What a strange thing time is. How inconsistently it passes. A year used to go by much more slowly than it does now – and, presumably, to my teenage daughter it still does. Her 2015 has been a lot longer than mine.

I was born into a post-war world. A world full of so-called comics that weren’t – and weren’t meant to be – funny. Comics with titles like Victor and Valiant, in which Our Boys were heroic Tommies and Germans were Fritz (untrustworthy but a bit pathetic) or The Hun (nastier, yet somehow oddly glamorous in their villainy).

On these pages you were supposed to understand, and take seriously, such warnings as: “Look out! Three Fokkers coming out of the sun!” Germans worse silly helmets and tended to say “Aaaaarrgh!” a lot while falling off buildings. They bore not the least resemblance to the real-life young Germans who occasionally came to stay, who were rather nice and rather serious.

But then, The War – when the Hun was Bad and Britishers were Good, and Frenchie was Good but Weak – was ancient history. It belonged to the mythical time of my parents’ memories (which weren’t much like the comic-book version). It belonged to that Time Before I Was Born.

Which is to say it was as impossibly prehistoric as the King’s Cross fire is to my daughter. Or the Hungerford massacre. The opening of the Docklands Light Railway. The first showing of The Simpsons, or Star Trek’s Next Generation. The year, that is, of the Great Hurricane.

See what I mean? If you’re my age, those are all recent events. They all took place in colour, while the major events of my childhood happened in black-and-white.

When I was born, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as long ago as the invasion of Iraq is today. And we’re still awaiting Lord Chilcot’s report into how that began.

My parents bought the house I was born in from an old couple who remembered the man who built it. Literally built it, with his own hands, after coming home from the war. The Napoleonic War, that is, which ended at Waterloo in 1815. History is made of real lives – and how oddly it weaves around them.

The worldwide web is generally reckoned to have begun around my 34th birthday. It was two or three years before I heard of it, about the time the first search engine was launched. By the time I was 41 I was writing a weekly column about the wonderful things you could find online. If I was still writing it, this week’s piece would be about a simple but brilliant site called You’re Getting Old! (www.you.regettingold.com). Simple, that is, in concept and appearance, but clever as all heck behind the scenes.

It works like this. Tell it the date of your birth and it will regale you with all sorts of interesting facts about your life. Like how many days old you are, how many breaths (roughly) you’ve taken, how many times (roughly) your heart has beaten, how many times the moon has orbited the Earth since you were born.

More entertainingly, if sometimes a little bafflingly, it will give you the names of two celebrities whose combined ages, in days, add up to yours. Today I’m as old as footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and singer Adele combined.

It will tell you approximately how many people out of 100,000 born on the same day as you are still alive. In my case, 87,283. My mother, who is as old as the actresses Kylie Minogue and Lucy Liu put together, has outlived all but 6,634 of her 100,000 contemporaries.

And then there’s that thing about time before and time after. I remember the shock I felt the day I realised that Led Zeppelin’s fourth album was older history than the end of World War II had been when it was released. And that day was 18 years ago. Blimey. How time, etc.

Now I learn, from You’re Getting Old!, that the start of the Second Boer War was nearer my birth date than today. (In my mother’s case, that statistic is given to the Battle of Navarino, the last major battle fought entirely between sailing ships. My daughter gets the law making seatbelts compulsory for drivers.)

Among other things I learn is that I was a month old when Sputnik became the first man-made satellite in space, six months when CND was founded, and 11 (years) when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. (Actually, I already knew that last one. I remember it.)

I was 40 when Princess Diana died (I remember that too). The same age Mum was when the Berlin Wall went up. I wonder what will go down in history when my daughter’s 40.

And I wonder how many people there will be in the world then. When my mother was born there were fewer than two billion. When I came along it was up to 2.9billion. It’s now 7.34billion… and clicking up faster than your heartbeat as you watch.
 
 
 
A question of power
 
 
1: Do the sums actually add up, or was last week’s big announcement just a political stunt aimed at voters here and non-voters in China?

2: How can it be right to offer a foreign country a multi-billion-pound guarantee to build nuclear power stations at the same time as axing the feed-in tariff supporting the infant solar industry?

3: How much progress could be made on genuine renewables such as wind, sun, wave and tidal power – and its storage – with the £24billion Hinkley Point is expected to cost?

Many more questions apply, but let’s start with those three. Anyone with an even vaguely plausible answer to any of them should send it on a postcard to the Department of Energy and Climate Change at 3 Whitehall Place, London.

It’s a long time since the Black Death, which may or may not have been spread around the world in the 14th century by travelling rats. It’s a while, too, since the grain harvest and the miller’s flour bins were seriously under threat from marauding rodents. Yet the mere mention of rats is likely to elicit a shudder from most people.

It’s not something you’re born with. Like hatred of people whose skin is a different hue, or disrespect for those of a different gender or sexuality, fear of rats has to be learned.

But it goes deep. The very word “rat” is used to mean a traitor. The rat’s image is used to depict slyness, evil, insidious threat. Horror stories are written about them.

Perhaps it’s simply because the brown rat, rattus norvegicus, is the most widespread mammal in the world after humans. Which, I suppose, makes it a competitor, of a sort. What’s more, rats are so well adapted to making a living scavenging on humans’ waste that they tend to go where we go. Their evolution has been inseparable from our own.

