FIRST off - I didn't turn down an award in the New Year's Honours. Second off - if I had refused an award, I wouldn't be telling you. Only my wife would know. Not even our three kids would be let in on the secret.

Before you write in, let me say I don't expect my "secrecy" resolve to be put to the test. Nor do I remotely consider that it deserves to be. But it strikes me that to let it be known you've been offered an honour but rejected it betrays a desire to have it both ways.

The most prominent recent refusenik, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, might have a sound point about the colonial overtones of awards still nominally linked to the British Empire. But he contributes to the system by using his rejection of an OBE as a weapon with which to attack it. The purity of his disgust is compromised even by acknowledging the offer of an award.

But of course the entire honours system is a farce. In high-profile areas like sport and the the arts, who gets awards is dictated at least partly by a need to keep numbers broadly in balance. In the voluntary sector, it is certain that for every worthy person honoured there are scores overlooked. Over our breakfast tables, each of us identifies awards that we find risible or incomprehensible.

My solution would be to confine honours to acts of bravery and courage. It is these that unite us all in feeling humble before great, and very often selfless, triumphs of the human spirit. Being the best Hamlet of your generation, or a cheerful milkman, is simply not enough.

A correspondent to Hear All Sides referred to a German plane crash on Eston Hills in 1941. At the end of the war, from the age of seven, I walked daily to and from my home on the hills, up and down the then lonely lane where one of the German airmen had landed in a tree - a wych-elm I think. The creaking of a branch that had been partially snapped by his fall terrified me. When passing in darkness I always walked in the middle of the road. And to keep my spirits up I took to whistling, a habit that is with me yet.

Vaguely-related matter. The History of Flight table published as part of the centenary of powered flight had a big gap backwards from the Wright Brothers' success to 1804, when Sir George Cayley, of Brompton, near Scarborough, flew the first successful model glider.

In 1853 Cayley achieved the first man-carrying flight with a full-size glider in which his coachman flew across the narrow Brompton Dale. Had an engine been available, Cayley would have beaten the Wright Brothers to powered flight by half a century. The spoked wheel, incidentally, was Cayley's invention to provide a light undercarriage for his glider.

'Crocodile baby stunt outcry" - headline on the story of the father who "did a Jacko" at an Australian zoo. Shame there's wasn't an outcry over the shooting, also in Australia, of the wild crocodile which, behaving as wild crocodiles will, devoured a man foolish enough to swim in the river that was the croc's home.