But if, let’s say, I did have a dog, I’d do all the fluffy-wuffy dog-owner things you have to do. I’d coo at puppies. I’d say, ‘oh he’s just being friendly’ whilst it gnaws down to the bone on a stranger’s shin.

But I’m sure if, for one night every year, I could send it out onto the street as part of a pack to knock on everyone’s door and ask for food, I’d do that too.

I’m not being a scrooge. I like carving pumpkins. I like the colours orange and black. I’m old enough to remember childrens’ TV witch Grotbags. I like Halloween.

And as child number 378 arrives at my door demanding chocolate, wearing a santa hat as his chosen costume, all I ask is that you say ‘thank you’. Oh, and that you take the nut ones I can’t eat.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum,
Beat out the time til no milk will come.

Or something like that, anyway.

It was a late Autumnal evening a couple of years back, a few weeks after we’d moved to our lovely house, that we opened the front door to find a pint of milk on our doorstep. Not yet acquainted with small town life, we were bemused to say the least. Many things were left outside doors in our previous town, Cardiff, but none were edible and fresh.

A few days later, our milk deliveries started. This being (semi-) rural Gloucestershire, it’s not just any old milk delivery, this is milk from Lucy’s Dairy. Where every carton of milk has a nice picture of Lucy with one of the cows in a free-spirited and countrysidey pose.

I drive by the farm at least once a week, and I can’t help feeling a little extra contentment, knowing that just over the hedgerow the cows are working hard to make the lovely milk that make my Shreddies taste nice. I’m convinced the cows sit (or most likely stand) in their field all day watching the locals go by. In between munching the grass they probably remark on how trim Mr Jones is as he cycles passed, or give a toothless cowy smile to Mrs Backewell as she walks her labrador Charlie in her Barbour jacket.

It’s not just cows in the field, either. I’ve never seen a delivery driver, or heard a milk-float. Do you know why? I think it’s because the cows do the delivering. Milk floats only have one pedal, and a cow’s hoof could easily work it. They’d come in teams of 4 and split-up, delivering the milk bottles all over the street.

One week, we even had blank milk cartons, and a note saying ’sorry, we ran out of labels’. They didn’t run out… the cows temporarily got distracted and the sheep ate them. That’s my theory, anyway.

But now it’s all coming to an end. And in a few days time we’ll get our last milk delivery. It’s a sign of the times, I guess, that Mr T Esco and Mrs S Ainsbury have squeezed the little (or hoofed) guy out. But come next week there’ll be a big queue of Fresians at the Job Centre. Thankfully the milk-makers are safe, but I’m not sure how much call there is for driving cows at the moment. Frankly, I’m more than a little worried that in a few weeks there’ll be gangs of cows hanging out on street corners, bored, listening to music on their phones and mooing loudly late into the night.

So, no more milk. It’s the udder truth I tell you…

For that reason, I absolutely love the idea of ‘The High Line Park’ which has just been completed and opened in New York. I just can’t see anything as simple and well-designed being opened anywhere else.

http://www.thehighline.org/

French houses have shutters. Dutch houses have canals outside. American houses have picket fences. English houses have decking and an occasional gnome.

It’s difficult to get exciting about housing.

That is until a slightly eccentric man from the West Country decides to build one out of Lego. And then another man decides that it has to be knocked down.

The news today featured the sad news that James May’s full-size lego house will be knocked down unless a buyer can be found sharpish. Legoland was interested until it found out that it would cost £50k to dismantle and rebuild the house in Windsor. This is absolutely absurd, of course, because building anything in Windsor is likely to cost at least 20 times that for anyone else wanting a neighbour who keeps Corgis and cornflakes in Tupperware*.

I think I have an answer though. Just the other day I was driving into a small town in Gloucestershire that looked like it hadn’t seen a paintbrush since we had a ruling King. Almost every house was boarded up, save one with a window box and fishing gnome sitting defiantly proud halfway up the garden path. Liverpool’s the same. And Wolverhampton. In fact, come to think of it, England’s full of these regeneration projects that are put on hold because of the staying-power of some of its residents.

3 years of council meetings, the tireless work of an entire planning department, and eventually Gordon Brown reaches into his pockets for a bit of funding. And then Mrs Stimpson, who normally writes in to The Telegraph letters page as ‘angry of Dunroamin’, holds everyone to ransom as she’s not moving out until the Daffodils in her herbaceous borders have finished flowering.

So I have a plan. Forget dismantling the house. Forget national news coverage showcasing the most exciting new-build since Mr Fraser decided on single rather than UPvc double-glazed front windows in Forest Drive, Billericay. Forget the eco-argument that a dozen polar bears will be saved everytime someone builds a cul de sac out of lego rather than bricks and mortar.

