No tonsil tennis, please

A SURVEY reveals that "one in five British adults would turn down an invitation to a same-sex wedding." Let's put it more positively - 80 per cent of us would attend. Over the past few years the allegedly uptight and bigoted Brits have abandoned old prejudices and embraced the gay community in a way that would have been unimaginable only a generation ago. We have only had one weekend of gay weddings. Give it another couple of years and the other 20 per cent will see nothing odd in a reception featuring a wedding cake with two little sugar-icing blokes.

HOWEVER, as we welcome the gay community into the bracing world of marriage (no, it's your turn to do the bins), we should point out that the kiss at the altar is supposed to be a chaste peck on the lips, not a full-on, slavering, open-mouthed session of tonsil tennis. I was at one wedding where the bride and groom kissed so long and lubriciously that the kids at the back were hissing "yuk!" "gross!" and "get a room!" Straight or gay, a little decorum is a blessed thing.

APOCALYPSE deferred. After all the build-up, yesterday's UN report on climate change is not the litany of disaster the eco-panickers were promising. We can adapt. We can cope.

IT was easy to spot Jon Snow on his climate-change trek to Greenland (C4). He was the only one looking glum. Grim-faced and urgent, Snow was reporting on the allegedly catastrophic effects of climate change, in advance of the UN report. Ideally, the locals would have huddled around Snow in a terrified mass, dreading the future. In fact, the Greenlanders all seemed remarkably cheerful about getting a bit warmer. And why not? As their glaciers thaw, rich soil and mineral deposits are exposed. The locals showed absolutely no enthusiasm for the old times, with 40-foot snowdrifts at the back door, blubber for breakfast and winter 10 months of the year. The more anguished Snow looked, the more the kids giggled.

LAWYERS are astonished that a former Mafia boss is free to carry on living here because the Crown Prosecution Service failed, by a matter of hours, to lodge an appeal against an extradition decision. Apparently no-one in London can remember a cock-up like this ever happening before. But nobody in Rome, or Sicily, will be in the least surprised. They will automatically assume that someone in the UK legal system has been made an offer he couldn't refuse, or possibly woken up with a horse's head in his bed.

TALKING of Italian Justice, Inspector De Luca (BBC4) is excellent. Set in the last days of Mussolini's fascist regime, it introduces that rarest of things an unheroic cop, De Luca (Alessandro Preziosi) who is genuinely scared of getting shot. He also beds every nubile signorina he meets. So unlike our own dear Met.

I'D WRITTEN yesterday's item on the astonishing increase in driver-awareness courses before the policing minister Damian Green revealed that in 2013 no fewer than 953,428 drivers chose to go on courses rather than receive points on their licence – more than double the previous year. This is now a £100 million-a-year industry. So where is the statistical evidence that drivers who attend such courses are any safer than those who accept the fine and penalty points instead? Doesn't the fact that nearly a million drivers have opted for courses suggest that three points on your licence are actually a far better deterrent? And can you think of any other part of the criminal-justice system where the accused is allowed to choose the punishment? A public inquiry into the whole driver-awareness industry is long overdue.