Chesterfield was hit very hard by Eighties Thatcherism. A few miles down the railway from Sheffield, the Derbyshire town depended directly and indirectly on a regional economy rooted in steel and coal. When such jobs disappeared, many youths without much academic qualification joined the Army. Today the deaths in Afghanistan of soldiers from Chesterfield and nearby towns such as Mansfield and Ilkeston appear regularly on the front pages of local papers.

Here's a snapshot from last Sunday, outside Chesterfield station. It is early afternoon. In the driving, freezing January rain stands a young serviceman, in full, neatly pressed, new-looking desert kit, taking a drag on a cigarette. He is standing in the rain because station and platforms have become, by law, smoke-free. He is waiting for the Virgin Cross-Country train.

Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown. Pit closures, private rail companies, foreign wars, and a ban on smoking. People tell you politics make no difference, but - for good or ill - every element in this snapshot was placed there by politicians. Boy in uniform smoking in the rain. Chesterfield, 15.30, 20/01/08. I wish I'd had a camera.

How clever of Gordon Brown to think of a way of not nationalising Northern Rock. Bonds! Wow.

As it happens, I myself face an embarrassing liability in the form of an end-of-January tax demand. But never fear: inspired by our Prime Minister's ingenuity, and rather than sending any actual money, I am inviting HM Revenue & Customs to issue bonds, redeemable against my future income. If available. As permitting. Whatever. As Mr Brown's my witness, this is not the same as writing the money off. Oh no.

There's been a correspondence on the Letters page about “haitch” versus “aitch”. I've listened out for such slips ever since, as an MP crowning a young village beauty queen, I heard her tell the crowd she was appy and hhonoured. Like all of us in other circumstances, she knew there was a pitfall to be avoided but wasn't quite sure which.

Many of the small eccentricities that creep into spoken English arise from an overcompensating desire to rebut rather than assert: to show we are not illiterate; not “common”; not ignorant. Determined not to drop an “h” from words that have one, people add one to words that don't. Taught at school about the effect (sometimes) of a final “e”, Labour conferences talk about “compo-sight” motions. Often becomes “off-t'n” because we can spell. Your northern equivalent of Hyacinth Bucket buys meat at the “butt-cher” because she vaguely knows that Received Pronunciation generally favours the short “u”.

Sensing (correctly) that there are occasions in English when the direct use of the personal pronoun can sound coarse (“who's she - the cat's mother?”) people in trade and commerce have started adopting a ceremonious “yourself” and “myself” instead of “you” and “me” (“If in doubt, do not hesitate to contact myself or the guard...”) - a curious resurrection of the polite use of the third person which in English had died back to “your grace”, “her majesty”, and “his nibs”.

And northeasterners who are not from Newcastle seem desperately keen to impress this negative upon others. Durham folk are particular offenders. I once noted Alan Milburn, then Health Secretary, (subliminally terrified lest he rhyme words like “blood” with words like “hood”) saying on the Today programme that the Government was putting “its best phutt forward”.

Do you ever, while watching a thrillingly good modern performance of the work of a classical composer or playwright, wish he were beside you to see and enjoy the way a future age was honouring him?

Shakespeare, you know, didn't live that long ago: only five lifetimes.

I'd have given anything to have had him with us in the stalls on Tuesday in London at the National Theatre, watching what must surely be the best Much Ado About Nothing I shall ever see - the director making pretty free with the script, but with an inspired eye to the groundlings that would have delighted Shakespeare: dumbing it down, camping it up, yet losing not a scintilla of meaning.

Compared with the Elizabethans, our age has become despairingly self-critical. Contrast our cultural anxiety with Much Ado's cockily English dismissal of the entire oeuvre of the Classical poets as “quondam carpet-mongers”. Such self-confidence! Where has it gone? Yet had Shakespeare been with us I reckon he'd have agreed that no generation in four centuries - including his own - can have done his play prouder than ours is doing on the South Bank this January.

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