At quite a few of the golf events I go to the starter hands you a little gift of some sort as you prepare to play; a ball, some tees, a pitch repairer or suchlike bearing the sponsor's logo. I was a bit surprised though to see a pressie on the table in front of me as I took my place at the Ministry of Justice's consultation exercise.

It looked like a whiteboard marker that you could clip on to your shirt pocket. It was logo free but should perhaps have had NHS stamped on it, being a handy alcohol free hand sanitizer allegedly effective against H1N1. I suppose with 100 or so people milling around the conference centre at the Pollock Halls, any one of whom could have been consorting with pigs, it was a wise protection. I'd have felt happier if I'd had it on Wednesday when my neighbour in the Spanish class declared that he had just risen from his bed of swine flu.

The other nifty gadget we were issued with, but not for keeps, was an electronic voting tablet to hang round our necks. The crowd were split into tables of about ten for discussion which a young person armed with a laptop tried valiantly to keep pace with. These sessions were skilfully led and were generally preceded by a video to set the scene. At various times slides of multi-choice polling questions appeared for light relief. We all then pushed our favoured tablet button and the poll result rolled onto the screen. The man in charge invariably thought the result interesting. It's a shame he couldn't have found a few different ways of saying so. Why don't they send us all one of these gadgets instead of a polling card and we could get a general election over with in five minutes.

With the rain pelting down outside this afternoon I turned to television instead of doing something outdoors and virile. I watched the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Despite having been a cheering bystander at the East African Safari Rally, having been to Ingliston on occasion and having regularly attended the Beveridge Park road races as a first-aider in my youth I'm not really a motor racing fan. There's a lot of hanging about hoping you won't go deaf, catching sight every so often of you're not sure who flashing past and not having a clue who's winning.

Television changes all that. You see the race overall. You are in the cockpit. You are backstage in the pit lane. You meet the rich and famous as they mill around on the grid before the start. Someone tells you what's going on. I really enjoyed it and the tussle for second place in the last couple of laps was nearly as exciting for the viewer as it was for the drivers.

I don't know what it takes to be a good racing driver but from one thing I saw you don't have to be too bright. When they pull into the pits and the team swarm around the car changing wheels and filling it up in seconds there is always a man who holds out a large lollipop in front of the car. He takes it away when everything is done. I saw one that read BRAKE - NO THROTTLE when the car pulled up and was turned over as the operation neared its end to read 1ST GEAR - THROTTLE. He must have been the guy who drove off in an earlier race with the fuel pipe still attached.

But what about the circuit! Magnificent. Built from scratch in 22 months. Get that project team over here and we could have the trams for Christmas.