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My hall of residence sits on the side of Headington Hill facing into Oxford city centre. Consequently we can occasionally be "entertained" late into the night by the noise from college balls in town. One such is tonight. I think it's Mansfield College (one of Headington's councillors' alma mater and the other's former employer incidentally).

College balls are supposed to be governed by an agreement with the City Council as licensing authority that, amongst other things, live bands will finish by 1am and all amplified music outdoors will stop at 3am at the latest. It's still going on as I write. I've never seen why, personally, they are permitted outdoors at all. Clubs and so on get licenses till all hours of the night nowadays of course, but they are at least indoors. And whilst the buildings may throb and hum a bit, there are strict limits on decibels audible outside. And though it's not very nice living near one when they chuck out in the early hours, at least the noise is limited to a big rush at tipping out time rather than being continuous for hours at a great distance. It is unconscionable to me that outdoor music that can be heard from miles away is permitted at all into the early hours, especially in a built up area.

What is more shocking though, given the college concerned's history as a place of education for the Wide Dissenters and other non-conformist Christian folk is the choice of music with which they have decided to keep the rest of the city awake. There's been some kind of rap artist (or hip-hop perhaps I don't know the difference and they're both just as bad) on for the last hour yelling obscenities about doing nasty things to one's female parent. Is it any wonder the "bluds in da 'hood" think it's okay to be anti-social?

The nice man from the council is on the case. As the environmental health officer on call tonight to deal with noise nuisances and such things he was not made aware that there was any late night event on tonight, which I find astonishing. I managed to find out through Google whose ball it was and let him know.

Ah - it seems just now to have stopped. And in its place, at 03:50, there are a few rockets being set off somewhere - illegal after 23:00 under the Fireworks regulations passed in 2004 but obviously incapable of being enforced at all. Oh well, maybe now I can get some sleep.

UPDATE: Just got a call from the EHO dealing with it. When he arrived the live "band" was still on and has been pulled off "early". The organisers could not name anyone in licensing that they were liaising with and did not know about the rules agreed for running college balls. These are clearly not working then. It was 800 people, so well above a Temporary Events Notice threshold. And I've found the license issued now.

It seems that you can maybe get away with having very wide ranging general license activities that cover you the rest of the year, and when it comes to your college ball or similar, you maybe just need to get an extension to any bit of it you are not already covered for - in this case the supply of alcohol after 02:00 which is when their usual weekend booze license finishes - they're already covered for live music performances from midnight to midnight Sunday to Saturday! So maybe there is no way of actually controlling these sort of events any longer.

It may be time for college authorities just to tell people to shove off and go hire an indoor venue for these events.

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"Your typical loyal Conservative wife" has long been a synonym in some circles for what the rest of us shirt-lifters affectionately call "fag-hags". Actually - it's a bit more than that - she is a byword for heterosexual "cover" for gay men wanting to make their way in supposedly homophobic conservative politics. Ffion Jenkins got the same when she married Willie Hague. If truth be told, the same was said of Sarah Gurling, now Mrs Charles Kennedy, and of Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Gordon Brown.

So, it's terribly tragic for everyone concerned when you hear of a real case of shall we say "sexual confusion" and there is speculation as to whether someone was really hiding his light under a bush, so to speak, all along. Doubly, trebly in this case, tragic when there are children involved. But no more so than if he was running off with another woman. So all credit to David Cameron if he holds to his word and refuses to judge Greg Barker's political ability and future on what is a bit of a personal mess. This is, after all, the twenty-first century, and not the nineteen-eighties when his party would be condemning his new "pretend family relationship" with legislation.

Since Greg is 40, and I am approaching the same, I can identify with him in a way - certainly my feelings have changed, becoming more open to finding love in people of either gender. It's not terribly trendy to say so in the entrenched "gay community" just as much as the "heterosexist community", but we need to appreciate that sexual identity is more fluid than the last two or three hundred years' of predominantly British macho-masculine history has led us to believe.

Has he always identified in secret as "gay" but been living a double life? He's sired three children, after all. People change in all sorts of ways. Loves change. He seems no better, or worse, than anyone who, after some years of marriage, has lost the fire that was once there and fallen for someone else. The gender of his new love should make no difference to the rest of us. It likely will to his kids - just because other children can be the cruelest.

But...he did work for one of those Russian kleptocrats we grace with the term "oligarch". That's the real skeleton in Mr Barker's newly redecorated closet. And if he ends up getting fired for anything, it should be the hug-a-huskie stunt he led his boss on a few months back!

But if there are young, gay, Tories out there (I can never quite understand why) Cameron's support for Barker will I hope make them think twice about taking on a fag hag till death do they part for the sake of a selection meeting.

Just a link really - in case you missed it Adam Sampson, Chief Executive of Shelter, writes in the Guardian today on the undesirability of perpetuating the myth that home ownership is wealth generating and calls for more tax on property rather than less, including land value taxes:

Adam Sampson: The price of house mania

...What we have is a classic disjunction between two policies, housing and taxation. Promoting affordable housing means making it more difficult to gain wealth by investment in home ownership. It means increasing taxation on the increase in the capital value of homes, not reducing it. It means reviewing the council tax system or examining the possibility of a land tax. It means using inheritance tax to reduce the growing wealth divide.

And this goes far beyond mere policy. Home ownership is driving a return to wealth disparities that we have not seen since the Victorian era. Whereas the space that rich people occupy is increasing, the poor are living more cramped lives. And the rise in house prices is reducing social and geographical mobility, with people far less able to move from the north to the south or from poorer areas to richer ones...

In her defense of the surveillance state (sorry if I've misunderstood but that's what it sounds like!) at CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder there's one little sentence that gives it all away. She says:

There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days.

Maybe that's because there is no such thing as "the benign state", now or at any point in history that immediately comes to mind.