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Underpants have occupied me this week. One by one, like Napoleon’s exhausted soldiers on the retreat from Moscow, mine have been falling by the wayside. A gusset torn asunder here, frayed elastic there, holes everywhere. The resulting search for serviceable nethertrouserings has been very interesting.

Dylan read My Back Pages; Proust rambled on and on about times lost; Hardy returned to the scenes of his lost love; I have been through my underpants drawer. It has been a poignant exercise.

Here, a manly jockstrap from the days when my young years made sport playable. There, the last, gallant survivor of an expensive set of CKs or similar, bought when the sap was rising and dreams could still be dreamed – are those toothmarks on the waistband?

Here, a very small – so small they make me wince to look at them – pair of briefs, with the logo ‘Urban Spirit’. What can have possessed me? I have never had need of small briefs, nor have I ever possessed anything remotely like an urban spirit.

There are silken reminders of the days of my wealth and fortune; there are frayed cheap supermarket jockeys, stitched with the sweat of Indonesian toddlers and bought when every principle I ever possessed was sacrificed on the altar of poverty created by the advent of children. There are Sloggis, for God’s sake. I must have thought I was David Beckham.

And look! There, the last of a set of three boxer shorts, which I have never liked, but which were bought on the advice of dear Captain Kay.

The Captain, as you all know, is wise in the ways of the Coconut Eating Crab, the malevolent deity that rules our destinies, driven by a desire for revenge on the fates that decreed its earthly cousins should be scuttling crabs that eat coconuts. You have to admit, it’s a pretty lousy trick.

A lifetime’s study of the Crab has brought a Zen-like calm to the Captain, who knows that our fretful ways will avail us nothing: the Crab gets us all, all the time, and once we live in acceptance of this fact at the heart of existence, we learn tolerance, acceptance and contentment. For example, at least we do not have to eat coconuts.

And what does this have to do with my underpants?

“No detail,” said the learned Captain, sparking up a fresh rollie and pouring a glass of malt whisky, “no detail evades the Crab. Thus it is that as a gentleman grows old, so gravity intrudes, even as it does with the poor female of the species. A gentleman’s accoutrements, the undercarriage of fond memory, matures in danglage as the years advance and you, my son, will be well advised to have capacious boxer shorts standing by.”

And so I bought some. Danglage has not yet increased, but I shall keep them against the day, for the Captain has long been my guru in all matters. He tells me that now, in his 80s, when he swings his legs over the side of the bed in the morning, his testicles hit the carpet before his feet. He uses a pair of warmed dessert spoons to insert them in his underwear.

Underpants as a reminder of our fragile mortality; underpants to mark the progress of the years; underpants to tell the story of my life.

Language, please

Management and I have frequent disagreements over the frankness of my language.

Last week, in the car on the way to school, my oldest, who is nine, heard a report on that cretinous little tick Michael Gove’s idea that we should have longer school days.

“Daddy, who is Michael Gove?”, he asked.

I told him, careful not to swear, mindful of Management’s decrees on the subject.

“Oh,” said Jamie. “Well, what an arsehole.”

I was very proud.

I think what irritated me most about Gove’s witless pronouncements was the suggestion that state schools should strive harder to emulate private schools. It was the innate – and unsurprising – assumption that private schools are better than state schools that angered me.

Oh yes? Well, matey, it’s private schools that have produced our present government, that have produced the majority of expenses-claiming MPs and bonus-spending bankers and the whole world-bankrupting lot of you. It is the private school that has for centuries produced our ruling classes, white, male, privileged and leading us all from boom to bust, over the top, to hell in a handcart.

Private schools teach the lessons that have led their old boys – always old boys – to make the decisions that have served us so ill: that money gives you isolation from the world’s problems, that you don’t need to interact with people who have no money, that if you have a problem money will solve it, that you have a right to wealth and privilege that cannot be shared by others.

Private schools are where rich children go to enjoy an education utterly removed from the realities of life beyond the gilded gates. So how do their pupils learn about the lives the common people lead? They don’t. Pupils learn that so long as they preserve their money, they don’t have to. Pupils learn that it’s OK to have luxury and privilege even though they have done nothing to earn it. Pupils learn that they can pass that on to their children, who will have done nothing to earn it.

How are they prepared to cope with the immense difficulties of the real world? They’re not. Lots of them are single sex schools, for the Crab’s sake – single sex schools in the 21^st century, schools that in their very existence breathe the message that men and women are not to be treated the same, are not equal.

On the other hand, it is people from far beyond the playing fields of Eton who have won the rights on which we all depend – health care, free education, holidays, holiday pay, sick pay, care for the elderly.

Well. Enough. I was going to try to avoid politics this week. I shall leave this now by inviting you to consider what may inhabit Michael Gove’s underpants drawer.

Apres that, le deluge

It has been interesting to hear the politicians writhing in discomfort as southern England slowly slips under muddy water.

The Conservatives, of course, blame the Environment Agency rather than the cuts they have enforced on local government and the jobs that have been lost in the public sector.

But you don’t need to have had a private education to know how poorly our roads, drains and rivers are maintained these days.

My grandad was a parish lengthsman, his beat one small part of South Devon, his full-time, properly-paid job to keep the drains clear, the verges neat, the roads surfaced. We had none of the pools of floodwater that so regularly appear on our patch after a brief shower. That job, of course, no longer exists.

It is not rocket or climate science to see that if you do not maintain rivers and roads, drains and culverts, bad things will come.

It is not rocket or climate science to see that if you increase the amount of water that runs off the hills by cutting down trees and tarmacing over acres of fields, bad things will come.

It is not rocket or climate science to know that Environment Agency chair Lord Smith is right when he says his staff know a hundred times more about flood control than the politicians who are queuing up to criticise them.

And yet everybody still insists the answer to our economic woes is to pave over more of paradise, add more sewers, create more tarmac slipways for rainwater to funnel onto the flood plains. And everybody still insists politicians should tell experts what to do.

Do you know, there are days when I have a lot of time for those bonkers Americans who say there’s no such thing as evolution, for man certainly doesn’t seem to learn.

It was interesting to see, on the news last night, the immediate deployment of troops in the areas by the Thames now threatened by flooding. As I recall, it took four weeks for a soldier to be sighted in Somerset, and then they were sent away again.

It’s also very interesting to see the growing number of people on Twitter pointing out that this crisis, and the damage it has caused to our knackered transport system, points up the lunacy of spending tens of billions on the ludicrous HS2 rail plan. How is it right to get people to Birmingham and Manchester a few minutes faster, while the rest of us are expected to depend on the few rusty, flooded rivets left to us by Beeching?