Clean, friendly and quiet - Michael Portillo's train journeys are nothing like the real deal

THE new series of Michael Portillo's Great Railway Journeys (BBC2) is a heart-warming odyssey on gloriously punctual British trains with spotless carriages that are never more than half-full, staffed by smiling, helpful employees and with not a drunk in sight. This is what television people call "factual" programming.

COME again? You seem to recall the climate scientists telling you global warming would bring hot dry summers and mild, wet winters? And then they changed their minds and said global warming was old hat and the new term was "climate change" which accounts for "extreme climate events"? Well, forget all that. This week's news from researchers at Reading University is that our summers could become cooler, but less rainy. I hesitate to report this because, by the time this column appears, the Reading version may have been overtaken by another global guesstimate. There does seem to be a growing consensus that global warming will, er, make things cooler. But who knows what next week will bring?

FOR writing stuff like the above, I get a regular postbag of hate mail from the climate-change priesthood denouncing me as a "denier," which is such a stupid word that I can't take it seriously. Denier, as any woman knows, is the measure of sheerness of tights and stockings. Just put me down as a climate-change agnostic or clagnostic.

CLAGNOSTIC. A new word is born.

AND now, possibly the most inept and offensive invitation ever extended by a political leader to a minority group. President Putin says gays are welcome at the Sochi Winter Olympics, so long as they "leave the children in peace." Maybe Putin, or Vlad the Unveiler as he is sometimes known, deserves some credit, for at least he managed to make this announcement without taking off his shirt, riding a horse or brandishing a gun. As a quick tour of the internet proves, the more he does the butch, anti-gay thing, the more Putin becomes a bit of a gay icon. I'm sure we all look forward to him being photographed with the Olympic Village People.

A READER moans that my plan to fund TV from income tax would give political parties the power to switch the money tap on and off. He has obviously missed the fact that one of the first deeds of the Tories on coming to power in 2010 was to do just that. They froze the TV licence at £145.50 for six years. Not before time. No matter how much you may worship Auntie Beeb, isn't it just a wee bit galling to see BBC executives getting six-figure payoffs or retiring on pensions pots of up to £4 million?

AS THE anti-sugar debate rages, I should mention what is probably the most influential book ever to arrive at Chateau Rhodes. In 1974 I interviewed a medical officer of health who blamed sugar for suppressing our natural appetite for high-fibre fruit, leading to all sorts of killer conditions. He gave me a book, The Saccharine Disease, by a Royal Navy doctor, T L Cleave, which scared me stiff. As a result of reading that book, from that day to this over the past 40 years, we have never had white sugar in the house. The Saccharine Disease is well worth reading and you don't have to buy it. The entire text is available online here.

SCAM emails pretending to come from BT are so good these days that you can hardly tell them from the real thing. So it was a joy this week to receive a good old-fashioned Third World con, complete with spelling mistake: "We apologies for any inconvenience," it declared. Don't menshun it.