Just find an ‘angry of Dunroamin’ who wants a child-friendly, 100% blunt and Teletubby-coloured house. Let her move in, and I guarantee that house will still be standing in 2012 even if it was in the middle of the planned olympic velodrome.

Very big, in fact.

So big, if I’m honest, that you could lose half of your string quartet in the back of it, which was probably the designers’ intention. Although, he was probably thinking about children, rather than those of a violinistic and violistic tendency.

When you’re a boy, you dream about the cars you’re going to own when you grow up. You put posters on your wall. You play top trumps. Fords are replaced by Aston Martins. Astons are replaced by Lamorghinis. Lamborghinis are replaced by Ferarris.

Then you turn 17 and are presented with an Austin Metro. It may be slow, it may have an engine with all the straight line speed of an arthritic tortoise. With a limp. After a particularly heavy meal. But it’s yours, and it stands for freedom. It may only have 4 gears, but each of those gears is now an integral part of your independence. And each those gears affords you the power of around 50 horses, which is certainly a lot more than Mr Darcy had to go and visit Elizabeth.

For the next few years you study maps, not to find the most efficient route, but to find the route with the most squiggily bits. The longest straights. The most interesting journey. Until, and no scientist has yet defined this, you wake up one morning and find yourself with a career, a mosaic driveway, a double-glazed conservatory, and a need for comfort, fuel-economy, safety and anonymity. In short, you have the same box-on-wheels as everyone else.

Today I did something I haven’t done for a while, and went for a drive. Okay, technically I spend a proportion of nearly every day driving, but that’s just going from A-B in the easiest way. It’s functional. It’s necessary. It’s boring.

Today, I went for a drive. I didn’t need to. I didn’t need to go anywhere in particular. But all day as I went around the house doing the various tasks that needed my attention, I kept catching a glimpse of blue glistening outside on the drive. The new shiny keyfob sat on the table and kept catching my eye, and now the two parts of the car were conspiring against me in a metaphorical pincer-movement to make me put everything else to one side.

And do you know the worst thing? My brain kept flashing up reasons not to go out like a rolling-news ticker. It was an unnecessary use of fossil fuels and as a result of my actions two baby seals would cry uncontrollably. It was a waste of money, and the few pounds of fuel could have been spent on breadsticks and wild-rocket pesto. And then middle-age jumped out and surprised me, and I thought about the wear-and-tear and resale value.

There was nothing for it, I had to go.

We’re told that driving has become boring. That all cars are the same now. That you can’t go fast because on every straight bit of road there’s a yellow-box paparazzi, and around every bend is a member of the road safety gestapo with a laser in their hand. But for 40 minutes every twist of the road was interesting. My mind wasn’t thinking ahead to what needed to be done when I reached B. Road signs were options, like an a-la-carte menu. Even those people that were clearly out driving Miss Daisy, in their beige rovers and powder-blue toyotas with the Arthur Daley hat on the rear shelf, were interesting challenges for overtaking rather than a frustrating issue that would make me late.

It’s been a long time since I actually drove for the sake of driving, and for a brief moment I felt that independence and freedom I had at 17. And the weird thing is, I wasn’t alone. I must have passed at least a dozen retired men driving the classic cars they bought with their retirement money. I must have been passed by at least another dozen men on motorbikes with either their wives or weekend partners riding pillion. There were no lorries delivering frozen pizzas to the disciples of Kerry Katona. No vans delivering overcharging plumbers to broken pipes. No buses delivering pensioners to Bridge club. No functional journeys at all, in fact. Just lots of people driving around aimlessly reliving their teens with big smiles on their faces. I strongly advise you to try it next Sunday.

We know America is the land of the free. This is both useful and irksome, as freedom so often comes with lawsuits and litigation.

The estate of classical composer Johann Pachelbel have today launched several lawsuits against contemporary artists who they claim have sampled or borrowed their forefather’s creation. Due to a strange quirk of copyright, that famous progression of eight chords appears to have a unique protection independent of copyright laws, and the estate is aiming to preserve Johann’s work for future generations.

Such lawsuits are becoming commonplace in the 21st century. Even late in the 20th century there was the famous clashing of horns of Apple Records and Apple computers. This long-winded and, at times, bitter argument later resulted in the owners of Apple Acme Inc. attempting to register the phrase ‘a is for apple’ as their own personal creation, leaving grocers and farmers the world over fearing for their livelihood. The hashtag #apple became Twitter’s highest-rated trending topic for several consecutive days as Twits the world over traded ideas for a possible re-branding of the humble apple should the judge rule in favour of the big corporation.

Details of those named in the Pachelbel estate’s suit are unknown as lawyers eagerly prepare dossiers for the courts, but speculation is rife. The action could see a number of major recording artists under the spotlight. Green Day’s worldwide hit ‘Basket Case’ may escape the net as the penultimate chord missed, but Sir Paul McCartney’s hit ‘Let it be’ may not get off so likely.

