Would you rather have a Trump?

FARMING today (Radio 4) offered this definition. If you're a bee keeper you keep bees. If you're a bee farmer, the bees keep you.

WE passed Sandringham on the way to our holiday in Norfolk. If I had a forelock I might have tugged it. Tomorrow sees the Queen become our longest-serving monarch and, although I am not the world's greatest monarchist, I will raise a glass to her. Just look across the Atlantic and consider the republican alternative. Having a monarchy which automatically provides your head of state means you never have to choose between Donald Trump and Kanye West.

MY holiday reading is Norman Maclean's elegant and unbearably poignant yarn, A River Runs Through It. It is a tale of youthful passion, loss and grief, set against a background of fly fishing in Montana. Every chapter has magical descriptions of shadows on water, trout rising and the wobbling sparkle of a greased fly line landing feather-light on the dimpled pools. Only in the last couple of pages do we hear of the murder of the writer's beloved younger brother and the silent anguish of a gentle, God-fearing family. The film, starring Brad Pitt, is wonderful but the book, as is so often the case, is better.

IT'S not an altogether gloomy read. I loved Maclean's explanatory note: "You will have to realise that in Montana drinking beer does not count as drinking."

NORMAN Maclean is an inspiration to all of us who keep meaning to write The Great Novel but never get beyond the first page. Maclean didn't start A River Runs Through It until after he was 70. Bags of time left, eh?

THE Norfolk village of Snettisham is small but its church is vast, like a cathedral unexpectedly emerging from placid meadows with a view to the sea. Inside it's a bit dog-eared and dusty but it exudes friendship. There is free tea and coffee provided for visitors and a loo tucked away in one corner. Adapting mediaeval churches for modern bladders can produce some awkward results. You can't actually approach this WC without standing on a memorial stone to a parishioner who died in 1806. Some may be horrified but I take the view that you're a long time dead and you may as well spend eternity supporting your fellow man.

MEANWHILE, back in the real world, a BBC radio reporter described the crowd of migrants crossing Europe as: "Women, children and at least one man in a wheelchair." She created the image of a crowd mostly made up of mothers and kids. Then you turn on the TV news and see the majority of the migrants are young, unaccompanied men. And while they are generally described as "desperate," some of these lads, who have paid a fortune to people-smugglers, look fit, feisty, well-fed, determined and disobedient, and a few of them seem to have a massive sense of entitlement about what Europe owes them. We already have quite enough bolshie young men like that without importing more. David Cameron's plan to bring family groups and orphaned children from refugee camps in the Middle East should at least ensure those in genuine need get priority over the rich young queue-jumpers.

THINGS to do on a rainy day. This comes from the collection of cheese-related jokes in the kiddies' corner at Bircham Windmill near Hunstanton: "How should you approach an angry Welsh cheese? Caerphilly."