Mischa Beitz

There I was on Sunday, flying back from Australia on a Korean airline called Asiana (I'd never heard of it before, and it was marvellous) and Outer Mongolia was slipping away 35,000ft beneath me, and the doll-like air-hostess, with a little bow, asked if I'd close the blind so passengers could watch The Incredible Hulk or stare at an on-screen graphic representation of our flight path - rather than the real thing! Witless fools. If you were flying over Mongolia, why wouldn't you want to look?

This is the story of a dog called Darcy. I met him in the Australian bush, where he was on holiday barking at a piece of barbed wire. Later I found out why. Well, no, not why but how it came about.

What happens when two columnists meet a bull? Though the joke answer eludes me, it would no doubt include the word bulls***. And on Sunday my Australian fellow-columnist, Richard Glover, and I castrated one. Well, not quite. We sat on a steer's neck while its owner - knife, scissors and antiseptic in hand - did the awful deed.

When half of mankind seems lifted by hope, nothing looks meaner than to disparage the dream. But what is this Obama mania? The world did not change for ever on Tuesday. No messiah has come among us. Miracles have not become possible. There is no new dawn. Calm down dear, it's only a US presidential election.

Come with me towards the Equator, first 5,000 miles east, then 5,000 miles west of Africa. We shall visit tiny specks of land: islands notionally our own. This month, the inhabitants of one have voted to re-establish their island council. And last week the former inhabitants of the other lost their battle for a right to return.

There I am on Saturday, standing in a field in Derbyshire, involved (via a Sky News satellite van) in a live discussion with a News of the World columnist about whether politicians are out of touch. I'm making the point that most politicians are not rich.

There are many of ways of not quite apologising, and they all take longer than the real thing. The real thing needs only one word. “Sorry.” Or if you want to spin it out, “I'm sorry.”

On the island of Corfu in August four men met, each of whom may be capable of destroying one or more of the other three, but none of whom can do so without destroying himself. It should follow that from all of them a period of calm is now called for. But don't count on it. The male of the species is a strange beast.

A friend told me about a teacher she knows, who has just asked her class to give a little talk on the subject of “shopping”. When it came to the turn of one small boy, he said: “We were going to go shopping but we didn't because daddy said we couldn't. My daddy works for Lehman Brothers. He doesn't now.”

This autumn the Labour Party has embarked upon a strategic blunder. The strategy is driven by Gordon Brown's personal instinct: an impulse, an idea, so devilishly clever that even Peter Mandelson must be impressed by the cunning. Reader, get a load of this...

When on Monday I saw headlines about the Ecclestone affair, Formula One, and £1 million donations to the Labour Party - and learnt that a freedom of information request has kicked Tony Blair's first big scandal back into the headlines - my mind went back not to Mr Blair but to his successor, Gordon Brown; and to a night eight years ago. I was at the party conferences in 2000 and attending a reception.

Columnists are nervous of looking silly. It was with hesitation that in August 2004, writing on this page after a Times poll had reported vast economic confidence among the public, I suggested that “a darker melody in a minor key is faintly audible beneath the oom-pah-pah of economic optimism: a persistent, puzzled, inquisitive counterpoint.

Peter Mandelson backs winners. If as we learnt (to gasps of incredulity) yesterday, Gordon Brown's old enemy is now to sit at the Prime Minister's side in Cabinet, then some of us will contemplate a choice between only two available conclusions. Either Mr Mandelson now sees Mr Brown as a potential winner or he will in the end betray him.

Birmingham is... and I realise at once that I was never cut out to be a branding whiz-kid because what I really want to say is: “...so much nicer than you think”; and “Birmingham is so much nicer than you think” is not the stuff of which great marketing concepts are made.

A reader who followed this column throughout the Blair years would know that I always thought Tony Blair was a fraud. But I have less often remarked that he usually seemed a rather pleasant person: unvindictive, and often generous about others.

Rarely can a columnist solve a national riddle but this morning I am that lucky man. Here's the riddle. Most of the media corps massed in Manchester on Tuesday, and most Labour delegates, reported seeing Gordon Brown make “the speech of his life”. And most of the rest of Britain reported hearing the same old pap that politicians always spout: totally forgettable.