It was often said, by half-hearted western Soviet apologists back in the 1970s, that one should wonder not why Russia was so badly ruled, but marvel that it could be ruled at all.

I always assumed that this was a reference to the geographical magnitude of the country and its diffuse ethnic mix, rather than an insinuation that Russians themselves were genetically predisposed towards incompetent and vicious autocracies. Might have to think again, though. A good proportion of that geographical magnitude and ethnic mix got the hell out as soon as it could in the years following 1991 - leaving Russia smaller, more ethnically heterodox, but scarcely better ruled.

There’s another little nugget of information to wonder at with Russia: despite, or perhaps because of, possessing one of the lowest population densities in the world, it has wreaked easily the most environmental havoc and misery of any country on earth. From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a gently glowing peasant with a life expectancy of 34 years.

Karl Marx would have been impressed, I suppose, that in the great battle between man and nature, the Soviet Union succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea - the Aral, now largely a toxic desert - and turning the world’s deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits. Shorn of its dumb and vindictive state socialism it was blithely assumed that Russia would improve, but there was nothing in Russia’s history to suggest this would be the case.

Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there.

It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there - perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.

It’s a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.

- Apparently, one in 11 British Muslims actively supports terrorist attacks over here and a further 20% or so “empathise” with those who carry out such attacks. This warning comes not from the BNP, but from a bloke called Haras Rafiq, who is an adviser to the government. I’d put the figures slightly higher - based on previous opinion poll findings - but Rafiq seems to be in the right sort of area. That’s something like 400,000-plus British citizens ready to either strap on the Semtex or smile indulgently while someone else does so.

Who knows if this will come as a shock to the government, the leaders of Muslim organisations and the BBC which insist that terrorism has “nothing to do with Islam” and that each act of carnage is simply the work of rogue nutters and wholly unconnected to the religion to which, seemingly by coincidence, they adhere.

That terrorist attacks from people who coincidentally happen to be Methodists or Unitarians or Hindus have been thin on the ground has not dissuaded the authorities from this interesting, counter-intuitive point of view. Perhaps Rafiq will have more luck.

He might add, too, that in one poll last year 40% of British Muslims wished to see sharia law imposed in the country and that the proportion of those who support or “empathise” with terrorist attacks increases markedly when Israelis are the chosen victims.

We shall fight on the beaches...

Bin that Olympic logo immediately: here’s the perfect image of Britain, in a photograph taken in Westcliff-on-Sea last week. An enormous elderly woman has somehow got herself jammed in a deckchair on the Essex shingle and the waves are beginning to lap about her feet. Soon perhaps she will drown.

But she does not look hugely perturbed. She is staying put - and unlike King Canute, does not for a moment imagine that the waves can be held back: the waves will do exactly as they wish.

“Look, you fat old trout,” the waves admonish her, as they begin their ingress over her Dr Scholl’s, “this is what happens when you ignore repeated government health warnings about obesity. We all told you and you wouldn’t listen, would you?”

The photograph doesn’t reveal that the coastguards freed our heroine - perhaps by slicing off vast swathes of thigh flesh, or after having summoned a large crane. No matter, I prefer to think that she is still sitting there, and with the water now around her neckline and her head tilted back to avoid the endless grey sea, is puffing on one last exquisitely defiant cigarette.

A holiday read to make you fall about

Looking for something worth reading on the beach this summer - or to while away those languid hours as your howling toddler is frisked for explosives at Heathrow and her bottle of baby milk is fed to the sniffer dogs? And her doll ripped open?

I suggest you forgo the usual selection of thrillers and the latest sanctimonious tome from some middle-aged woman angry that people occasionally misuse commas.

Why not go for a book you have already paid for once, through taxes? And will, I’m sure, be only more delighted to pay for a second time.

You can buy The Role of Towels as a Control to Reduce Slip Potential from - natch - the Health and Safety Executive. It’s the culmination of £12,000 worth of research into what happens when you step out of a bath onto a towel you’ve placed on the floor to reduce the risk of breaking your neck. So, do towels do the job? Let me spoil the book for you by giving away the last line. “The testing carried out here is insufficient to draw significant conclusions,” it says, with masterful understatement.

- A sense of utter futility and existential despair, not to mention laziness, has led to me never, ever, taking any advice from green activists about how I might cause less damage to the earth. I am convinced that pretty soon, for example, it will be shown that recycling rubbish causes much more damage to the ozone layer than simply flinging it out of your car somewhere along the A5.

Listen to this latest news from the green lobby: walking is four times more damaging to the ozone layer than driving a car. A brisk walk to the shops will require you to eat 100 grams of, say, beef, thus resulting in 3.6kg of emissions used to produce your steak. A car journey would produce less than 1kg of emissions. So, save the planet and buy a car.

Times Recommends

• Graveyard of empires could claim more careers
• Would you live on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall?
• At last we’re getting our heads out of the sand