I have only ever given my children one piece of advice. Other parents I know talk solemnly about drugs, sex, pregnancy, work, manners and the importance of good A-level grades. But all I’ve ever told my kids is this: “No matter what, never salute a magpie.”

I don’t know when I got into the habit. Or even why. Maybe it was peer pressure. Maybe it was boredom. But one day, while driving along, I saw a lone magpie hopping about on the grass verge and I saluted it. And that was that. I was hooked. And now, I know for sure that if I fail to salute even a single one of them I will catch cancer within the hour.

This is a huge problem in Milton Keynes where, for reasons known only to Bill Oddie, there are one trillion magpies, all of which hang around by themselves on the endless sponsored roundabouts.

I’d love to know how many people die on the town’s roads each year because the driver was warding off bad luck. I bet it’s millions.

All superstition is mumbo jumbo. I know that. As a result, I will happily walk under a ladder, and I know that if some bees come to my house it will not burn down. I realise too that a black cat will give me just as much asthma as a brown one and that if my left ear feels warm it’s because it’s a sunny day. And yet I have this magpie thing going on. It makes me very angry as there is no methadone. There is no clinic. There is no cure.

Still, it could be worse. I could believe in the power of ley lines, the magic of dance and that I have the ability, through deep concentration, to become a dog or a cow, so that I may experience life from its point of view. In short, I’m awfully glad I’m not a druid.

Last June they were at Stonehenge again to mark the summer solstice. Apparently, 36,500 poor souls got up in the middle of the night and were dragged by their beliefs and their little Citroëns to a field in Wiltshire where they were forced by custom to mark the disappointingly cloudy dawn by chanting and pretending to be King Arthur.

As a saluter of magpies, I have every sympathy with these people and I wish them well. I like having hippies in the world. They bring a richness and a calm, and while they like to wear hoods, they do not beat up old ladies.

And that brings me on to the point of this morning’s blog entry. What in the name of whatever god you hold dear were the police doing using an unmanned spy drone to fly around, taking pictures of these people as they swayed gently in stillness of morning?

Can you imagine the hullabaloo if Dixon of Dock Green used similar tactics during a Catholic Church service?  If the smells and bells were drowned out by the relentless buzz of a spy plane? And let’s be honest, shall we? On the crime-o-meter, Johnny Pope’s merry little gang of bachelors is far more likely to be involved in serious wrongdoing than some dizzy druid bird with flowers in her hair.

I can see why the army might need a spy drone in Afghanistan. But how on earth could the Wiltshire constabulary justify the purchase of such a thing? To catch crop circlists? It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

And why were revellers limited to taking just four cans of beer each onto the site? This means there must have been a meeting at which a busybody in a trouser suit will have said “two” and then a fat man will have said “five”, and much discussion will have taken place, at our expense, before the figure of four was arrived at.

This is even more absurd, come to think of it, than the police spy plane. Certainly I feel sure that early man would not have embarked on the road to civilisation if he had thought that, one day, humankind would arrive at a point where one man has the right to determine how much beer another man may take into a field in the middle of the night.

Then there’s the drugs business. Now, I’m not going to come here and defend the use of narcotics. But we learnt last week that there are now 1m cocaine users in Britain. Statistically then we can be assured that marching powder is being used in the House of Commons, in village halls, in business meetings, at dinner parties and even, perhaps, by pop stars.

So why pick on the druids? Why send sniffer dogs to their annual summer get-together? We know there will have been some dope and we know, because they’d stayed up all night, that some of the Morris men will have got some marching powder up their schnozzers. But if it’s busts they’re after, Plod would probably have had a higher success rate if they’d had a snout about in their own locker rooms.

The fact is that despite the massive, and extremely costly, operation the police made only 37 arrests, mostly for minor public order offences. That’s 37 from a crowd of 36,500. One in a thousand, or thereabouts.

I’m not suggesting that the police ignore large gatherings of people.

Whether it’s a football match or a bunch of Tamils in Parliament Square, the forces of law and order need to be on hand to give people directions to the nearest bus stop and break up whatever fights may occur.

