AMID the high-volume worldwide tributes to the much-loved actor and comedian Robin Williams came a quiet voice from Teesdale.

Children’s author Anne Fine, of Barnard Castle, creator of Madame Doubtfire, recalled that she never met Williams, whose screen version of her most famous character became one of his defining roles.

Invited to share the limelight with Williams on a chat show, Anne declined because the show clashed with a talk she was due to give to a group of librarians. Full Brownie points to her for honouring the unglamorous commitment, all of us will agree.

But her talk allowed her time to catch Williams on TV. “I was relieved not to have been there,” she recalled. “Robin was being so dementedly funny that I would have been sitting like an idiot at the end of the sofa with nothing to say.”

Of course she would have said something, and the most voluble is never to be confused with the most valuable. Who would have been the most creative artist on that sofa?

Without Madame Doubtfire, Williams’ Mrs Doubtfire would not have existed. Always, in the beginning is the word – and Anne had provided it.

BY presenting captive bumble bees with coloured discs containing varying amounts of pollen, scientists at Sussex University have discovered that petal colour is probably the key to attracting the bees to the most productive flowers.

Very clever – the research and the skill of the bees. But as an appreciation of the bumble bee nothing surpasses some wonderful words by the nineteenth century natural history writer Richard Jefferies.

Pointing out that hive bees will only visit flowers in the open, never for instance venturing into a hedge, he turns to what he calls the “humble bee” – our bumble bee. “He knows no skep. No artificial saccharine aids him, there is no step to his house that he may alight in comfort. No one cares for him but he hums to himself as he goes... Down into the mossy sided ditch, up into the tall elm, far inside the deepest wood, away he wanders. Humble he is but wild; always wild and humming to his flowers.”

There’s more in a superb essay, The Pageant of Summer. Seek out, too, a comparable piece, A London Trout, in which Jefferies describes how, over three summers, he protected a trout he had spotted under a bridge over a brook.

ENGLAND’S crushing victories over India in the last two Tests – the final one by the colossal margin of an innings and 244 runs – don’t tell us how good the rebuilt England side is – merely how poor the opposition was. “Humiliating” and “embarrassing”

were the chosen words not of any English critic but Indian cricket legend Sunil Gavaskar.

But a primary fault is the structure of the game. Faltering after their early victory at Lord’s, India had no opportunity to recover with fixtures against county sides, formerly the regular pattern.

The abandonment of the county fixtures also means fewer people get to see the tourists, thus reducing further the already declining interest in Tests.