We should all be just a little ashamed that in last night's Panorama, it took an American, albeit one so Anglophilic as Bill Bryson, to lecture us on our littering habits. As the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Bryson's particular beef is with those who defile our hedgerows, but in Panorama he also found, rather depressingly, that in the London Borough of Camden last year there was a 0 per cent chance of a person dropping litter being apprehended by the police (across the river in Southwark, by happy contrast, 3,000 litterbugs felt the long arm of the law).
I used to feel that responsible citizens, no less than the constabulary, had a duty to confront litter louts. In fact perhaps our duty was greater, given the number of other antisocial activities upon which the police are also expected to pounce. Consequently, whenever I saw someone jettison an empty can, I underwent my own personal metamorphosis from Clark Kent to Litter Man, handing the offending article back to them with some reproachful words about how I was trying to bring up my children to respect their environment, and couldn't they at least take the trouble to find a bin.
Although I am no stranger to cowardice, a strange fearlessness descended on me in such situations. There isn't much that scares me more than a Staffordshire bull terrier straining on a leash held by a man with a tattooed face, but once, in north London, on seeing exactly such a man toss a cigarette packet insouciantly to the ground, I stepped forth with my righteous harangue. And of course was viciously abused, but at least I had made my point.
These past couple of years, however, my fearlessness has evaporated. Whereas before I simply saw red whatever the shape or size of the miscreant, now I make a considered judgment as to the likelihood of getting a knife in the belly, and duly, more often than not, keep my indignation to myself. I am not proud of this, but stories such as that last week of 58-year-old Linda Buchanan, who was pushed on to a railway line by two young men she had asked to stop smoking on the platform, have shaken some of the fight out of me.
Needless to add, the vast proportion of those who drop litter are not likely to assault the person rebuking them. On the other hand, most people prepared to use knives in the street are probably also prepared to drop litter. More and more, modern life is just one big Venn diagram.
Anyway, I decided that discretion was probably the better part of valour just a few weeks ago when, this time in Liverpool, I saw some drunk teenagers drop their hamburger cartons into the gutter. On holiday in Italy last week, I couldn't help thinking of them. We were staying in Portovenere, a delightful Ligurian seaside resort which at night was packed with adolescent Italians. We speculated that Portovenere, like Newquay in Cornwall, is perhaps where Italian kids go when they finish their version of the GCSEs. They were certainly high-spirited. But we couldn't help noticing that none of them seemed intoxicated, nor, so far as my highly sensitive litter antennae could discern, did any of them drop so much as a spent match.
Nicole, you made a grown man cry
Four years pass with hardly any of us showing the remotest interest in women's quadruple sculling, or slalom kayaking, yet suddenly the Olympics are upon us and these things assume vast significance.
I love the Olympics for that reason. I love the way in which the jargon of minority sports invades the general consciousness, that one day hardly any of us have a clue what it means to back-travel along a pommel horse, and the next day we are all experts.
Forgivably, our interest is ignited by British success, and it was ever thus. At the old-fashioned boys' grammar school I attended in the 1970s, hockey was considered rather an effete affair, mainly because it was the only alternative, apart from a sick note, to rugby.
But my prejudice went west, or perhaps east, during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, at which the British men's team won gold, and bore no resemblance to the tall, pallid boys who from 1973 to 1979 self-consciously carried their hockey sticks on to the number 15 bus. Overnight, men's hockey became the most macho of sports (it helped, one must shamefully concede, that they beat the Germans in the final).
I've long since stopped caring about hockey again, but at the moment hardly anything seems more important than freestyle swimming and women's cycling; Nicole Cooke's victorious screams when she crossed the line first in the women's road race on Sunday pricked my tear ducts in a way that I thought no woman on a bike ever could.
* One of my children's favourite books, when they were little, was The Tiger Who Came To Tea, by Judith Kerr. It's a delightful story, published in 1968, about a tiger who turns up at the door of a suburban house, and helps himself to all the food in the larder, all the water in the taps, and even all daddy's beer, leaving mummy with nothing to give daddy for tea, although daddy then comes home from work and, it being 1968, very masterfully solves the problem by taking mummy and Sophie out to a café.
Anyway, in a recent Radio 4 programme about The Tiger Who Came To Tea, various earnest people ventured their theories that the tiger represented danger, that his unexpected arrival for tea referred to the abrupt invasion of a snug, comfortable world.
Then Judith Kerr herself came on and said that actually it was just a story about a tiger, one that she made up because her daughter was particularly fond of tigers.
And I couldn't help wondering whether, in that simple exchange about a popular children's book, there was a cruel truth about the whole spurious literary analysis industry, and whether, if Shakespeare or Milton or Donne were to come back to life, they would laugh their socks off, or doublets and hose, at some of the ideas postulated in a million theses.
"No, really," I can hear Shakespeare telling Libby Purves, "it was just a story I made up about an old man with three daughters."
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