My father has been quite ill recently, and I’ve been thinking a lot about redemption. Not everyone gets the opportunity to atone for their mistakes, of course. But to do so, you must at first acknowledge them.

The BBC’s one-time ‘voice of the nation’, Huw Edwards, appears to be struggling with this notion. As he nears the end of his six-month suspended sentence for accessing indecent images of children, the only thing he seems intent on rehabilitating is his reputation and six-figure salary.

He is allegedly in talks with Channel 4 to make a ‘tell-all’ interview, setting out his version of events, and explaining why he believes he was as much the victim as anyone else in the tawdry saga of his downfall.

Given that the images and videos he willingly received were of a boy around the age of eight, and the abuse the child suffered was category A (the most serious), this seems frankly delusional. Somewhere, that poor kid (if he is even still a kid, or even still alive) is suffering – and men like Edwards are the reason. Let’s be clear: that child is the only victim here.

So it’s a measure of the man’s arrogance to see him now on his high horse, claiming that ‘it would never have happened had I not been having a total breakdown after 25 years of psychiatric treatment’. Hmm. Plenty of people have a nervous breakdown, but they don’t generally resort to child abuse images to work through it.

It’s not the good times that show you what kind of person someone is, but the bad. In times of adversity, people’s true colours shine through. And Mr Edwards’ are distinctly murky.

He has clearly not fully grasped the severity of his mistakes, and is too deluded to understand that the last thing the public wants from him is self-serving excuses.

Perhaps it would help if I spelled it out for him: he used his power, status, influence and generous BBC salary to indulge his perverse sexual fantasies, all while posing as the sternest of moral arbiters.

Complaining that he’s been hard done by Channel 5’s recent drama starring Martin Clunes (Edwards has called it ‘one-sided’) and blaming the young man at the centre of the scandal for blackmailing him smacks of unforgivable arrogance. If he really wants to get his side of the story out there, he’s going the wrong way about it.

Edwards is not the first celebrity to fall from a great height. In recent years there has been a succession of household idols who have turned out to have feet of clay to a greater or lesser extent.

Russell Brand (multiple sexual assault allegations, which are denied), Phillip Schofield (an ‘unwise but not illegal relationship’), David Walliams (leaked recordings of derogatory comments about contestants on Britain’s Got Talent), Gregg Wallace (inappropriate language, racist comments, sexual innuendo).

The only one I have any sympathy for is Wallace. Not that I didn’t find him annoying and obnoxious on MasterChef – but then that was all part of his wide-boy act.

I see him now on social media, spending time with his severely autistic son and his long-suffering wife, sharing tips on downsizing and cutting back on expenditure and I think, fair play to him: he had it all, lost it all, and is slowly working his way back from the brink.

Whether it will work remains to be seen. It did for Michael Barrymore (dead man face down in swimming pool), who is now a bit of a viral legend on TikTok.

In any case, no criminal charges were brought against Wallace. The same is not true of Edwards. And what I can’t stand about the man is the way he still, after everything, seems to think the normal rules don’t apply to him.

If you believe (as I do) that we are put on this planet to learn some kind of important spiritual lesson, then Edwards is failing abysmally. You can’t just order people to forgive you. You must give them a reason to do so. First there must be acknowledgment of the wrong done, then atonement.

Edwards isn’t even close.

Horror for Helen

The most remarkable thing about the disgraceful verbal assault on Dame Helen Mirren by swivel-eyed pro-Pal Tom Carroll is not so much the vitriol, blind hatred and naked misogyny levelled at her (sadly, we are all too used to this kind of thing now) but the fact that he posted the footage online himself. Not only a nasty piece of work – but a narcissist, too.  

I once got into terrible trouble for buying a pair of elephant-shaped lamps from OKA, priced £134.50 for the pair. I still get trolled for this, even though the MPs’ expenses inquiry ruled that the claim was legitimate (but hey, let’s not allow the facts to get in the way).

But however idiotic my choice of lighting may or may not have been, it pales into insignificance compared to £2,618.16 for a pair of Lalique salt and pepper shakers, £3,500 for a silver wine coaster and £2,995 on a Smythson tea set. Those are just some of the luxury items Nicola Sturgeon’s estranged husband, Peter Murrell, bought with the £400,000 he embezzled from SNP party funds. Makes my choice look parsimonious.

Hooray for farmer Hodgson!

Kudos to the furious Lake District farmer who finally snapped and sprayed dozens of illegally parked cars in his field with slurry. Hogg Hodgson (with a name like that he should have his own Netflix series) said: ‘I am sick of being abused by people when I ask them not to park on our land.’ Even after the cars left, he still had to pick up litter left behind.

It’s like those louts in Bournemouth and Brighton, leaving their rubbish for someone else to deal with. Perhaps Mr Hodgson could be deployed to help teach them a lesson, too.

I appreciate that not everyone likes dogs. But to the man who told me to ‘get off the pavement’ the other day as I was walking my Lhasa Apso, Muffin, you’re not exactly God’s gift yourself.

‘I don’t want your dog to touch me,’ he said. ‘I don’t think my dog wants to touch you, either,’ I replied.

There followed a full and frank exchange of opinions, culminating in him calling me a ‘b***h’. It got so nasty a passer-by stopped to remonstrate with him. He, by contrast, was a total hero. 

When did I turn into such an early bird?

All my life I’ve been a night owl. I was a child insomniac who would stay up until the wee small hours. My 30s and 40s were full of late nights.

But lately something has changed: I’ve started keeping toddler hours. It gets to 8pm – a time when I would ordinarily have been thinking about what to have for supper – and I start wondering if it’s too early to start heading for bed. Most nights I’m asleep by 10pm, 11 at the latest.

And where once getting out of bed at 7.30am felt physically agonising, now I wake naturally at around 5.30 or 6am. There is something magical about mornings, silent save for birdsong, the air fresh and crisp.

Is there something about getting older that turns a person into an early bird? Is it the fact that I’m running out of time/life that makes me want to see the sunrise? Or have I just become an incorrigible old bore?

Answers on a postcard, please.