Are Italians the rudest people on the planet? Three times this year, trying to alight from a Tube train, I've been shoved back by stylishly dressed people pushing in to board before the alighting passengers are off: and every time they've been yabbering in Italian. How do we reconcile modern Italy - consumerism, junk television, brand addiction and mindless celebrity worship - with the Italy of Venice, da Vinci, Verdi and the Medicis? Say what you like about our rowdy, beer-swilling English mob but, tattoos and all, they'd have seen through Berlusconi in an instant.

Dishonoured

Funny how offences that seem grave at the time may sometimes fade, while small slights linger and grow in one's feelings. It is 23 years since Oxford University snubbed Margaret Thatcher by making her the first prime minister since the Second World War not to be offered an honorary degree - but though we Conservatives brushed it off at the time, and the PM's response via her spokesman (“If they do not wish to confer the honour, the Prime Minister is the last person to wish to receive it”) was dignified, it rankles with me more, not less, as the years go by. No Conservative of a certain age forgets or overlooks this ignorant and stupid snub.

For all I know, private approaches have since been made to Lady Thatcher, and perhaps she does not want this wrong righted. But it ought to be - and surely today the vote would go the other way?

Chris Patten is now Chancellor of the university and though the honour does not lie within his gift, it would be nice if happened when he was there.

Talk of a state funeral which, incredibly, seems likely to have emanated from Downing Street, was vulgar and inappropriate while the Baroness is still very much alive, and (speaking for myself) I don't think any peacetime politicians should get these; but that honorary doctorate was her due. It should be offered publicly, and soon, whether or not she chooses to accept.

Suffocated

In this July heat we are reminded how hopeless we Europeans are at people-friendly ventilation and cooling systems. They conspire both to cook and to deafen us.

The free market can be bad at responding to consumer irritation, particularly where the ultimate consumers (us) do not choose the product from the manufacturers. It is an intermediary hotel chain, for instance, that buys those monster centralised air-conditioning machines in a courtyard outside your hotel window, roaring unmuffled through the night. Interior extractor fans are often intrusively noisy, too, as any speaker (or would-be sleeper) knows; and on trains and buses it may be hard to hear yourself talk against the din.

Meanwhile it has been so unbearably sweaty on the Tube that the roar of an air-conditioner would even be welcome - but London Underground has no proper cooling system. And recording my Great Lives BBC radio programmes in a studio, we've all stewed because the noisy air-conditioning must be switched off.

The discomfort is not without technical reasons. Moving air makes a noise, and the cheapest and least cumbersome means (a fast-running fan down a narrow tube, as opposed to a slow-running fan down a wide tube) is the also the noisiest. Air-conditioning creates cold only by dumping heat, and in the Underground there is nowhere down there to dump it: cooling carriages heats up tunnels.

But air-source heat pumps (the same technology as your refrigerator) could deliver unlimited cheap, “green” hot water to the city above ground; and quiet ventilation is available, at a cost in money and space. Are we prepared to pay? I think we are; but no economic mechanism exists for us to say so.

Humanised

This, from the British Humanists, made me smile. “Tired of seeing religious advertising on the side of buses? Want to redress the balance? Political blogger Jon Worth invites you to visit PledgeBank and pledge just £5 towards getting an advertisement on the side of a bus saying: ‘There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life.'”

I have pledged my £5. Only if Mr Worth reaches his fundraising total will pledgers have to pay up. The chances look slim because today is the deadline, and yesterday they were well short of the signatory numbers needed.

Still I hope they make it. Religious billboards are everywhere and I wouldn't complain: sponsors have every right to display them. It would be interesting to find out whether the “faith” community reciprocates such tolerance; though Worth's message (if deemed “hateful”) is arguably now illegal.

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