The best moment of my life, if memory does not fail me, was the day my parents dropped me off at university halls for the very first time. Mildly delirious at escaping from the 1950s (it was actually the late Seventies, but nobody had told my mother and father), I can still remember the thrill of watching the Austin Maxi’s exhaust pipe disappearing sedately around the corner. Over the wire at last!

But pity those who may never experience that epiphany. Yesterday’s bright idea, floated by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is that there should be a lot less leaving home in the future. Under a “no-fee degrees” scheme, university students in England would be spared £3,225 for tuition if they opt to live at home.

This is transgressive madness, and not because it limits choice for poorer students — who have always been adept at living at home. It’s madness because today’s potential undergraduates, already seriously infantilised, will have their development arrested for another three or four years, by which point, like zoo-raised marmosets, they are unlikely ever to adapt to independent living.

Have you met many middle-class school-leavers? Most are as ditsy as Goldie Hawn in her prime — and those are just the boys. These kids have had their entire lives planned and feather-bedded by their parents to protect them from the grime of reality. School-leavers only know how to get places by taxi, parental or otherwise; can only study if fed knowledge on silver teaspoons; and have their friends carefully chosen for them. Of bills, responsibilities, risk, timekeeping and public transport they know absolutely nothing.

Moving out, in fact, is their one hope of salvation. If they remain at home, prevented from developing adult relationships, keeping a budget, crossing the road or experiencing any kind of failure, we are guaranteeing the end of the human race within a few generations. I think someone ought to warn the civil servants.

Sorry affair

And talking of which, a grumpy old(ish) man of my acquaintance recently had a close shave with the tyranny of modern childrearing. After local teenagers made obscene gestures at him as he drove behind the school bus, he climbed on board and reprimanded them. When one of them spat at him, he instinctively grabbed the boy.

My friend was exceedingly lucky: the parents chose not to call the police. Instead the next day the mother and father — educated; five-star patronising — appeared on his doorstep to seek a solemn apology from him for assaulting their petit prince; and his assurance that such a thing would never happen again. Did they bring their son to apologise for what he did? Of course not. What a supremely old-fashioned idea.

No-whinny situation

Not many people are aware of the proposal to start a poll tax for horses — partly, I suppose for lack of riots in Trafalgar Square. Yes, not only must we poor horse-owning saps cope with the exorbitant cost of feed, shoeing, vets’ bills and diesel, but now it seems we will also have to pay the Government for the pleasure of doing so.

The rural affairs department’s idea of taxing farm animals has just finished a three-month consultation, that classic euphemism for shoring up a decision already made. Defra, of course, isn’t calling it a tax. It’s a levy fund — needed, the civil servants warble, to pay for a new body to cope in the event of serious outbreaks of disease. They want, they say to distribute “responsibility and cost-sharing” for animal health among owners and keepers.

Why is it, when one bathes in these warm, anodyne words, that one feels like a helpless victim of a self-perpetuating, endgame bureaucracy? The proposed annual tax is not, thus far, vast: perhaps £10 per horse. But that’s not the point. The point is that harmless, private people — us — are having our freedom compromised and must stump up for the wages of officials who exist to dream up crazy schemes, simply so they can dream up even more crazy schemes.

Those in the horse world who have taken part in the consultation say it is a shambles, ill thought-through and incomplete. Not to mention anti-democratic. It defies the basic fact that owning an animal for leisure purposes is a free right; possibly one of the most ancient rights there is. And if that animal is not in the food chain and is not kept for industrial purposes, then we should not be taxed for owning it. Watch out cat and dog owners: it will be you next.

Horse ownership is bursting with unworkable bureaucracy. One’s horse must now have an official passport, even if it never leaves its field; every equine born since July 1 must be microchipped, at considerable cost; and when you transport it you are subject to a swath of regulations which, strictly interpreted, make 80 per cent of leisure horsebox drivers illegal. As we say in Scotland, it really is a load of mince. But it’s expensive mince, and we’re paying for it.

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