CONTRARY to Shake-speare’s line, summer is often the season of our national discontent, and I wonder if it’s any accident that the last few have been filled with distractions, mostly of the royal or sporting variety.

After all the ceremonial and loyal outpourings surrounding the wedding and the diamond jubilee, plus the memorable experience of our nation running the Olympics pretty well and winning quite a lot of medals, it was difficult to see how we could keep match all that in 2013.

But we’ve already had Andy winning at Wimbledon and the Lions triumphing down under, while this weekend brought us more woe for Australians on the cricket pitch and a Brit other than Sir Bradley winning the Tour de France; it even looked like we might have an Open victor for a while.

On the royal front, an expectant nation was, at the time of writing last night, still waiting for the latest addition to the family to arrive – an arrival which would presumably be of particular relief to the Queen, so she could go on holiday (a point HMQ herself raised with Cumbrian schoolchildren last week, if anyone thinks I’m being disrespectful).

Most remarkable of all, all this has happened while we’ve been baking in a most unexpected heatwave. A very cynical soul might claim all the rest of the above could have somehow been “fixed” by the powers that be, but no one can manipulate the British weather.

Normal service has now been resumed in that quarter, with grey skies overhead, but I hope most of us managed to enjoy our brilliant burst of summer.

• MANY journalists get a bit wary about assuming officials and experts are always right after covering a few stories in which they’re horribly wrong. For me the warning signs start when politicians and bureaucrats get tired of their core tasks and hanker for big plans and grand gestures.

There’s nothing wrong with them having a wider vision backed by sincere beliefs, unless they become so tied to a big plan they can’t or won’t accept there any flaws in it, and their confidence that their cause is right blinds them to anything going wrong with the grand design.

I get particularly concerned when our leaders start trying to dabble in what I, for want of a better term, call “social engineering”.

A few months ago a local newspaper had a front-page story about a family’s dilemma in the Dales village where I was brought up, trapped with a property they couldn’t sell thanks to a “housing policy” brought in two decades earlier.

This policy would, officials claimed at the time, bring much-needed homes for local people, but was actually based on planning rules restricting the number of houses built for general sale.

The “homes for locals” bit was what officials hoped might happen, but they had no positive power to make it reality and after a while the policy appeared to be quietly shelved – except for people like the aforementioned family who’d signed “locals-only” planning agreements.

Now we’re told the decision to introduce blanket 20mph zones in west York was not only based on safety concerns but on the desire to create better communities.

Actually realising this laudable ambition is obviously in the hands of the people who live in these communities, who could have asked for specific 20mph zones if they’d thought it would help. The city council isn’t even envisaging an enabling role here, merely remaining in the realms of pious hope.

I’ve been driving for more than 30 years and have never been done for speeding – which I hope indicates I take the rules of the road reasonably seriously – but I truly don’t believe speed limits are suitable instruments of social policy.

How significant the 20mph decision will be is yet to be seen, but with the Lendal Bridge experiment looming I hope our leaders won’t allow even sincerely held beliefs to get in the way of making a judgement based on evidence of the closure’s effect – and that they skip the social engineering entirely.