WHAT is a newspaper column? Well, according to the Penguin Book Of Columnists it is “more of a performance than an expression of intellectual argument, and it tends to react to contemporary events and shared experiences”.

A column is also, as the book’s editor, Christopher Silvester, points out in his introduction, a piece of work that “appears in the same publication on a regular basis usually in the same position and with the same heading and by-line”.

The presence of the column, Christopher continues, is reassuring, “not primarily because of what it has to say, but because of its appearance in a particular spot, on a particular day or days, and at an approximately predictable length”.

That all sounds good to me.

The last regular appearance this columnist made before going on holiday addressed Nigel Farage and Ukip. The reaction to those approximately predictable 700 or so words, rattled out as ever in an hour or so in between greater tasks, was pretty extreme online, with a few letters too.

There is no need to rake over what was written, but it is worth responding on one count. What I wrote was not a “biased article” or “the most biased article ever written in the history of newspapers” (or some such); it was an opinionated column.

Sometimes columns are about nothing much; sometimes the writer has an axe to grind. That’s what columnists do. And, yes, on occasions their opinions will annoy some readers, but at least this gives the anonymous commentators who gather in a disputatious congregation at the bottom of the page on the internet something to occupy themselves.

Anyway, this week I’d like to invite everyone round to my place. Our house is a semi on the edge of York, with a road out the front that quietly threads its way to a town some miles away. Out the back there are open fields rolling away into the distance.

What a pleasant place to pass one’s days – and how I’d love to live there.

For what has just been described is how things used to be, long before we moved to our house. Now the road at the front is quite busy, heading as it does to the ring-road half a mile or so away. Depending on wind direction, when we are in the garden we can hear the rush of tyres as vehicles circle the city in the distance.

Oh, and the garden no longer ends in open fields. Houses were built there years ago. This would have been a great shame for whoever lived in our house at the time. No one wants to see fields replaced by houses, although people do have to live somewhere.

Let’s go further back. Now everyone can come back to my place and shuffle around in a green field. That’s the thing about most houses: they stand on what would at one time have been verdant open space.

These thoughts were stirred into life partly by York Outer MP Julian Sturdy’s article in Saturday’s edition of The Press. In this, Julian (good name, sir) argued that we must fight to keep York’s green belt, and that some of the huge housing developments outlined in the council’s Local Plan threatened to “change our beautiful historic cathedral city beyond recognition”.

In terms of scale, he may well have a point: where possible, it is surely better to build on brownfield sites rather than sprawl houses across open land.

Yet often when people talk about protecting the green belt, what they mean is “protecting that bit of green land near where I live”. In a sense this is natural enough. Crane your neck outside our house and you can see where the green fields begin. I’d love those open spaces to stay forever green, but they will probably be built on at some stage.

And here’s a thing. Mr Sturdy is the MP for Outer York and most brownfield sites are presumably in inner York, so the implication seems to be: build your houses on someone else’s patch.

It’s a tricky business, that’s for sure, with few easy answers. One thing worth saying is that any development that harmed Askham Bog would be an outrage. And, no, that’s not on ‘my’ green belt. It’s just a lovely place.