A flying boot directed at a radio may be enough to get it out of your system. Time lends perspective, they say: sleep on it.

Well, I have. I have let a week pass. But each time I remind myself of the Prime Minister’s tribute last week to the late Nick Clarke, I still want to spit. Within hours of the death of BBC Radio 4’s wonderful World at One presenter, Tony Blair was ready to emote. “Nick,” he said, “was an outstanding presenter, who over many years represented the best elements of public service broadcasting in this country.”

Yesterday I telephoned a BBC press officer. Did Mr Blair ever accord Nick Clarke an interview on The World at One, I asked? A tight-lipped “we think not”, was the reply. She did not say why but we both knew. The aim was to punish Nick for his polite insistence on getting answers by starving his programme of senior interviewees.

So spare us the “Nick”, would you, Prime Minister? Spare us the “best elements” stuff. Your old mate whom, now he’s breathed his last, you call “Nick” was the man whose career your people tried persistently to undermine; the man whose programme I have myself heard Alastair Campbell mocking during his matey chats with the Westminster press corps.

Downing Street’s futile vendetta against Nick Clarke’s programme only did him credit: Clarke’s patient, penetrating, professionalism scared and angered Mr Blair’s team. Now Nick is dead, would silence have been too much to ask of Mr Blair? As for the rest of us, we must all take great care not to die before Mr Blair does. Barely a week passes these days without a moving Blair tribute, sprayed out indiscriminately to the humble no less than the mighty. What a prospect. The fires of Hell I shall bear with fortitude, but the horrifying possibility of a Blair tribute echoing through the ether as I depart this Earth (“We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but Matt was a credit to the newspaper industry . . .”) one counts not least among the reasons for clinging to life.

• What follows is not another “string ’em up” attack on litter louts, but an honest expression of bafflement. I was trotting along a little Derbyshire lane on Monday, over a hilltop. Sometimes drivers pull in there to rest, or snack, or take in the lovely view.

  Someone had simply emptied out the rubbish from their car onto the grass verge: crisp packets, Coca-Cola cans, cigarette packets and paper cups.

  Never mind punishment, the law, and all that. Something different troubled me. Why, why, would someone who has found the place pretty enough to stop here, fail to make the mental connection? His gain had been almost zero, and the general loss so real, that it made me question an assumption underlying my whole outlook on life: that humans are similar at heart. But was this driver even the same genus as me? Could I ever feel any sense of shared humanity with him? Murder I can forgive. Rapine, pillage, plunder, these I can understand. But just to tip out a bag of rubbish . . . Was he from another planet? Or am I? These, not tales of genocide in foreign lands, are my bleakest moments.

• News this week that Gordon Brown’s handwriting has been submitted by his Tory Shadow for analysis by a graphologist (“unreliable . . . evasive . . . poor judgment”, she reports) lifted my spirits, and for a curious reason. All my childhood was marked by the misery of having untidy handwriting. School report after school report: angry teachers’ comments on my essays; that chilling word “ presentation”; tears at bedtime; visits to specialists; despairing attempts to learn a neat script; cursive, italic, Marion Richardson; hours of exercises doing loops . . . a dark cloud that never seemed to go away.

  But it has. Gone, all gone. Nobody cares about my writing any more. Until I read that Times report on Tuesday, I had quite forgotten all that wretchedness, half a century ago.

  How intense are the anxieties of childhood! How perpetual, how insoluble, do the miseries appear. That things will pass never seemed to occur to me as a boy. People talk of the “optimism of youth”; they should remember the pessimism of youth; they should rejoice in the wonderful capacity to rise above things, to look past things, to set things aside, that comes with age.

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