THIS week I had intended to focus once more on one of the big issues facing our society today, I really had.

I was going to welcome the Government planning a “fully funded” solution to the dilemmas of caring for our increasingly aged population, but suggest a £75,000 cap on care costs (not including such trivia as paying for accommodation and food) still looked like quite a lot of cash to find and it was hard to see how it would completely put and end to people having to sell their homes.

But then I would have had to concede that our ageing population problem is becoming so vast it may be almost impossible to identify a complete solution, and to admit that I probably needed considerably more time to consider yesterday’s announcement – which seemed a bit like going round in circles. So I turned instead to an issue where I am clearly swimming completely against the tide of virtually all popular and informed opinion.

I refer, of course, to James Bond’s latest outing, Skyfall. I mean, it was a perfectly competent modern action movie and certainly better than Quantum Of Solace, but the outstanding British film of the year, as Sunday’s Bafta awards would have us believe?

That said, the other nominations didn’t look too hot. Maybe the academy also felt the need to recognise Skyfall’s huge commercial success, and to acknowledge that while British people may have cause to fear age our institutions tend to grow stronger with time, as the Olympic link-up between two of them – Bond and Her Majesty – illustrated very well.

That may explain the Baftas, but not Skyfall being listed by Barry Norman among the Radio Times Top 50 British films, or Norman claiming it was probably the greatest Bond movie. Oh come on; both From Russia With Love and Goldfinger were vastly superior, though for different reasons.

What makes me more annoyed is that Skyfall could have been so much better than it actually was. It felt as though its makers strung together a series of outrageous action sequences and twisted what existed of a plot to fit the next set-piece. And while Daniel Craig and our own Dame Judi led some reasonably impressive acting performances, the movie lacked a really menacing villain – bizarrely, when you consider how terrifying Javier Bardem was in No Country For Old Men.

If only Skyfall’s makers had managed to be intelligent instead of merely clever – a fault shared by Baftas host Stephen Fry, who even managed to highlight his own excessive verbosity by reminding award winners to be brief in their acceptance speeches.

Enough of the Baftas; if you wanted action entertainment this weekend brought it in the form of international rugby – who would have thought Scotland, so often long on commitment but short on scores, would run in the tries while Wales would courageously break a dismal losing streak in Paris and inexperienced England would show such composure in ending a decade of defeat in rain-lashed Dublin?

And finally, if I may, I propose to return to vast human phenomena, in this case possibly the greatest mass migration on the planet. The great thing is this wasn’t caused by famine, war, pestilence or persecution, as big folk movements so often seem to be, but by 200 million Chinese people travelling to see their families to celebrate the arrival of the Year Of The Snake. I hope the festivities went well.