Slow down and live long

Beer, Devon

THEY warn you about sunburn and dry hair. What the experts never tell you is that after a certain age the first effects of the sun are bleached nostril hairs. You fall asleep on the beach and wake up with what looks like a swarm of silvery eels in two black caverns. Very fetching.

AFTER a few days down here you develop the Beer Walk. The stroll to the sea which took 10 minutes when you arrived now lasts half an hour, every slow pace on the hot, sticky pavement bringing some new and unconsidered thing to ponder, such as the hamster cage in the window-ads at the corner shop. At £15 it comes with just about everything a hamster cage should contain. There's a wheel, a seesaw, a tunnel and two balls, but no hamster. I suspect the poor little chap gymmed himself to death, hurtling around the wheel, up the seesaw, down the seesaw, through the tunnel and into the balls. Hamster language does not include the expression "take it easy" and hamsters don't have the right mental attitude to develop the Beer Walk.

IF you need proof that the Devonian lifestyle is good for you, look no further than the routine death announcements outside a local funeral director's. This week's dear departed were 93, 97 and 101.

WITH so many holiday homes and caravans in Devon, the shop windows are full of adverts for cleaners, each would-be employer desperately trying to outdo the others in how light and easy the cleaning is. I am reminded of the story by, I believe, Robert Morley, concerning the lady choosing a cleaner who rang the previous employer for a reference. Turned out that Mrs Gladbag didn't do washing, scrubbing, sweeping, or anything that involved bending or operating electrical equipment. So what, exactly, did Mrs Gladbag do? "Mostly making tea and discussing her leg," came the reply.

DID I mention that Beer has caravans? It does. There is a glorious site on Beer Head. But the strange thing about it is that although many, many artists come here to capture the beauty of the Jurassic Coast in oils or watercolours, Beer caravan site is always depicted as a lush green and utterly empty meadow. Some events are airbrushed out of history but Beer Head is paintbrushed out of geography.

IN HIS new book My Scotland, Our Britain, Gordon Brown declares his great pride in being MP for Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath, "to speak on behalf of the community that made me and raised me." So how many times have you spoken in Parliament since losing the 2010 General Election, Mr Brown? He may like to kid us he's Mr Proud but the former Labour leader and PM has been doing very good impressions of Mr Grumpy and Mr Silent.

GENERATION Right was the title of a Radio 4 programme looking at the alleged right-wing views of Britain's under-30s. One manifestation of this was young people objecting to NHS resources being spent on binge drinkers, chain smokers and grossly obese people who are perceived as being responsible for their conditions. What on earth is right-wing about wanting to use the NHS effectively? I bet the great Labour reformers who created the NHS 60-odd years ago would have had precisely the same views.

HOW international politics works. Memorandum from the Grand Ayatollah to all citizens of Iran: With effect from 0900 on Monday the stinking, whore-bred spawn of the Great Satan will be known as "our dear friends the American people."