Just occasionally you encounter abroad an idea so smart that you cannot think why it hasn't been adopted here. Colombia, whence I've just returned, has cash machines like ours. They work fine with British cards, paying out in Colombian pesos. The procedure's the same, except that before pressing the final proceed key you are asked on-screen whether you wish to donate the equivalent of about (a) 30p; (b) 60p; or (c) 90p, to a listed charity; a sum that would not be deducted from your cash payout, but charged on your monthly statement. To indicate your decision you press a key.

All my group found ourselves opting for the middle-sized donation, which was to a children's charity. Why? Because, first, it's a tiny sum, it's easy, and it doesn't reduce your payout; secondly, because this is when you're keeping your fingers crossed that the machine will cough up and you sort of half-think in a superstitious way that you're more likely to get mercy if you show mercy to others; and, thirdly, because the moment of pulling loads of dosh from a hole in the wall is (for me, anyway) a moment of counting my blessings and remembering that not everybody can.

I bet this would work in Britain. If 30 million people did it twice a week, it would raise more than a billion a year for charity. We would chip in (I'd guess) without cutting other giving, and could trigger charity tax-relief, too, simply by pressing another key. Even the beastly banks could get some kudos. So why not give it a try?

Mind the gap

Here's another idea I've brought excitedly back. The city of Bogotá, appalled by the projected cost of an underground railway, tried something about a hundred times cheaper. The ingredients are lots of concrete kerbstones; a set of steel-girder pedestrian overpasses and stairs; some basic platforms and shelters; a computerised dot-matrix platform announcement system; ticket machines; and the buses you already have - plus some.

So Bogotá's Underground is overground. Its trains are buses. Its tracks are asphalted channels between kerb-stoned margins, mostly down the central reservations of the main highways. This is really just a turbocharged bus-lane system, with teeth: including platforms, access, interchanges, and serious info-tech. It needs space, which in British cities we often lack, but no more space than the ruinously expensive tramway systems, with their hideous superstructure, that we've committed ourselves to in some places.

In congested Bogotá, impatient people quit taxis to join the ribbons of long red buses, one every few minutes, streaming freely along their dedicated riverbeds within the highway. The idea has applications here too.

Lost in translation

Am I back in time to rescue my friend Michael Gove from his own super-courtesy? Michael, now an MP, bids fair to become Westminster's new Lord James Douglas-Hamilton: in Tory days a delightful minister who was so polite that he was once spotted leaping out of his government car to open the door for his female chauffeur.

Michael shares these instincts, displaying an almost pathological urge to defer (or apparently defer) to critics. Take his deeply reasonable column on this page some weeks ago, wondering whether, when surely no translation can reproduce the genius, it's worth reading English versions of foreign literature.

Of course it isn't - or not as literature. But I fly in to the newsstands of Paris to find Michael now deferring to a critic who insists the plot and descriptions in War and Peace survive translation.

I dare say they do. The melody of Beethoven's Fifth survives playing on a penny whistle, after a fashion. But the greatness of great writing (certainly great English writing) is so inextricably bound up with style and tone as to lose its better half when reduced to a fair translation of the plot. Molière is crass in English. Voltaire loses much.

Abroad I've been reading George Eliot's sublime Scenes of Clerical Life. Sod her plots; if Eliot's razor-edge balance of scorn, pity, humour and affection - let alone her lemon-sharp relish in deftly worded commentary, and the sweet, silly English way her countryfolk talk - survive translation into Czech, then I'm a Dutchman.

Got a light, sir?

Unpacking, you come across things you forgot not to take. In the pocket of a laptop case that survived (without query) every hand-luggage scanner that the moronic and insulting US security apparatus could throw at us in two transits through Miami airport, plus innumerable X-ray scanners at Barcelona, London, Bogotá, Manizales, Leticia, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Paris Gare du Nord... was a big box of matches.

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