Speaking from the Pachelbel Chateaux in Austria, Johann XII told press reporters, ‘I’m not copyrighting individual chords, just a simple 8-chord progression. Of course there will be some royalty money involved, but I’m not just doing this for the money … it’s to preserve my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s work. We will use the money to start our own radio station playing and touring group. We also have researchers working in laboratories to see if the Canon can be transposed into other keys. There were early experiments in F major, but we simply ran out of funds’.

Whilst those named in the action have yet to be named, some widely-respected songs may simply disappear from Music Store shelves, leaving gaps in almost every genre. Avril Levigne’s text-speak-spelt  ‘Sk8ter Boi’, Chirpy Antipodian popster Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’, and the Emerald Isle’s golden son Bono’s hit ‘With or Without You’ all use a strikingly similar chordal structure. Nineties Madchester sensation The Farm’s ‘Altogether Now’, Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian hit ‘Get Me Away From Here’. The Bob Marley estate may release a modified version of ‘No Woman, No Cry’ using the chorus ‘No Chord Use, No Crime’ in order to raise public support for the freedom of eight simple chords.

At the time of writing, new attentions we being placed towards lift manufacturers around the world, who are thought to have further compounded the problems by incorporating a special audio system in lifts which can only pipe-out the Canon in D.

It remains to be seen how this will develop. It is entirely likely that this argument will continue to go round in circles underneath the spotlight. So far it has gone around at least 56 times in an endless ostinato.

I’m sure it happened a little more gradually, but essentially some primitative people must have woken up one day and decided to work together for everyone’s benefit. Rather than competing against one another for food and shelter, they found they could pool their resources and make collective decisions which would allow everyone to move on together. An amazing event which would ultimately bring us Starbucks, vote-based television shows democratic legal systems hundred of years later.

Inevitably there would be those societies who would safeguard this gift and value their cooperative above everything else, and there would be those who would use it as a front to bring in their favoured cronies as leaders under a smokescreen of fake democracy and a heabily-censored free-speech.

One of the great things about any society is that they all have their watchmen. People who are looking out for everyone else. People who give up their time to make sure the things that happen do so without damaging everybody else, and thankfully that happened this week.

I’m not sure if it was a slow week on Jeremy Kyle, or whether the economic disaster gripping the world has led to a catastrophic rise in the cost of needlework kits, but eighteen people complained about a television advert in which a Welsh d-list celebrity rides a bicycle through a supermarket and a thorough investigation was launched and reported its findings this week.

Now, I’m not the greatest fan of Health and Safety. It’s ridiculous that we can’t play conkers, throw snowballs or run with axes. A questionnaire for teachers this week suggested that children can’t build things out of egg cartons through fear of salmonella and teachers must wear goggles when using drawing pins. But for once, I don’t blame the helmet-wearing high-vis-clad steel-toe-capped goggle-wearing HSE.

What were those eighteen people thinking? There they were, outraged that Duffy was not wearing a high-vis vest whilst riding her bicycle. And wait. What’s that? I don’t think she’s got lights on her bike either. Presumably they’ve come home from a hard day at the office, put their feet up with a glass of chianti in one hand and suddenly found themselves so insensed that they just had to write in and complain with the other. Except, of course, they hadn’t had a hard day at the office – they’d probably spent all day polishing their Mary Whitehouse bust and waiting for something to come on that they can complain about.

A further 4 people complained that children may emulate the Welsh pop-princess. I’m fairly certain we weren’t going to have elderly ladies knocked over beside the frozen peas as dozens of tweeny-boppers raced laps around aisles 12 and 13 in Morrissons. But thank you. You are the Guardians of liberty and watchkeepers of our security.

At least they complained, of course.

Also this week people around the world where aghast at the situation in Iran, and hundreds of people turned their Twitter avatars green in a gesture of solidarity to Iranian protestors. I’m not sure how many people fighting on the streets for their democratic rights, and in some cases lives, will have taken time-out to logon to see people around the world changing the colour of their avatar to show solidarity with them, but it was at least some kind of action.

President Obama went from ’showing concern’ earlier in the week to talking directly to Iran and today warning them that ‘the world is watching’.

The truth is that we have a leader in this country who will take time out to phone a slightly troubled singer from a television talent show who is in the midst of her fifteen minutes of fame, but who takes a far less radical and direct approach to the more serious and fundamental problems in the world.

But don’t worry. We can all turn out logos green and the twits will tweet about injustice from every last corner of the globe with uncensored and unblocked mobile phone reception, but I have a better solution. If we can get Duffy to rig a mock election and then embark on a genocidal rampage throughout some town in Mid-Wales whilst advertising a tasty beverage, we’ll see the world leap into action in direct response. Well, only if she forgets to wear the appropriate safety-wear.