But I simply cannot understand why such large numbers were used to monitor a group of people who, by their very nature, pose about as much threat to the world as a flock of budgerigars. They hum. They make love to one another. They speak in Welsh. And they go home.

Certainly I can assure you that driving along while under the influence of a silly scare story about magpies is much more of a threat to the nation’s peace and tranquillity.

                Lurkers – that’s what they call people on the internet who don’t make any noise. Lurkers don’t register on the internet. Not even a blip do they leave. And there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of them, literally, the silent majority, peering in from the galleries.

          Lurking is considered a bit unsporting down in sunny cyberspace (this is after all, a theatre of flamboyant interactivity). But the number crunchers who crank out the quasi-Arbitron ratings of page visitors, estimate that lurkers outnumber their more ‘chatty’ counterparts by at least 50 to one. Even here on this blog, most people are content to be part of the grand, high-beamed woodwork. Virtual wallflowers.

          And then you click on a button, and your words come out the other side of the pipe. All of a sudden, an offhand comment that lit up only your screen has twice circumnavigated the globe. One keystroke sends non decaying duplicates to the rest of the world. This takes but a few seconds.

          And then, a few hours later, you pick up a response from some church preacher in Cleveland, and – all of a sudden, another rabbit comes out of the magician’s hat – and you’re rolling. You have successfully evolved from larval lurker to the pupae Net-head phase: a novice poster, a newbie, (a creature with spindly, wriggly little legs but no wings). From there, it is just a matter of time, of picking up speed and justifying sporadic editorials at the expense of freedom of speech.

          That is not a problem; it allows one to avenge all those other frivolous uses of your education and relinquished tax payments. And in the midst of all of this internet surfing, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you have ever graduated or not. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are for that matter. You’re still on the internet, and it’s seamless. It is absolutely continuous. You are moved, but at the same time, you are still where you are. Parked behind your keyboard, just patiently waiting. Waiting to be a part of the next big episode. You are hooked, and you don’t even know it.

          Next you become the Web-master. Struggling to get your own personal opinions and pages aired. Spending more and more time networking to build traffic through your own site’s content. Adwords, keywords, meta-tags, traffic generators and on-line stats are now king in your mind as you struggle ever increasingly, to be seen amongst 50 or so billion competing treasured sites. Every waking hour is pushed towards finding that one extra elusive reader and all else pails into insignificance.

          Now you are at the top of the tree. Ruthlessly sticking to your objectives as you consciously force yourself to go that extra mile and stay with it. One day, your time will come. It may be tomorrow, it could be in years. But you plod on regardless, relentlessly chasing your dreams. Learning new languages to further your ambitions. There’s HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, JAVA, FLASH and FTP to mention but a few.

          Eventually, it all becomes too much. Too many things to do, too many places to be. Your life has become a living library of screen names, profiles and passwords. E-mail addresses and web URLs. Your inbox takes hours to get through and everybody in the whole wide world wants to talk to you all at once.

          “I feel crushed by the weight of this weird world. I have no idea why I bother with this whole Web existence. There’s just too bloody much of this stuff, all the time, and it never stops. All this information, it’s toxic. I can’t even think about messengers without getting queasy. Jesus, I just want to shut off the crush of all those voices, the endless chatter, and all the people that float right through me. I’m worn out with being a ghost. I feel myself starting to wear thin.

I’m sick of the overload. Sick of absorbing all this shit. Sick of cold coffee. Sick of the sleep deprivation. Sick of feeling strung out all the time. Sick of waking up in the morning with my brain ringing. And you know what? I really don’t care if I never pick up another piece of goddamned e-mail as long as I live. I just can’t DO this anymore. I am so fucking tired.

          And just then, another idea has spawned itself and it demands of you, the full internet treatment. So, even more tapping onto the keyboard and a further delving into the internet through the wee small hours ensues. And on it goes for the fully fledged, cyber-living Net-heads.

            It was May 4th 1982, two days after the sinking of the Argentine cruiser - the General Belgrano. It was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Conquerer. 368 Argentine sailors were killed in that episode and Argentina, under the dictate of General Galtieri reacted with martial vigour. An Argentine warplane launched a French built Exocet air-to-sea missile at the British Destroyer HMS Sheffield where twenty men were killed. George Reynolds was part of the company of marines on board that ship. Part of the South Atlantic Task Force, sent to re-gain the Falkland Isles. It was a near miss for George and he now lay collapsed on the deck in great pain and drenched in blood.

