Society

Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire or east towards Oxford. You may notice something that is so commonplace in British river systems most people ignore it: the woods, marshes and wetlands are all but gone. Farmers have ploughed fields up to the banks. Because there is nothing – or next to nothing – to soak up the rain, water and silt

Mr S doesn’t usually notice A List waists, but he wasn’t totally surprised when he heard that Matt Damon was on a diet during the filming of Monuments Men. While your correspondent has no reason to be smug, he will say that Damon wasn’t looking quite his Jason Bourne self. Steerpike was surprised, however, to learn that Damon’s diet apparently consisted of just one thing: grapes. Speaking at the premiere, co-star Bob Balaban told me ‘Matt was trying to lose weight and was hardly eating anything, just grapes.’ Am I the only person who thought that Matt Damon preferred apples? ‘How do you like them grapes?’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Last week the Met Office and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology issued an admirable joint report on the floods and their possible connection to climate change, concluding that it is not possible to make such a link. ‘As yet’, it said, ‘there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the consequent flooding’. In many ways this was not much of a surprise, since only the wild activist fringe among the climate science community have tended to try to make the link in the past. Taking such a level-headed view, the Met Office report represented a valuable opportunity to