Hail, the great philanthropist

CLIMATE-change uncertainty. We had one crisp frost this week. Do you think that might have been winter?

YES, I hear all the assurances. The glass floor in the walkway high across London's Tower Bridge is immensely strong. But when a waitress dropped a bottle on it, the pane appeared to smash like an old car windscreen. How scared would you have felt at that moment? Thankfully, the only damage was to a "sacrificial" layer of glass, not the entire pane. Even so, you might want to pack a pair of sacrificial underpants.

FIRST, GQ magazine names Tony Blair Philanthropist of the Year. Next, Save the Children gives him its Global Legacy award. Are we witnessing a worldwide epidemic of irony?

IT WAS, of course, quite wrong for David Mellor MP to berate a London taxi driver, boasting about his own achievements and ridiculing the cabbie. However, London cabbies are not always what we expect. In popular folklore they are cheerful Cockney cocksparrows who know every street in the capital ("The Knowledge") and can converse brightly on any given subject. I have not been a great user of the capital's black cabs but on two occasions I was with cabbies who got hopelessly lost. A third cabbie flew into a rage when I suggested paying his fare with a card. I dare say they can look after themselves.

SKINT (C4) is the reality programme that makes Benefits Street look like Monte Carlo. It is a hideously bleak study of the underclass in Grimsby where life revolves around booze, drugs, crime and prostitution and the highlight of a resident's day is selling a fistful of DVDs for a quid. It is the most heartbreaking programme I can imagine for there is no White Dee, no humour and no hope, and you know that nothing the Government is doing will make things better. These are pointless, wasted lives. In the 19th century, religious revival and the abstinence movement turned Britain's inner-cities around. Two hundred years later, does anyone see a way forward? And do we begin to understand why some people think the only answer is the ruthless discipline of Sharia?

REALITY check, please. Home Secretary Theresa May says Britain faces a terror threat "unmatched before or since 9/11." That's a nasty attack of amnesia, Mrs May. Have you really forgotten that before 9/11 we had 30 years of the IRA Troubles? That was real terrorism. Thousands of bombs were detonated all over the United Kingdom and Ulster. More than 3,500 people were killed and 47,500 injured. Since 9/11 there has been one successful Islamist attack on the UK, the 7/7 Tube bombings of 2005 in which 52 people died, plus the slaying of Lee Rigby by a pair of deranged psychopaths. To compare today's nebulous terrorist threat with the real, daily carnage of the Troubles is to rewrite history with no regard for the facts. The truth is that you are far less likely to be involved in a terrorist incident today than at any time in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Why politicians want to convince you otherwise is anyone's guess, but you can't help noticing that every time the terror threat is ramped up, they chip away at more of our civil liberties.

A FRIEND has just bought a new car. It came with a "space-saver" spare wheel which should not be used if you are towing. So he bought a proper full-sized spare wheel which, to his surprise, fits perfectly in the compartment under the boot. This raises a complex puzzle. If a full-size wheel fits in the space provided, what space is the space-saver wheel supposed to save?