I had lunch with a cleavage. There was also a mind so I didn’t understand why it was felt necessary to flaunt the physical attribute.

Bjorn Lomborg’s book The Sceptical Environmentalist should be required reading for all who are concerned about environmental issues. He presents his evidence and his arguments very clearly, which is a lot more than can be said for many of his antagonists.

Patricia Hewitt, the Environment Secretary was on television this evening talking about the affects of carbon dioxide emissions on the melting of the Greenland’s icecap and the risk of subsequent rise in sea levels. She spoke of the imminent need to prevent a possible irreversible progressive rise of twenty five feet over the next one thousand years. She left us to surmise what this would imply for London and other coastal areas but the BBC helpfully provided photographs of mass flooding of rural areas a few years ago.

The agenda in Patricia Hewitt’s presentation may be that the she wants to stigmatise the USA – a popular political pastime – for not implementing the Kyoto protocol, one of the most poorly thought out considerations in my lifetime, perhaps second only to belief in the Welfare State.

Global warming is a fact but its cause is not clear and prevention is not as simple a matter as some make out. Observing the changing coast line in the last one thousand years, let alone over the various ice-ages or geological time since the break up of the super-continent Pangaea and the formation of tectonic plates, shows us that Patricia Hewitt, for all her ministerial status and resources, may need a few lessons from Bjorn Lomborg on the difference between fact and conjecture.

I want to enter into a contract to rent a property and then buy it at the end of six years. This suits me because I don’t have to raise the deposit right now and it suits the vendors for tax reasons because they are approaching pensionable age. The interesting point is whether we should agree a purchase price in advance or agree to an independent market valuation in due course. It’s a standard South Kensington dinner party game, guessing what our property will be worth in six years time, or whenever, but I am not playing games. Retrospectively I might wish that I had bought two other properties five years ago. They have streaked up in value since I had the option – but I would have gone bust if I had taken that opportunity because I could not have serviced the mortgage.

I felt an immense sense of relief today when I handed over the management of a particular issue to one of my professional advisors. Over the years I have learned to respect him and trust his judgement. My problem is so far unchanged – but it is not mine alone any more.

As a counsellor I do not generally give advice. I talk in general principles and let people work out for themselves whether these would be relevant to them. After all, I know only a fraction of my wife’s experiences and perceptions and even then my knowledge is really only a guess. As far as my patients are concerned, my assessment of my own insights into their lives is in line with a catchphrase of Manuel in Fawlty Towers: I know nothing.

Even so, I did give a specific response today, not so much in sympathy for my questioner but out of sadness for his partner, whom I have never met. My patient told me that he had found it too worrying, despite all my reassurances, to continue in a relationship with a girl who is HIV positive. He wanted to know how to tell her that he intends to end the relationship. I consider that, if he doesn’t know that instinctively for himself, he is not likely to discover it by mentally thrashing around through various alternatives. I suggested that he should ignore her HIV status and say that the relationship wasn’t working out for him: stick to that and say nothing more. God knows the girl has enough trouble without it being compounded by his insensitivity.

Among others, I was in a meeting this evening with two single women, one of whom had fallen out with her lover, as she had with her employer, and now paraded a State-funded baby for all to admire. The other, with no prospective husband/father, is now heavily pregnant and looking forward to similar State-subsidised motherhood.

In the interest of the quality of the sexes, perhaps one day babies will be created entirely in extra-uterine incubators so that women can be spared the ‘burden’ of pregnancy and the infants can be shared out equally between single men and single women. Marriage is already optional. Why should old fashioned concepts of parenting, let alone gender stereotypes, persist? Anyway, whatever the ethics, the State will doubtless provide on demand. Or have I got that wrong? Are ethical, social and financial principles malleable only for women?

The Pope, in his recent pronouncement, believes that sex and love should go together. Fifty percent of the Liberal Democrat leadership contenders would appear to disagree. For once I’m with the Pope. Actually, I’m with almost anyone who isn’t a Liberal Democrat. Their big-government ideas appeal to me even less than promiscuity. What has Liberalism come to?

Today I met the man whose job it is to set up stores for Apple, the computer company. My valuable and versatile Apple Mac has remained unopened by my bed had for the whole of this year so far. Its operation remains a mystery. Now I have no excuse. Apple have opened a store in Regent Street, just down from Oxford Circus. Evidently, in addition to selling hardware and software and all sorts of accessories they also lay on free training. I have no further excuse for my ignorance and indolence, but how long shall I need – a day, a week, a month, a year? I can already hear my excuses building up inside my head. I’m very reluctant to join the twentieth, let alone twenty first century.

We own our cottage and we own our dog Phoebe. She believes that she owns the cottage (and she therefore lets us know when the cats come in) and also owns the lane (and she lets us know if anyone walks or drives down it). Most of our neighbours are farmers. They start early. We arrive late. That contradiction doesn’t work very well for us when Phoebe performs her proper function as a burglar alarm.

We have a hostess trolley in which to keep food warm before it is served at a supper party. Normally I use it as a filing cabinet so that the dining table does not overflow with my books and papers and architects drawings and financial projections and articles and heaven-know-what, including dictation tapes of work in progress. One such contained a couple of chapters of a book on methadone maintenance and harm minimisation, the non-treatment for heroin addiction. On the top of the hostess is a table lamp and they share a double socket behind it. This evening I cleared out my papers because my real life hostess wants to use the trolley for its original purpose. At some time someone must have turned on both switches at the same time. The books were well cooked, which didn’t matter other than gluing the plastic dust sheets to each other, but the tape had melted into a shape reminiscent of a Dali watch. The tape was three years old and it deserved that fate: it was a rotten book on a rotten subject.