Democracy? What democracy?

I REFERRED recently to First World problems, issues which bother people who are too comfortable to have real problems. A Daily Telegraph reader complains that his village is "plagued with feral peacocks."

"I MAY have cancer but cancer does not have me." Stephen Sutton, the 19-year-old who inspired so many people and raised more than £4 million for charity before his untimely death, was not the first cancer patient to utter these words and he won't be the last. He speaks for all those patients who believe there are more ways to cope with cancer than simply surviving it.

WE in the media are guilty of turning cancer into a battle. We talk of people fighting it, beating it or losing their battle with it. This can imply that if they had only fought harder they might have emerged triumphant, which is grotesquely unfair. The reality is that although some cancers can be eliminated, many forms of the disease respond neither to treatment nor to positive thinking. What matters, as Stephen showed, is what you do for yourself and others in the time you have left.

THERE is a suspicion that Tony Blair and George W Bush planned to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein long before the official decision, based on that infamous "dodgy dossier" was announced. We are now told a deal has been struck between the Chilcot Inquiry and the Cabinet Office not to publish correspondence between Blair and Bush but to tell us the "gist" of their conversations. You thought you lived in a democracy? You thought government was run by elected politicians, not Sir Humphreys in the shadows? You seriously believed that we were all equal before the law? And you honestly hoped that one day we would discover who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of US and UK soldiers, not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis? How are things in Cloud Cuckoo Land? Tony Blair with his personal fortune and global contacts is untouchable. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

SPRINGWATCH (BBC2) introduced us to Chris the cuckoo who has flown 30,000 miles back and forth between Africa and Norfolk. We are supposed to be impressed. Why don't Chris and all the billions of silly birds who waste their entire lives commuting simply find somewhere agreeable mid-way and settle down?

I HAVE never seen anything like the pigeon I spotted a few days ago in a park where people were feeding the ducks. The pigeon had inserted himself in a bunch of ducks and was walking in a very odd way with his feet splayed. If I didn't know better I'd swear the pigeon was pretending to be a duck. One for you twitchers.

IT is not the winning that matters. It is not the losing that matters. It is the keeping dry that matters. The sailing rally I referred to last week, the one I organise every year, took place over three of the wettest days I can remember. But nothing seemed to lower the spirits of a bunch of sailors whose greatest joy is being afloat, no matter what, and whose mantra is that there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. What a great bunch the Brits are. They are cheerful, noisy, often have a damp coat and sometimes sing in the rain. The bullfrog breed.

PURELY by chance this column contains peacocks, cuckoos, pigeons, ducks and bullfrogs. It will not happen again.