That are you doing to "offset your carbon footprint"? More to the point, do you know what your carbon footprint is and what you need to do if you decide to offset it? There's lots of talk about it but very little explanation of what it means.

Well, on your behalf as well as my own, I've been looking into it. Your carbon footprint is the amount of carbon you produce - when you drive your car, fly off to foreign parts, turn up your central heating, buy a packet of disposable nappies for your infant, leave the "stand-by" light on your VCR, buy over-packaged products or do any of the other many things that use energy and directly or indirectly produce the gases which we are told interminably are threatening the future of the planet.

However, you can "offset" some of the pollution you cause by paying money to a company which will invest it for you in a "green" scheme, such as forestry or windfarms - after first deducting its commission, of course.

Sounds a brilliant idea for those who have the spare money to do that sort of thing. You can carry on regardless, driving your children to and from their school a quarter of a mile away in your gas-guzzling 4x4, jetting off to the Maldives or somewhere equally exotic a couple of times a year, running all your electrical appliances at once if you want and having your gas central heating turned up full.

All you need to do is send off a bundle of cash and your conscience can be clear. A few trees will be planted in exchange for the pounds of carbon spewed into the atmosphere. Isn't it just typical of today's world: one law for the rich, another for the rest of us who aren't in a position to buy ourselves off?

But it rather misses the point, which is not to pollute in the first place rather than carry on polluting regardless and hope that by spending some cash we can counter some of the effects of our actions.

I suspect that offsetting carbon footprints will be seen by posterity as a gimmick that made hardly any difference except to the fortunes of those who set themselves up as brokers. If we're really serious about saving the planet there's only one way to do it and that's by changing our lifestyle, denying ourselves some of those things we have previously taken for granted, and seriously cutting down on the amount of carbon we're responsible for in one way or another.

And on top of that, we could do worse than plant a few trees.

Every parent's nightmare

Every parent and grandparent will have spent this week sharing to some extent the ordeal of Gerry and Kate McCann as the search has gone on in Portugal for their snatched daughter Madeleine. The disappearance of a precious child in such circumstances is the stuff of all our nightmares.

However, none of us can fully appreciate what they must be feeling.

The last thing they need on top of their fears, wild imaginings and feelings of guilt is mutterings of disapproval for leaving their children alone in their holiday chalet while they dined nearby, popping back regularly to check up on them.

They believed they were in a safe environment. The chalet was locked. They only did more or less what many of us have done in the past, taking advantage of the baby listening service' offered by hotels to leave the children asleep in the room and spend the evening downstairs in the restaurant or bar, going up every now and then to check them out.

We never stopped to think about the credentials of those entrusted with doing the listening, or of others in the hotel who would have known that there were children being left unattended for periods at a time during the evening.

It's no more difficult for someone evil to break into a hotel room than it is into a chalet and spirit a child away. Plenty of people will no doubt now be bearing that in mind and taking much greater care.

That, though, will be no consolation to Madeleine's family. They need all our sympathy, support and love, not our censure.

Challenger not fit for purpose

I'm rather relieved that John Reid has decided not to challenge Gordon Brown for the top job. He just might have managed to bluster and scaremonger his way into it, and where would we have been then? In an even worse mess than under Gordon, I reckon.

Would we have wanted to be led by a man who has also decided, a year on, that he doesn't want to be Home Secretary after all, after pushing through controversial reforms which have seen the Home Office split in two and sailing into uncharted territory? This is a man who declared his department "not fit for purpose". He's abandoned it before it's been even remotely shaped up.

Now whoever replaces him as Home Secretary will have to take the flak for what could well turn out to be another ill-thought-out, hastily-pushed-through, half-baked, radical measure that goes all wrong and leaves British justice in an even bigger mess than it's been in recently.

It, plus Iraq, plus the disastrous further move towards the break-up of Great Britain following the rise of Scottish nationalism revealed in last week's election are all adding up to a depressing "legacy" package for the Blair years that the truce in Northern Ireland - welcome though it is - doesn't quite cancel out.