comment that the Prime Minister was trying to rig the system to ensure a Labour party victory at the next General Election. In that one statement, Cameron reduced what is an imperative for true reform to the usual playground behaviour of wanting to be the first on the swings. He is either stupid or – more likely – can already smell the scent of power floating on the winds. So why rock the boat?

I find it hard to believe that I have written nothing for over a month. I know I had been getting lazy and missing days between items – it does say ‘random and irregular’ at the top – but a whole month? Well – I have an excuse.

I was in a small, light aircraft that had to make an emergency landing in the Amazon rain forest and it took the pilot and I a month to get back to civilisation surviving on suspicious looking insects and… OK. I’ll try again. I was walking across a field in the Yorkshire Dales when there was this sudden loud engine noise above me and a bright light in the sky and I suddenly found myself amongst weird looking aliens who threatened to carry out nefarious medical experiments on me unless I gave them my credit card PIN. Only felt like minutes but when I got back a whole month… How about this? I was crossing the Solent on the Isle of Wight ferry when we were boarded by Portuguese pirates and held for ransom. OK. I’ll own up to the truth. I had to take a rail trip to Penzance and what with the usual rail delays, missing trains, missed connections and confusing timetables and ticketing, it took me four weeks to get there.