I read during the week that Ridley Scott has suspended filming on his Robin Hood epic, Nottingham, because he has realised that the onset of autumn threatens the greenness of his Sherwood Forest.

Not that the man's horticultural naivety alarmed me especially. I do not expect Sir Ridley to know the exact timings of the carotenoid and anthocyanin pigmentation advance as late-summer chlorophylls dwindle in English leaves, any more than I would expect Hollywood to plough millions of dollars into an action movie concept from Alan Titchmarsh.

(Although I did briefly wonder if Sir Ridley had deliberately set his breakthrough 1982 movie, Blade Runner, in a dimly lit futuristic cityscape only because he was worried about getting the trees wrong.)

No, what worried me was Sir Ridley's dismal, unimaginative, high-Tory, blatantly sociopathic interpretation of English history and literature.

Robin Hood “seen through the eyes of the Sheriff of Nottingham?” Ooh, how original. Finally the medieval history of England gets to be seen through the eyes of the all-conquering Norman upper classes.

You twonk, Ridley. From the Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book through Magna Carta to the Breton lays, it was the Norman nobility who wrote all the history in the first place. It's always the upper classes, the exploiters and administrators, who get to tell the story.

There's nothing new at all about seeing things through their eyes.

That's the whole point of Robin Hood - that the down-trodden underclass, the exploited and the weak get to have their version told too.

For the past few years, history teaching in schools has endeavoured to press home this point, to give a voice back to the odd woman, prole or black person who has featured in British history - largely in an attempt to make history more interesting to women, black people and proles. And now Sir Ridley wants to take it all away from them again. Is 21st-century Britain so conformist, right-wing and hidebound by convention and regulation that we really want to hear the sheriff's side of it? The policeman's version?

Indeed, so silenced was the voice of the common man in Norman England that the balladeers had to make up Robin (anointing him in later versions with that spurious “Earl of Locksley” mantle because even the plebs needed their saviour to be a nobleman). That's what folklore is: the sad, unrealised, fictional version of history created by the plucky losers.

And now Sir Ridley wants us to give him up and go back to the draft of history left to us everywhere else by the Norman conquistadors.

In Nottingham, I gather, the sheriff is an honest lawman just trying to do his job. What a surprise that Sir Ridley, the wife-hopping Geordie billionaire with fenced and gated mansions from Hampstead to Beverly Hills, has decided that the man who stole from the rich to give to the poor was in fact a bad person, and that the sheriff, who was responsible for the protection of the medieval equivalent of wife-hopping Geordie billionaires with fenced and gated mansions, was actually the hero of the tale.

What will Robin Hood look like through the eyes of the sheriff? Will he be Robin the Hoody, loitering around shopping centres deliberately bumping into old ladies? Will he defy an ASBO or one of those preposterous seaside teenage curfews, and thus put the murderous sheriff in the right?

Will Little John be an obese teenager with a pie in each hand? Will Friar Tuck be a mad mullah? Will Operation Trident be called in? Will Robin sell drugs (one of the key ways to withdraw sympathy in the crass absolutist logic of Hollywood morality). Will they dare to make him black?

In Hollywood, they are calling this a “revisionist reading of the Robin Hood story”. But revisionism is what you apply to history, not to a hotch-potch concoction of folk dreams of resistance. Not to fiction. It's like offering a revisionist version of Winnie-the-Pooh in which we learn that, in reality, Piglet ran the show. Or asking whether Mole and Ratty (as has been suggested) were gay. No! They were made up.

Do we need to be shown Sir Ridley's tale of plucky Goliath and his cold-blooded murder by conniving David? Or of how forward-thinking maverick Pontius Pilate saved the Roman Empire by clamping down on a bearded whacko who thought he was the Son of God, and bravely nailed him to a cross against all the odds?

Probably not.

It's funny, every time I write “Sir Ridley” in the context of the legend of Robin Hood I get an image of an evil knight, dressed all in black, and riding a black horse, advancing on a defenceless 12th-century village to claim his brutal droit de seigneur over a humble blacksmith's beautiful teenage daughter.

Now there's a film I'd go and see...

Starbucks is to offer free refills “in an attempt to stop customers deserting them because of the credit crunch”. Well, not refills exactly, but free cups of filter coffee. Announced in the same week as the record hoik in fuel bills, and promising to run indefinitely in all UK outlets, this is an example of true social responsibility from everyone's favourite charming little local chain.

For as the weather cools down and winter closes in, people who can no longer afford to have the heating on at night can take their hotwater bottles into Starbucks and ask to have their free cup of boiling, muddy pond water poured straight in, then home to bed to snuggle down to a warm night.

PS. If you bought this copy of The Times in a Starbucks outlet and have already drunk your free cup of filter coffee... more fool you! The stuff is not for drinking. Ye gods. But I hope you enjoyed eating the sports section, so much tastier than those awful muffins, I find.

I am not going to pretend that it's funny that a man in Alice Springs was “eaten alive” by a pack of wild dogs. It's not, it's awful. The guy was dirt -poor, lived in a camp, and it is no way for a human being to die.

What is funny, however, is how blunt and direct Australian provincial news reporting still is in 2008. The piece I read in The Northern Territory News reported that “his body was a bloody mess”.

Last week, in a piece about the persistence of far-right populist politicking in Central Europe, I wrote in passing that the Poles remain in denial about their responsibility for the Holocaust. How gratifying, then, to see so many letters in The Times in the subsequent days from Poles denying their responsibility for the Holocaust.

(I particularly enjoyed the one from Barbara Tuge-Erecinska, the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to the United Kingdom. Do write again, ambassador, and this time tell us about the Kielce pogrom of 1946, 15 months after the war finished. Most of my readers probably don't know about the widespread killing, by Poles, only by Poles, not by anyone else, of Polish Jews returning from the camps after their liberation.)

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