Sometimes it seems an age for the green man to replace the red one at a pedestrian crossing.

It can be downright frustrating. Not so the other day in New Road outside Nuffield College.

A small group was waiting to cross, and a couple - they later told me they had been married 57 years - were using the delay to recall the famous Dorothy Parker quip about men and their aversion to women in spectacles.

Alongside was a fresh-faced university student, wearing precision-creased blue trousers and a navy-blue tank top over a white, short-sleeved shirt.

"If I may help," he offered in a dazzling, cut-glass accent, "the saying is: Men seldom make passes, at girls who wear glasses'."

Then, gazing at the woman, he added: "But in your case, ma'am, any man would always make the exception."

She gave the broadest of smiles, and blew a Marilyn Monroe-style pouting kiss, but not before adjusting her glasses!

"Thank you," she said, blushing delightfully, as she might have done half a century ago.

"The pleasure is all mine," said the young gallant, before crossing the road.

In nigh on half a century of driving an average of about 20,000 miles a year, I was never caught speeding. This infuriating fact has bored my penalty point-earning family to tears, and there is no doubt they have prayed for a stain on this whiter-than-white record.

Now their prayers have been answered: 37mph in a 30 zone worth 60 quid to the county force and three points on the unblemished licence.

Making them fall about laughing is the fact that I was caught by a fixed camera in my village where I had lobbied for a camera to be installed!

For those Biblically inclined, read Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 1.

"Will you help me, please?" asked the young teenage boy when he and his friend, both smartly dressed in school uniforms, confronted me.

"I want to sell my mobile phone. "Will you come with me to the stall? The man won't buy it unless I'm with an adult. Perhaps you could say you're my dad."

It was an old model, but I still questioned why he wanted to sell it.

"To buy a present for my mum," he replied without a second's hesitation.

I declined the offer of instant parenthood, also suggesting that mum wouldn't want him to make such a sacrifice.

But the truth was that I suspected the phone had been stolen. Handling stolen goods was a rap I preferred to avoid. Even when he confirmed the phone number, I was not convinced. The boys walked off, hoping to find someone more obliging.

But I have felt uneasy ever since and not because I failed to pass my suspicions to the first policeman to stride into view. Maybe the phone was the boy's. Maybe he had wanted to buy that present for mum. I had thought the worst without a scrap of evidence.

Whatever happened to those days when we first considered the best?