We have had trouble with our lights for years. Not all the lights in our home, but the expensive lights in our front & back rooms. The ones with half a dozen high-powered halogen bulbs in each.

The problem is that the bulbs blow alarmingly quickly – a dozen a week if we replace them, at £8 each, and then finally the transformer in the light unit failed.

We have consulted electricians a couple of times about this, with £35 call-out charges and £30 per half hour plus parts. None has found a solution, although their list of suggestions is, shall we say, less than scientific.

• If you touch the bulbs with your skin, they will blow – you need to hold them in a tissue
• That’s an aluminium unit. Aluminium doesn’t conduct electricity. It does? Are you sure? (They used it for wiring in the 1960s because it was cheaper than copper!)
• In that case, aluminium conducts electricity, and that is blowing your unit
• You burn logs? That puts soot in the air which (you can guess the rest…)

I’ve finally found out what the problem is. Halogen bulbs burn much hotter, and their filaments are much finer. And in our house we have a creature called Tiny Flirt (Clodhoppus Babyelephantus) who travels everywhere at full throttle in gigantic leaps and bounds, and an enormous creature called Little Nutter (Autisticus Bouncii.) He can bounce on a paved driveway like it’s a trampoline.

When halogen bulbs vibrate, they break. And when the children are in our house, it rings like a bell.

Time to get my screwdriver out. This weekend I shall mostly be fitting cheap light fittings…

I have to admit that I was amused when I heard the claim made in the USA that had Stephen Hawking been British and reliant upon the NHS, he would have been left to die.

I laughed out loud when I heard the claim that Senator Kennedy, who is in his late seventies, would not have been treated for his brain tumour if he was British.

But this claim made by Fox News, that nationalised healthcare systems are a breeding ground for recruiting Islamist terrorists, had me in hysterics.

It’s going to take the USA a very long time indeed to win back the respect it is losing because of its conduct in this debate.

Except I don’t live in suburbia. I live in the centre of York. Whatever.

Now that term has ended and I have a life again, I have chopped down trees and trimmed hedges and weeded borders around my house – and suddenly been all Visible and High Profile to my neighbours, who have been falling over themselves to pop out of the house and Have A Chat.

Readers of the great works of AA Milne will understand the significance of all these capital letters.

My neighbours are delighted that I have started to show an interest in gardening at last. My response: "No, I hate gardening. But that tree had to die. It kept whispering things about me. "

My Nuisance Neighbour Leylandii Hedge, which I planted five years ago , was trimmed down to a neat & tidy 7 feet tall, and no longer overhangs the footpath. The dead laurel has been disposed of. And that bastard whispering tree? A bloke in the pub dealt with that. "No questions, but yeah – there will be nothing left but ashes when we’ve finished with it. "

But no, I’m not going to mow the grass verge. A bloke from the council does that every other Wednesday. That’s good enough, unless you plan to play croquet on it – in which case you bloody mow it. And no, having dirty cars on my drive doesn’t bother me – mainly because my car looks less pink when it’s filthy.

And no, I hadn’t noticed that the enormous silver birch outside my house had been chopped down. When did that happen? May? Well, that explains it. I work for a living.

Apparently the attack on her car was "a random attack by bored youths."

Of course, Blears is famous for being in touch with the feelings of voters, so she must be right.

It can’t possibly be an expression of disgust at the recent behaviour of the New Labour government.