WHY, in the abominable new heyday of the bicycle, are so many people still falling off horses? The question seemed worth following up after Professor David Nutt, latterly the government’s chief adviser on recreational drugs, claimed that equestrian recreations were more perilous than addiction to Ecstasy and cannabis.

"Do you know," he asked rhetorically in a television interview, "how many deaths there are from horse riding? There are about 30 a year. From Ecstasy there are no more than 10. Horse-riding is like bungy jumping and climbing mountains. I would be very concerned if my children were doing it."

The professor’s comparison so inflamed the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith that she is reported to have gone hoarse from trying to shout him down. The present one, Alan Johnson, chose to save his voice. He just fired Professor Nutt out of hand. This was after his drugs tsar continued to resist the re-classification of cannabis from C to B, though its new derivative known is as skunk is several times more powerful than the original grassy weed.

Much fun is being had in priggish right-wing circles at Prof Nutt’s stance—mainly on the juvenile lines that it is as nutty as his name. But this man is probably this country’s chief expert in psychopharmacology, the fancy name for substances that derange and ultimately black out the human brain. He is no hippyfied defender of dope. His thunder is against governments criminalising relatively petty fads.

"If we want to reduce deaths, "he argues, "alcohol and heroin are the issues. I have four children, now aged 18 to 26, and at almost every party they went to in their teenage years, a child was taken to hospital with alcohol poisoning. Liver disease will become a worse killer than heart disease within 20 years."

Cannabis, he insists, is relatively harmless. "Classing it as B will be a disaster because anyone caught in possession three times can be sent to prison for five years. The prison population will increase, and those people will find it hard to get jobs. That way, you add to the underclass and the burden."

Put like that, it seems possible the professor has a point, and a point that may amply justify the march of several hundred scientists on Downing Street this coming Sunday to protest against his dismissal. But why does he talk of horses? It does seem to diminish his case.

I put a call through to Mark Weston, welfare officer of the British Horse Society. How many riders maimed, dead or just shook up could he account for? He could account for none.

"We have collated," he said, "no significant figures for recreational riders. Our experience is that most people who fall off a horse soon pick themselves up and jump back on unscathed."

So where did Nutt get his worrying statistic of 30 deaths? Try British Eventing," Mr Weston suggested. "The competition they go in for could account for it." I did. British Eventing had no one available to offer me a corpse count, but a young woman there said, tartly, "yes, it is a dangerous game. Of course it is. What do you expect?"

I expect sportsmen and women who spend their spare time spurring Dobbin over high fences or harrying foxes to come a fatal cropper now and then. Of course I do. But it was my impression that when the professor spoke of horsepersons falling to their deaths he was talking of victims of non-competitive country trots. It could, after all, happen to any yokel on squireling with funds to keep a pony, especially, perhaps, to one with a well-filled hip flask. Peel, a former prime minister, met his end that way, though it was a longish time ago, in 1850.

On reflection, I feel Prof Nutt would have been on more plausible ground if he had contrasted the modest risk of smoking pot or swallowing Ecstasy tablets with the mortal danger of riding bicycles.

In one year alone, 85,000 people fell off bikes, often in the pathway of heavy motorised traffic. Of these, 45,000 were children. That was in 2002, the last time ROSPA – the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents – compiled its casualty figures.

The number of bike casualties has probably gone up since then – possibly because the lunatics who whizz around mowing down old folk on pavements have taken a pill or two, or are mad drunk, before they set off. But bikes, even for the professor, may have seemed a controversy too far. Nor is he, I feel, entirely right about C class drugs. He has ignored the cultural motive for taking them.

Ruffians take them because they are illegal and because they get a buzz from breaking the law. They will commit any foul crime to fund their addiction. Their victims are law-abiding householders whose homes they burgle or helpless old people they beat up in the street.

Forever in debt to Threshers

I WAS dismayed to hear that Threshers, the wonderful off-licence wine chain, had gone into administration and would need a strong marketing campaign to keep going. My favourite branch, in the Chorlton suburb of Manchester, rewarded me, one night on the loading way to a party, with a free multi-purpose bottle-opener, which is as handy as any pocket tool ever handed to a Queen’s boy scout. I have it before me now.

Its main purpose—inscribed in gold on one side of a maroon handle—is to "help you get more out of a bottle of wire." But it does more than that. The smallest of its three blades is sharp enough to skin a rabbit with. "Is that," inquired a security officer at Belfast airport, "for cutting the pilot’s throat with?"

But he let me keep it when I said I needed it for getting inside a bottle on Sunday train buffets when the bartender had forgotten his tools. The security man was a Threshers fans—as are all decent fellows who guard us when we sleep. The corkscrew bit would unscrew the rivets from a sea-going liner.

All this, buckshee, for buying three bottles of plonk and a packet of fags on a rainy night. May Threshers overcome its difficulties. I will keep its self-service waiter’s tools for ever.

Meet Boris in a dark alley? You must be joking

AFTER Boris Johnson, the bike-errant mayor of London had rescued her from a bar-wielding gang of gutter molls, a middle-class young woman admitted she had always voted for his left-wing rival, Ken Livingstone.

But she added, "I would rather meet Boris in an alley on a dark night."

This is surely the unlikeliest compliment ever paid by a lady to a self- admittedly die-hard Tory.