I knew it was a mistake to abandon the horse

Sometimes, the cutting edge is the wrong place to be. Buying a new phone or car and shopping for the latest fashions are all good ways to spend more cash than necessary on stuff that would plunge in price if you just waited a little longer.

It turns out that this might also be true of policy, and it seems to be especially true of environmental policy. My diesel car, when I bought it second-hand a few years ago, was then considered to have splendid green credentials. Now, it turns out, I’ve been churning out illegal levels of pollution the whole time.

New green house-building methods are headed for a similar scandal, if academics at the University of Bath are to be believed. Building regulations demand that all new structures and refurbishments adhere to the latest energy-efficiency standards. Alas, it turns out they don’t actually perform as promised when they’re built. In some cases, retrofitted buildings use more energy than they did before.

Then there are all those little “improvements” that are meant to make life safer and greener. The unbelievable proliferation of speed bumps, for example, has left some streets featuring, like Katie Price, several types of bump put in at different times just a few yards apart. If motion sickness is the policy aim, it is succeeding.

It now transpires, however, that these infernal concrete pimples are not only ruining journeys, but also causing additional air pollution from all the braking and accelerating of cars as they drive over them. To call them “traffic-calming” measures, as councils do, is positively Orwellian.

The next expensive mistake we regret will no doubt be the epidemic of bike lanes taking over otherwise usable roads all across London. I cycle and drive, but these lanes go far beyond the measures needed to improve safety and instead just make it almost unbearable to get in a car. It takes a minimum of one hour to get out of town, half of which is spent churning out extra exhaust fumes as you sit on clogged roads and roundabouts that were flowing perfectly well until now.

Few people would suggest that the government should do nothing about road safety or pollution. But it would surely be better to wait until a new method is proven against all the relevant metrics (all kinds of pollution, for example) and tested in small areas before rolling out a national plague of special tax schemes, flying traffic cones and vehicle booby traps to “green” the country. After years of setting up energy subsidy schemes, for example, most informed people, from top oil executives to academics, think a simple carbon tax would be much cheaper and more effective. The government will otherwise leave us with no

Rewatching an old David Attenborough programme, I was struck by his change in style. Presenting his 1998 series, The Life

of Birds, he is always careful to tell viewers the location of the creature in question and some behavioural facts about it before indulging in the gorgeous nature cinematography we have come to expect from his newer shows, such as Planet Earth. He’s not shy, either: unlike now, the camera didn’t used to cut delicately away when the animals started mating, and in one episode Sir David even sits happily on a rock while discussing a pair of albatrosses consummating their love just below his fulsome hand gestures.

It being the late Nineties and the start of the modern genome revolution, his scripts are full of rather simplistic genetic explanations for everything, as well as reminders that, however loving the animals might appear, they are all cheating on each other rampantly as soon as their mate’s back is turned. It’s a world away from the wanton sentimentality of the current shows and, all in all, it’s hard to escape the feeling that he’s been rather dumbed down over the years.

Still, I suppose if the sweeter, sanitised version makes the wonder of the natural world accessible to a wider audience then perhaps it’s worth it. for humans to “make space for nature” in urban environments. He would no doubt be delighted to know that the roof of my house does exactly that. For the second year running, a pair of pigeons have made their home there and bred a nestful of chicks. (Pigeon chicks, for the record, are not cute, and look like mangy, sickly little things.) And each year, the chicks chirp away for a period before they are pecked to death by enormous, vicious seagulls, who sniff them out before they are big enough to escape. The gulls are rather magnificent, monstrous creatures with sharp beaks and sleek white feathers that shine like chainmail. But although I’m all for doing my bit for nature, the shrunken carcasses the seagulls leave behind rather take the shine off it all. In short, I am looking into pigeon spikes.

Bravo to the 14 black men, all Cambridge students, who posed for a photograph recently to promote the idea that black pupils should not feel they don’t belong at the country’s top universities. This seems much likelier to encourage applications from under-represented groups than loud denunciations of the institutions’ “entrenched racism”. Attracting the applicants is surely more useful than putting them off.