AGREE or disagree with having a royal family, it’s not too often that Buckingham Palace makes a wrong call. The most notorious, of course, was the failure to fly the royal flag at half mast when Princess Diana died. The Royals compounded the error by remaining at Balmoral until force of public feeling brought them to London.

But the Palace might have erred again with the plans to mark the day the Queen becomes Britain’s longest serving monarch. On September 9 she will pass Queen Victoria’s record of 63 years 217 days – between 1837 and 1901.

The Queen has been reported as not wanting a great deal of attention paid to the landmark moment. But certainly in Scotland there will a great hoo-ha. That’s if the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has anything to do with it. And she has. For the Queen has chosen to mark the day by formally opening the revived borders railway, from Edinburgh to Tweedbank, near Galashiels.

The royal blessing might simply have been to unveil a plaque. But the Queen will make the full 30-mile journey, accompanied by her husband and, wait for it, Ms Sturgeon.

What a coup for the Scottish Nationalists and their resourceful leader. Not that the £300m rebirth of this railway, restoring a train service to the only region of Britain without one, doesn’t deserves the highest-possible accolade. The Queen’s seal of approval also mirrors her personal fondness for Scotland.

But you would imagine that if any political leader is to share the spotlight as the Queen passes that longest-serving milestone it would be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Maybe David Cameron will be issued with a platform ticket. And maybe it would have been better if the Queen, in line with her no-fuss inclination, had chosen to spend the day privately.

Hiroshima – and of course Nagasaki. We’ve all read the reports, and seen the TV pictures, surrounding the 70th anniversary of those atomic holocausts. What’s been missing? The American reaction to the anniversary.

You might have expected to see President Obama, or at least his deputy, standing with the Japanese PM at the memorial ceremonies. Perhaps America wasn’t invited. If so that hardly matches Japan’s pacifist stance. What’s strange is that none of the newspaper or TV reports seemed to mention America - except to say it dropped the bombs. If I didn’t know better I’d suspect the media had been gagged.

Football’s back - and after the first 90 minutes one top flight manager accuses another of snubbing him by avoiding the final-whistle handshake. That’s part of a ‘code of conduct’ that also includes a handshake between players. The moment you need a code of conduct, the hope of maintaining good conduct is gone. Good conduct is bred, by early teaching and example. Imposed as a set of gestures it has no roots and will never thrive.

Finally a pat on the back for Hear All Sides correspondent Peter Elliott, of Eaglescliffe – for speaking up for the northern word ‘brambles’, distressingly losing ground to ‘blackberries.’ My wife’s on this case – correcting our London-born grandson. There’s a nice line in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses: “Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,/ All by himself, gathering brambles.”