More government? Not in our name.

HOW car insurance works. A friend has just received a renewal letter from his insurer telling him his policy would be automatically renewed at a premium of £178.10. He went to the same insurers' website where he found identical cover for just £152.81. So he phoned the company and was instantly offered yet another price of £140.67. Moral: never pay the asking price. Seemples.

HANG on one moment. Who says England wants devolution? The Scots may clamour for home rule but the English are deeply suspicious of yet more layers of government with all the self-serving bureaucracy, corruption, inefficiency and expenses-fiddling politicians that entails. We have quite enough politicians, thanks. Ten years ago the North East of England was offered its own regional assembly by John Prescott and crushingly rejected it in a referendum. Electing similar assemblies all over England would be like electing 50 police commissioners in every region – and we know how popular that is.

MEANWHILE, Labour faces an uphill task. How do you get people to like Ed Miliband when we have yet to be convinced that Ed Miliband likes people?

OPERATION Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath? (BBC2) reminded me of that stunning day five years ago when the Staffordshire Hoard was first put on show. I found myself in a huddle of Birmingham blokes at the city museum, hunched over the display cases of Anglo-Saxon artefacts. They were craftsmen and metal workers. They knew exactly how much skill and time had gone into these impossibly intricate items, and they were utterly gobsmacked.

I RECALLED those Brummies' admiring words during Operation Stonehenge which showed an ancient dagger hilt once decorated with 140,000 tiny gold studs. In a brilliant move, the programme makers invited Willard Wigan to examine a single stud. Wigan is one of the wonders of our age, a self-taught sculptor who works almost at molecular level. If you want a humming bird carved inside the eye of a needle, Wigan's your man. The artist used a microscope to examine the prehistoric stud. At the limits of his considerable skills, Wigan was just about able to create a single stud, twisting gold no thicker than a human hair. He reckoned, such was the optical precision demanded, that these studs must have been made by children. God knows how long each one took to make, and yet 140,000 of them were used to decorate a single knife. It was a staggering insight into the Britain of 4,000 years ago. We assume our ancient ancestors were club-wielding morons. In fact, they could conceive and create magical masterpieces way beyond our ken.

WILLARD Wigan MBE grew up in Wednesfield and began making tiny sculptures when he was five. As he puts it: "I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live." You can admire his work here.

THE Stonehenge documentary was narrated by Samuel West, son of Timothy West and Prunella ScaleS. He is a fine actor. I interviewed him years ago at Stratford when he was a young Henry IV. It was a dream role but West admitted he also got a lot of satisfaction from narrating documentaries, simply because he learned so much. Fresh from narrating a scientific film, he asked: "Anything you want to know about the weather systems on Mars?"

HOW electricity works. An email arrived from E.ON on Saturday asking me for a meter reading. I took it, emailed the figures and paid the bill online. About an hour later a little E.ON van came into the yard, paused briefly and then drove off. The driver had left a card asking for my meter reading. Odd.