            George had been trapped by falling debris wrought from the missile strike and such was the extent of his injuries, he was later to have his legs amputated. Just days after reaching the conflict zone, his participation was already over. He was whisked away for urgent medical treatment and returned home as soon as was possible. Surviving the whole ordeal, George now had the unenviable task of learning to live with his injuries. Being a strong and generally healthy man, he had a fairly fast recovery but had the added burden of having to cope with prosthetic limbs, learning to stand and learning to walk again from scratch. Undaunted and filled with enthusiasm for a somehow brighter future, George struggled through as the conflict in the Falklands continued without him. The Falkland conflict was finally settled on July 11th of that same year, but it took George a further six months before he could claim his own personal victory.

            It was now March 1983 and George was once again fully mobile and he had pensioned himself out of the Marines. He took the money and literally ran all the way back to Civvy Street, where he took up a new career, in sales. It wasn't long before he got the hang of his new job and within just a couple of months; he was fast breaking his targets and reaching for the heavens. He loved his new profession and vowed to invest all his time and efforts into it. Already breaking records, he applied himself more and more. His goal now: to be the best.

            George Reynalds was fast becoming a champion in his field, a real master of his craft and a winner through and through. He was a salesman with a brilliant history of beaten sales targets and untold earned commissions, but what made George different from all others, was his determination and an inability to be beaten by anything. Through all kinds of adversity he had already triumphed and now, having fully mastered his chosen profession, he was to become a true star of the sales community. Because of his record achievements through sales, he was later able to give training seminars and quickly became known as the 'Billy Graham' of all selling.

            One example of beating the competition, he would inform his trainees, was his having been blessed with a wooden leg (or two). Think about that for a while ... How would you cope? How would you turn this disadvantage to your advantage and still carry yourself through your ambitions? George had found a novel way of doing just that, and he pushed it as far as he could. Well how had George managed it? Not many people would reckon a wooden leg was anything to be blessed with, but then, not so many people could use a wooden leg to make as much money as George did.

            Its time now, to see how he did it. He was in a very competitive market that promised a lot of repeat business to the right salesman and George knew this full well. He had at the time, a dozen eager competitors fighting for the same business but undeterred by this, George got himself most of that business, purely because of his wooden leg, he would say.

            It wasn't sympathy business he was winning, and George being a true pro, wouldn't have accepted it if it was. No, all he did was use his wooden leg as a form of focuser and memory jogger for his clients. When he first met a new prospective customer, he sat with his wooden leg straight out to one side, so that the customer could see four inches of the polished teak between his deliberately short sock and his trouser turn-up. He'd turned down the offer of switching from polished teak to a skin coloured, contoured aluminium years before.

            The mere sight of those four inches of polished teak, he claimed, used to hypnotise his customers. They just couldn't take their eyes off it. Ten minutes later maximum, and the customer couldn't help himself but say: - "Excuse me asking: but is that REALLY wood?

            "Oh yes!" the salesman would reply, pulling his trouser leg up another six inches, flashing the timber prop and giving the polished teak a rap with his pen. "Copped for it big time during the Falklands."

            A few minutes were then spent talking about the leg, problems in damp weather, the "Arrr - Jim Lads", etc, but the key factor thereafter for business was that the salesman was never ever forgotten. Repeat business was thereby, as good as guaranteed. The other dozen competitors simply didn't stand a chance. Other than a mirrored personality, they offered nothing different for the customer to focus his attention on.

            But the biggest bonus for George our one legged sales legend, was that thanks to our government, his car sported a disabled driver sticker. Purely because of this, diligent use of his DD privileges meant he could literally park up anywhere and dive in with his polished sales pitches whilst the competition were still driving aimlessly around the town, looking for somewhere to legally park. So now he could make more sales calls than his rivals, as well as win most times when he was face to face selling.

             Sorry about that final twist, I couldn't help it.