I was watching a rat the other day. Having climbed easily up the metal pole, it was balancing on the curved arm of a bird-feeder, trying to reach the seed in one of the hanging containers. First it tried stretching out with its little pink forepaws to reach one. Having just failed, it then shifted position, using its tail for balance, and tried to reach out for the other. No go. But it had set the feeder swinging slightly, so that after shinning back down the pole it was rewarded with a mouthful or two of fallen seed.

Good for you, ratty, I thought. A bit of success for intelligence and dexterity. A lovely thing to see. Setting received prejudice aside, this bright-eyed, sleek-furred, healthy rat was delightful.

Maybe it’s time the rat was re-branded. OK, you wouldn’t welcome one in your house. Then again, I wouldn’t want a wild bird in the house, either, but I love seeing them in the garden.

The rat’s success in living around humans makes you wonder how it would fare in a post-human world. It also makes it – along with the cat, some birds and latterly the fox – an unusual sort of creature.

I’ve often wondered how wildlife would fare if we weren’t around. And there’s a great – though unintentional – experiment that provides a convincing answer.

When the nuclear power station at Chernobyl in Ukraine blew up in April 1986 it was a disaster on a grand scale. For humans. For the wild things it was a blessing in disguise.

Not the accident itself, which exposed them to the same radioactive contamination peril that caused 100,000 people to be permanently evacuated from an exclusion zone of 1,600 square miles. But the evacuation was good news for the animals.

A study published in the journal Current Biology reveals the exclusion zone to be teeming with wild boar, deer of several species, wolves, bears, lynx – and all the smaller animals and birds the predators need to survive on. It’s a striking success for re-wilding.

But as Professor Jim Smith of Portsmouth University, leader of the study team, says: “This doesn’t mean radiation is good for wildlife. Just that the effects of human habitation – hunting, farming, forestry – are a lot worse.”

Remember Hans Blix? He’s the former Swedish Foreign Minister who became head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He was also the chief expert sent into Iraq by the United Nations in 2002 to determine whether Saddam Hussein had any weapons of mass destruction at his disposal.

If George W Bush and his war-mongering cronies, including Tony Blair, had listened to Blix, they would not have invaded Iraq. Arguably – actually I believe it’s beyond argument – there would be no ISIS threat today. And plausibly no desperate millions sparking crisis in Europe by fleeing homes engulfed in the Middle East holocaust.

But they didn’t listen. And people right across the British political spectrum are not listening to Blix now.
Well, almost right across the spectrum. Honourable exceptions include the Green and Scottish National parties and Jeremy Corbyn.

Few people alive have the knowledge and experience of nuclear weaponry that Hans Blix has. So we should be interested, at least, in what he thinks of the impending decision to commit many billions of pounds to replacing Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons system.

From a peace and security perspective, Blix told the Hay Festival in 2013, it is “a completely pointless exercise”.

Pointless because it totally fails to address the real threats we face in today’s world.

What use could Trident conceivably be against ISIS? What deterrent function could it possibly serve against Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or any terrorist threat to anyone anywhere?

How exactly did it help the United States on 9/11 to be one of the world’s five countries possessed of a supposedly legitimate nuclear arsenal? How did it help the UK on 7/7?

Whatever some of his shadow cabinet colleagues think, Corbyn’s position on nuclear weapons is clear, consistent, logical – and right.

If nobody is prepared to push a button with the power to wipe out life on earth, what is the point of having that button?

And if anyone IS prepared to push it… having it is worse than useless. A lot worse.

However many jobs in Barrow-in-Furness depend on building the submarines. And however many hospitals, schools, libraries, free university places, social services jobs and welfare benefits we’ve given up to pay for them.

Many leading members of the armed forces recognise the truth of this. They’d rather some of the Trident billions were spent on personnel and equipment that might actually be used.

Sadly the people who will shortly rubberstamp the decision – Her Majesty’s Government – seem incapable of seeing it.

You might think the Chancellor of the Exchequer had more important things to fill his time with, but George Osborne says he wants to make London “the sporting capital of the world”. As if Jose Mourinho’s employment in the metropolis was not already enough to seal that title.

To that end, Osborne has hosted talks at 11 Downing Street with representatives of the New York Jets and Miami Dolphins. The aim being, it seems, to persuade one or other of those “franchises” to relocate from the land where people think football is a game played in helmets, face-masks and shoulder-pads that would have embarrassed a 1980s pop diva.

Never mind the silly “uniforms”, the incomprehensible and fundamentally dull nature of the game, or that this is a sport dogged by scandals involving drugs, brain injuries and domestic violence. The very fact that its clubs are known as franchises should be enough to tell you how un-British it is. I know there is nothing more British than traipsing poodle-like in America’s footsteps, but this, surely, is a step too far.

And look at it from an American viewpoint. Not that of the franchise-owners, but of the fans who keep them rich by shelling out for tickets and burgers at the ball-game. Imagine you’re an ordinary Joe from the Bronx or the Lower East Side. How would you feel  if your team’s “home” games were suddenly shifted from the MetLife Stadium to a foreign city 3,500 miles away?

It’d be like hearing the Canaries were about to flit from Carrow Road to make a new nest on another continent.
Or that cricket had moved its HQ from Lord’s to Dubai. Oh, hang on…

But if Osborne really wants London to reign supreme in world sport, why pick on a game whose very name, American football, tells you it’s the possession/obsession of just one foreign land?

Why – unless his ambition really is to make Britain the 51st United State – attempt to extend the NFL here? That ‘N’ stands for ‘National’ – and it doesn’t mean this nation.

Why not instead establish London as a base for kabbadi, floorball, sumo wrestling… or Gaelic football?
It’d make as much sense. At least until you consider the other meaning of that word “capital”.