Simon Hoggart's Week: Gordon Brown and Other Planets

• I bumped into a labor MP the other night, who told me that No 10 really has become a bunker, with the prime minister in complete denial of the outside world.

He had been among a group of eight labor MPs who had been to see Gordon Brown. One was Glenda Jackson, who ventured the view that things were looking very grim all round.

"No, no, no!" said the great helmsman.

"Growth! There will be growth for the next 10 years! Not as fast as before, but growth all the same ..."

The party left in anxious, contemplative mood.

• The BBC has been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, and what a powerful evocation of the past it has been! When I was a lad, space travel was the future, all gleaming rockets with fins, and chaps wandering round Jupiter. Now it's as old-fashioned as leather arm patches, Watneys Red Barrel and reel to reel tape recorders. Even the shots of mission control look comically dated, the men with those glasses shaped like TV screens gazing at clunky old black and white computer screens. And they smoked: fags, cigars and pipes, some ordinary briar pipes, others great, curved, Sherlock Holmes affairs. It's a wonder anyone could see those flickering screens through the haze.

Now most of the useful space exploration is unmanned. It seems unlikely that anyone will walk on the moon again - what would be the point? And the experts at Seti - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - say that life forms from another planet are not going to bother traveling across goodness knows how many light years just to look at us. Instead they will send a computer which will orbit the earth and send back the data without even bothering to abduct a housewife and extract her bodily fluids.

• Talking of the past, one of the most persistent - yet quickly disprovable - myths concerns the fact that the national euphoria created by England winning the World Cup in 1966 helped Harold Wilson to his election victory that year. I even saw it repeated in a long and discursive article (what the Americans call a "thumbsucker") in the Times this week. It's easy to check. General election of 1966: 31 March. World Cup final: 30 July - 17 weeks later. Yet I suspect nothing as humdrum as facts will shake this belief.

• Have you noticed how it's getting more and more difficult just to walk anywhere? We are always being enjoined to walk instead of driving or taking the bus, but these days navigating an urban street is like sailing through the North-West Passage during the spring melt.

Chuggers, or charity muggers, seem to be everywhere, along with people handing out cards offering cheap phone calls and clothing sales.

Those £700 baby buggies, sometimes with a dozen wheels, the size and shape of lunar landing vehicles, get no smaller.

The other day I was halted by stroller-lock as the pavement was entirely blocked by just two of these things while the mothers chatted insouciantly.

People have what look like steamer trunks on wheels which trundle behind them, tripping up anyone who doesn't spend their life looking downwards.

I don't mind tourists - we need their money and Britain is so expensive you can't blame them for hanging round in great gangs because it's cheaper than going anywhere or eating anything - but I do resent people with gigantic back-packs that cause them to occupy twice as much space as a normal human.

Worst of all are the cyclists. I fear that keeping them on the roads is now a lost cause, and they weave their way down the pavements occasionally ringing their bell as if it were us, the pedestrians, who have no right to be there and are impeding their otherwise speedy progress.

• Sad to see the retirement of Vaughny, as Michael Vaughan was apparently known to his teammates, such as Straussy. Cricketers are not famed for inventive nicknames. I wonder what the Australian Kasprowicz is called; Kass rather than Kasprowiczy, I suppose.

When I played for the Guardian football team (my high spot: scoring against the Times, followed a few minutes later by an own goal) Richard Norton-Taylor was a key member of our side. We called him Norton-Taylory, which was pretty stupid, because by the time you'd shouted: "Man on, Norton-Taylory!" it was usually too late.

• Reader David Ray was at Essex University during the 1980s, at the same time as John Bercow. He has kindly sent me a copy of the Conservatives' manifesto for the time Bercow was standing for president of the student union.

There was a great deal of upheaval at Essex in this period, and Bercow was all against people who think they have a "divine right" to stop other people speaking. (Cecil Parkinson had been driven from the campus by an egg-throwing campaign.)

Actually his declaration of principles seems extremely moderate: "We need to protect the interests of all students, not just a minority of egotistical political hacks," which seems a good definition of his present job.

The back page of the leaflet asks if you might really be a Conservative. "Do you like having fun, drinking, Clint Eastwood movies, making money, playing sport? Do you never wear sandals, men's earrings, dope pouches, Palestinian scarves, Oxfam coats?" Bercow lost, but probably for the last time.