There’s nothing like being personally connected to loop one into the progress of a natural disaster. I have very close friends who live between Tewkesbury and Evesham, in the epicentre of the floods devastating central England. I was going up there for the weekend, but when I received a succinct email: “We are an island”, my determination to go in contrast to the waters evaporated. I stayed in London, watching politicians on the rolling news up to their mouths in raw sewage, which they vainly attempt to stem with sandbags full of rhetoric. David Cameron in Witney, Oxfordshire, the worst-affected part of his constituency, seized the day to pour his tepid scorn on Government preparedness.

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In Moulin Rouge, John Huston’s 1952 biopic of the French painter and absinthe-bucket Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, José Ferrer played the lead — entirely on his knees. The action begins in a Parisian bar, Toulouse-Lautrec sits supping his deathly green mouthwash — the barman polishes the glasses. Then the painter clambers down off his stool. Suddenly we’re in his point of view, looking up at the great zinc-topped escarpment of the counter the barman leans over, peers down at us, and speaks the first line of the movie: “So long, Toulouse!”

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I write this to the jaunty strains of the West Jesmond Rhythm Kings’ platter Jubilee Stomp, courtesy of their trumpeter and vocalist, Mike Durham, who also happens to have been the highest bidder for my services in this year’s Independent Charity Auction. Or rather, his wife Patti snaffled me up as a present for Mike, who, as well as being a jazz musician and a sesquipedalian, manages to be a deep topographer of considerable intensity.

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This Saturday’s Guardian newspaper family section (July 14) will have a piece written by Will and his son Lex where they exchange passions: Will takes Lex walking on the Isle of Jura, while Lex takes Will along to the West Indies v England Twenty20 cricket at the Oval.

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The time I gave up smoking, I lasted just short of a year, so in some ways I’m not the best qualified person to write about it. Added to that, my love affair with La Divina Nicotina is intense, protracted and tempestuous. I smoke cigarettes, I smoke cigars, a few years ago — after the sabbatical — I even took to puffing on pipes, and rapidly acquired a whole mantelpiece full of them, together with scores of obscure pipe tobaccos with names like Velvan Plug.

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Last year I walked from where I live now, to where I was born, to where I grew up, to where I was at school, to where I was at University: Stockwell — Charing Cross — the Hampstead Garden Suburb — Finchley — Oxford. Thus linking my life together with a physical chord, the music of my swishing thighs.

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