I took advantage of the long summer evening (ie it wasn’t actually pelting down for once) last night to take the kids to Coram Fields, the site of the old Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, where there’s a fab playground.  They are in full-on park mode at the moment: cycling in Richmond Park on Saturday and rambling up Parliament Hill on Monday to pick blackberries.  Frankly, anything that tires the little beggars out while they are on their school holidays is a Godsend.

And, for someone like me who was brought up in the countryside, it is nice to see them getting just a hint of the freedom to run and shout that I enjoyed.  It is one of the wonderful things about London that there is so much green still available, even to someone living in the centre of town.  Even if you live in the most densely-built areas of London – Notting Hill is a good example; Hampstead is another – you have access to fantastic areas like Holland Park and Hampstead Heath.
 
Which puts today’s headlines about the threat to the Green Belt into some sort of perspective.  Yes, it is true that England is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe.  Yes, there is a real question about how far the extra houses we need can be accommodated without sacrificing some land which is currently designated as Green Belt.
 
But let’s get a few things straight.  There is nothing in anyone’s plans which should mean that the Green Belt is seriously under threat.  We can have the houses we need and still preserve the integrity of our countryside.  And it is possible to build cities which do what the best bits of London do: combine density of housing with access to green spaces.  And our kids can have decent homes and decent places to play.
 

A week to go to the scariest gig I’ve ever done.  And as each day passes, I’m getting more and more terrified.
 
I don’t usually get too phased by the sorts of things I have to do in Shelter.  Sure, some have been difficult, particularly where I have to explain unpopular decisions to our own staff (always the most challenging audience).  And some have been, bluntly, bizarre – the memory of finding myself on the main stage at Stratford at some RSC event debating homelessness in Shakespeare in front of an audience of bemused Japanese tourists on a day trip to see Macbeth or Hamlet still causes my palms to sweat with embarrassment.
 
But next week’s event is just fixating me.  In theory, it shouldn’t be a problem – just a quick two minutes at a fundraiser to say thank you to the performers and venue for supporting us.  But the venue is the Comedy Store and the performers are some of the leading lights of British comedy.   The sort of event where there are risks enough in sitting in the front row of the audience, let alone being asked to spend two minutes on stage with a mike in your hand.
 
Of course, I could just play it straight, go for outrage (“There are over a million children …”) and gratitude (“Without your help…”).  But, let’s face it, no-one will want to be lectured at a comedy gig.  And pomposity is the worst of all possible sins for that audience.
 
So I’m stuck.  Anyone know any good jokes?
 

Comes up on you unexpectedly sometimes.  There I was, browsing the online editions of the papers (it’s a quiet day here at Shelter Towers and I’d got in early for a breakfast meeting), when suddenly I was face-to-face (well, virtually) with one of our success stories.  Someone I’d never heard of, we’d given help to and now sees us as her “saviour”.
 
It’s not just the positive PR.  For me, it really makes a difference.  In this job, unlike most of my previous ones, I can sometimes feel far too remote from our clients.  In my last role, running a far smaller organisation and without the demands of endless speeches and lobbying meetings, I could get out to the projects every week or two and actually spend time sitting with the people we were trying to help.  In Shelter, no matter how much I try to make time for that, we have so many projects that the limited time I can spend in any individual one has to be devoted to talking with staff, particularly at a time when we are making so many changes in the organisation.
 
And I really feel the loss.  Often, coming back from those meetings, I look round train carriages filled with other middle-aged men in suits also tapping at laptops and worrying about their organisation’s performance figures and wonder how I differ.  So much of what you have to do as a Chief Executive is the same in a charity as any other business.  But our purpose is different – it is not to make money but change lives.  And unless you can spend time with those people whose lives you are trying to change, there is a danger that you can forget that.

… to a rainy England and the usual silly season crime panic.  With politicians away and little to report, what is better to fill up those empty pages and broadcast hours than a rehashing of statistics to try to create the – largely misleading - impression that the country is overrun by knife-wielding thugs?
 
Which is not to say that there aren’t real crimes and real victims.  Listening this morning to the Today Programme interview with the widow of the murdered headteacher Philip Lawrence was a humbling experience.  Hearing someone so palpably decent struggling to balance her belief in justice with her deep personal bitterness about what had happened was painful in the extreme.
 
But we should remind ourselves that what we see and hear in the media is not always representative of what is going on in the real world.  A decade and a half ago when I was researching and writing on crime, I spent some time looking at the media reporting of sexual crime.  Over the period I was studying, the number of sex crime stories in the newspapers doubled (with the Telegraph rather than the tabloids leading the way).  However, the number of crimes reported to the police had largely stayed the same, showing only a slight increase.  And, according to most surveys of victims we had (which were, admittedly, pretty poor), the actual number of offences then being committed was in decline.
 
Does it matter?  It certainly does.  What the media report influences how we think and behave.  Not only do these sort of panics risk knee-jerk political responses – think the Dangerous Dogs Act or the anti-rave legislation; the last thing we need is for pressure for a watering-down of the Human Rights Act.  But fear of crime is arguably just as serious as the real thing.  The fear created by media hysteria is more likely to create no-go areas in our inner cities than is the reality of the threat posed by the crime which sadly does still infest some of our streets.

Gate fever, Doolally tap, demob happiness – whatever you call it, I’ve got it.
 
It’s been a time since Easter and my holidays are just around the corner.  Off tomorrow and not coming back until 20^th.  Bliss.
 
Not that it’s been a bad few months, that is.  Campaigning-wise, in fact, it has been fantastic.  Internally, it has been difficult, of course – you can’t propose the sorts of changes we are suggesting in Shelter without getting a pretty robust response from some staff.  And even there, I think we are much further along than I expected us to be.
 
But I can’t deny that a few days in France with the family looks an attractive prospect right now.  So long as it is a proper break.  Reading an article on where the new austere Cabinet will be holidaying, I found to my horror that at least four of them are off to France too. 
 
No problem, you might think – France is a big country.  But I still haven’t recovered from the occasion a couple of years ago when we were driving down a little country road near Mt Ventoux when we overtook a sweating jogger pounding through the midday heat.  Something looked familiar.  Turning round for a closer look, I realised it was Alistair Campbell, who apparently has a holiday home there.  The temptation to reverse at top speed was, thankfully, resisted.
 
We are not holidaying near Mt Ventoux this year.