Mobile phones do not work in the tiny island state of São Tomé e Principe off the West African coast, whence I returned last Thursday. So awaiting my luggage at Heathrow I was quickly on the line to a friend. “What's been happening in British politics while I've been away?” was the breathless question.

“Gordon Brown's been going on about plastic bags.”

Don't snigger. After nearly a decade puzzling over routine references by journalistic colleagues to Mr Brown's “towering intellect”, the penny has dropped. This is it. There isn't anything more. Citizenship ceremonies and plastic bags.

So it was off to the real Britain. In the old railway station below the Derbyshire town of Wirksworth on a wet and windy Saturday morning they were waving off the Idridgehay Express. This inaugural journey to Idridgehay went three and a half miles down the eight-mile track to Duffield. Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, a businesslike group of

local enthusiasts, have been reinstating the old, overgrown 1860 track, and are nearly halfway there.

Shivering, my partner and I quaffed our complimentary buck's fizz and joined the waiting train, an elderly diesel car (just like the whizzbang new one Grandad took me for a ride on in 1956).

The organisers had pulled out all the stops. The station was packed. A note had been affixed to the door of the temporary public loos: “More Ladies round the back of building.” In an eclectic mix of periods, uniforms and themes there was a barrel organ, a medieval town crier with a bell, a fine speech from the Mayor of Wirksworth, Councillor Pollock, and a shunting locomotive named after Lady Hilton, the public-spirited widow of a former lord lieutenant of the county. As we pulled away, everyone waved from their back gardens.

This is the real Britain, and I love it, and do not need to sign a register in some stupid, government-imposed citizenship ceremony to prove it.

Anxiety has surfaced this week about forced marriages in Britain. It seems there is no let-up in this practice: couples, of whom one partner is in the Indian sub-continent and one under close parental control, are being pushed into matrimony in large numbers. This is not the real Britain and must not become so. It can be corrected simply, not by posturing about Britishness but by a straightforward piece of law. Permission to bring a married partner into Britain could be restricted to couples both of whom are at least 25. This is clear and judiciable. Who can determine whether two people really love each other, or are engaged of their own free will? But who will seriously argue that if a couple are genuinely in love they cannot wait until they are 25?

It was announced on Monday that a 17-year-old Scottish schoolboy has come first in Europe and second in the world in a world maths competition. He tackled 62,273 mental arithmetic questions in 48 hours. And, with only half an hour's sleep, got 97.5 per cent of them correct. I heard this on the radio, before he was interviewed. “Funny,” I thought. “In my multiracial secondary school in Swaziland there were (among many Africans, Indians and Europeans) only three Chinese boys, and in maths all three of them were streets ahead of everyone else in the school.”

Then came the interview. The Scottish schoolboy's name was Rock Tsui. He spoke with a Chinese accent. Hmm. Is it really just upbringing?

The case of the 19-year-old gay Iranian student, Mehdi Kazemi, reported yesterday is troubling. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, 4,000 homosexuals have been executed since the Iranian revolution, and Kazemi's boyfriend was hanged. The Netherlands (where Kazemi fled when his asylum application was refused here) has just sent him back. I see no way, under the Geneva Convention, that the Home Office can or should hold the line in his case. I hope he wins.

But if he does, what of all the other millions of gays in countries where they are viciously persecuted? Would they all be entitled to asylum? How much longer can the convention itself hold?

Oh dear. You just sit on the bench at Portcullis House in Westminster and MPs come up and offer horridnesses. This variation on the nursery doggerel is from a Labour backbencher, via another Labour backbencher - but composed by a Cabinet minister who must not be named:

At Downing Street upon the stair

I met a man who wasn't Blair.

He wasn't Blair again today.

Oh how I wish he'd go away.

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