Diary

11 February 2006

The other night a woman overtook me on her bike on the climb up to Islington. Nothing unusual about that, except that her wheels were only the size of soup plates. How was it possible that the revolutions of her tiny wheels could cover the ground more quickly than my huge wheels, when as far as I could see our feet were pumping up and down at the same sort of rate. I gazed at her retreating form with the baffled awe of a tribesman seeing his first aeroplane. Was it an optical illusion? Was it the gears? Not for the first time, I wished I understood physics properly. Is it true that a clock loses weight as the spring unwinds? Does a boat really go more quickly through cold water than hot water? The worrying thing is that the nation of Newton and Faraday is becoming almost as ignorant as me. Over the past ten years the number of students taking A-level physics has fallen from 45,000 to 30,000, and the number of university physics departments has fallen by a third. It is madness, not least since physics graduates are the best paid of all.

There is only one big fact that matters at the moment in British politics, namely that more and more members of the ruling liberal elite want David Cameron to be prime minister, and fewer and fewer want Gordon Brown to be prime minister.

Scotland is now among the most politically correct places in the universe, but I was still amazed at the haul of supposedly lethal instruments that the Edinburgh airport authorities had confiscated from people about to board an aircraft. They were all in a Perspex cube at the gate: not just penknives and scissors, but corkscrews and, get this, a silver plastic Roman child’s gladius complete with bronze plastic scabbard, as used in dressing up.

Which brings me conveniently to the moment we have all been dreading. When I was editor, I banned book plugs from diaries, and yet here it is, a plug as blatant and conspicuous as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. If you want to understand the continuing awe in which we hold the gladius — and other aspects of Roman civilisation — then I have some advice. HarperCollins. Dream of Rome. Plenty of change from £20. You know it makes sense.