Impartial reporting? There's no such thing.

SO that's our English summer holiday for another year. Six sunny days and a thunderstorm. Can't complain.

IN any case, sometimes it's impossible to use the simplest phrase without telling a lie. Like "European Union."

UP and over the clifftop path to Branscombe, one of the most beautiful walks in Britain. We do this three-mile trek every year and wonder how long it will be before our withered and decrepit bodies can no longer take it. This week we not only did the Beer-to-Branscombe walk in fine form but later passed the Daily Mail test-your-fitness thing which involves sitting in a dining chair and seeing how many times you can stand up (no hands allowed) in 30 seconds. If you can get up quickly more than a dozen times it means your muscles are in fine shape. Then again, it could mean you have a dodgy bladder and rising quickly from chairs has become a necessity.

DURING one holiday, we had finished our meal at the Old Bakery and the owner said, as we prepared to leave: "There's something on the radio about some bombs in London." Ten years have passed since the Tube bombings of July 5, 2005. In the time it took to walk between two tranquil Devon villages, the world changed.

REMEMBER something called the Olympic legacy? We were promised that if we bunged a few billion quid into the 2012 games, the result would be a lean, fit, sports-hungry population. A casual stroll along the Devon beaches tells a different story. No health service can hope to deal with the epidemic of diabetes, heart disease and cancer being stored up in a million wobbly bellies and flobbery bums of our lardy nation. Fat is the new norm. And once the NHS buckles under the strain, we will all be at risk whether we are fat or thin. The big killer of the 21st century - passive gluttony.

THANKS for your memories of DIY tools found in operating theatres. A reader sends the eye-watering tale of arriving at hospital to have a steel pin removed after a foot operation. The surgeon asked for pliers. The nurse explained they had none. A young registrar mentioned that he had some in his car tool kit. "Well, go and get them," ordered the surgeon briskly. The pliers were fetched, the nurse sterilised them and the surgeon extracted the pin. The patient was fully conscious throughout.