Melanie McDonagh: This is Boys' Own stuff for girls

It was the noise that was the remarkable thing - the sound of a high wind. It was the sound of Titan, the first time that it has been heard by human ear. There are all manner of prodigies that we have encountered for the first time this weekend courtesy of the Huygens space probe: a lake of tar (or is it methane?); beds of stubby rivulets which may or may not still have liquid flowing through them; a mist rising over the surface of Titan, beyond which an orange sky is discernible. It's the stuff of science fiction, except that it isn't fiction.

It was the noise that was the remarkable thing - the sound of a high wind. It was the sound of Titan, the first time that it has been heard by human ear. There are all manner of prodigies that we have encountered for the first time this weekend courtesy of the Huygens space probe: a lake of tar (or is it methane?); beds of stubby rivulets which may or may not still have liquid flowing through them; a mist rising over the surface of Titan, beyond which an orange sky is discernible. It's the stuff of science fiction, except that it isn't fiction.

Perhaps what pleases us most about these wonders, however, is that they seem familiar to us. The shoreline on that curious dark sea is, well, like a shoreline on Earth. The boulders of ice lying on that curiously desolate terrain, why, they look like a desert strewn with stones - or, come to that, the lunar desolation of those rocky landscapes in the West of Ireland, in the Burren. What's captivating isn't so much the strangeness of this moon of Saturn - it's that we can point to its mountains and peaks and seas and rocks and recognise them as being a world like ours.

John Zarnecki, one of the principal investigators for the Huygens monitor, asked wonderingly about the image of an oily sea - "Did one see waves?" If there were waves, it means that there's another respect in which this curious terrain is more intelligible to us than, say, the surface of Venus.

I know that this sort of project is meant to be very much Boys' Own territory; male adventure stories writ large and real. Space rockets are what you get on boys' duvet covers, not on those for girls. Personally, I'm a sucker for adventure stories, and some of the ones I like best are precisely the sort of Edwardian and Victorian science fiction which turned the scientific discoveries of the time into captivating stories.

It's curious to read a novel such as H G Wells's The First Men on the Moon in the light of the Titan findings. He, too, traded on the curious familiarity of the landscape of another planet. It's a pity that he, or Jules Verne, or Arthur Conan Doyle, who popularised scientific discovery at the same time that they used it as the stuff of adventure, never saw what we see now. I bet they'd have made so much more of it than we shall.

The other obvious difference between our approach to the findings on Titan and that which our forebears would certainly have had is that they would have seen in the marvels of another world further evidence of the greatness of creation and the hand of the Creator. Our age is, for the most part, too sophisticated to feel gratitude and awe, but it seems like the appropriate reaction to me.

Housey-housey

On a rather more mundane level, isn't it just too comforting to learn about the distresses of the Blairs in the property market? It seems that the house in Connaught Square that they purchased for £3.6m five months ago has since slipped in value by about £300,000 (the price of a couple of ordinary houses). Also, since they've failed to find a tenant - the people who could afford to pay more than two thousand quid a week for rent found the decorative scheme too busy - the mortgage payments are eating up the Prime Minister's entire salary. So they're advertising it with no fewer than three estate agents.

It's another episode in the Blairs' ongoing attempts to ride the property market. Apparently, Mrs Blair has never got over her pique that after she sold their Islington house for £615,000 in 1997, it rocketed in value to £1.5m. It may have been the reason behind the purchase a couple of flats in Bristol, one purely for investment, at a favourable price, thanks to the intervention of the colourful Peter Foster on Mrs Blair's behalf.

But I wonder whether the Blairs' difficulties here may have their advantages. There are few things more productive of the sin of envy than other people's killing in the housing market. It's offensive in a Marxist sense, because it's profit-making quite divorced from any effort on the part of the profiteers. All you need is enough capital to invest at the right time, and then sit back and watch your asset values go up. I speak with the bitterness of one who has never owned any real estate in her life. The flip side to this is that when people fail catastrophically to reap rewards on their property speculation - especially when they're running the economy - it makes us feel comforted that they are as clueless as everyone else about the vagaries of property values. I bet we'd like the Blairs a lot less if they were not just highly paid for their jobs, but successful speculators as well.

The sad story of Margaret Blackburn, the poor woman suffering from terminal cancer who got her husband to kill her as a "last act of love", has been seized on by the right-to-die lobby as yet another reason why we should have assisted suicide. Dr Evan Harris, the Lib Dem euthanasia enthusiast, tells us that it shows that the law needs straightening out. He goes on to say blithely that of course, "if you have moral objections, no one is forcing you" to kill yourself.

Unfortunately, the evidence from countries where euthanasia is legal is that this is precisely what happens. In the Netherlands, severely disabled babies can be killed off on humanitarian grounds, even though infants are unable to express a rational preference in the matter. People with mental conditions, such as anorexia, that impair their ability to make a reasoned decision about their future are also fair game. And if you are Dutch and sick of life you may shortly be able to get a doctor to settle your condition - the human condition - by killing you off altogether. The Royal Dutch Medical Association is recommending that people "who have difficulty living" for whatever reason, ought to be entitled to be killed by their doctor as well. Is this the way we want to go? I fancy not.

Revealing, isn't it, that the four top-selling books on Amazon are all of the self-help variety. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing myself, and I've been toying with purchasing The Mind Gym - the second from the top of the best sellers; the top being Paul McKenna's snappily titled I Can Make You Lose Weight. The last self-help book I acquired, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, sounded similarly promising except that I couldn't for the life of me get beyond the introduction, so impenetrable was the prose.