THREE years ago, this column became almost a single-issue column. Rarely a week passed without an item, often the main piece, on the appalling foot-and-mouth crisis.

My view was simple. The large-scale destruction of animals, the vast majority in good health, was incompatible with civilised values - and was unnecessary anyway, since the animals could be vaccinated against the disease. A handful of others took this view. They included one of two eminent animal-disease researchers, whose scientific knowledge buttressed my instinctive revulsion at the grotesque slaughter.

But the protests of the lonely few were drowned out by the loud insistence from all official quarters, headed by the Government and the NFU, that there really was no alternative to mass extermination. Among the battery of arguments as to why vaccination wouldn't work or couldn't be applied probably only one held any truth - that the public wouldn't buy the products of vaccinated animals. And the reason for that was the irrational fears raised at the start of the outbreak.

Anyway, water under the bridge. Except that at the end of this month, an EU directive will require every EU government "to prepare all arrangements necessary for emergency vaccination". Hey presto - our Government now believes that vaccination is "ideally suited" to dealing with epidemics, and would be "effective" in almost every conceivable situation.

So all those hideous funeral pyres, all the distress to animals, farmers, and indeed to those of us who found the scenes utterly beyond the pale, could have been avoided. And most of the £4bn or so cost of the outbreak could have been devoted to more useful purposes. Perhaps boosting the old age pension (some hope, eh?).

But other lessons of foot-and-mouth have not been learned. Proved to be one of the country's finest assets, the footpath network is still neglected, even despite mounting concern about the nation's lack of fitness. Nor is the incalculable value of an unspoilt countryside yet recognised. Indeed, while the excesses of subsidised farming might now be reined back, the countryside is being wrecked by pylons, industrial estates, wind-farms, and scattered tat. And that's before John Prescott releases about 23,000 new homes a year on Britain's remaining green fields.

Once gone, they will never be recovered. Unlike foot-and-mouth, this tragedy is terminal.

POTTERING in my garden during England's Euro 2004 game with Switzerland, I heard my neighbour in his garden. "Hey Brian," I called through the thick hedge, "you not a footie fan?" "Nah," came the reply. "Does nothing for me."

Isn't that amazing: the only two male non-footie fans in England live next door to each other in a village in North Yorkshire.

AND now - very tangentially - Wimbledon. One of our two cats is named Lottie - to which I add Dod, after Wimbledon's youngest (15-year-old) champion (1887).

She likes to go for a walk, during which I call out her name. One day a passer-by asked: "What's that you call your cat?" "Lottie Dod," I said. He paused a second: "Wasn't she a tennis player?" "Right on," I replied. About the same time, our youngest grand-daughter, aged four, asked: "Grandad, why do you call Lottie 'dog'?" Miss Dod, incidentally, won Wimbledon five times and, with a hemline nine inches from the ground, was the first player to expose more than her ankles.