I've been writing this Saturday column for four years, and while I won't miss the commitment, for now anyway, I will miss the readers the column brought me into contact with and those it didn't.

And just now, as I have done almost every week for those four years, I opened the Notes app on my iPhone and clicked on the Column Ideas heading to open a list of possible subjects for a column, a list I've added to whenever an idea comes upon me.

I realised long ago that the inconvenience of tapping an idea into my phone, or in decades past scrawling it in a pocket diary, as the idea arrived saves a world of torment.

So what will I write about today?

First up for serious consideration is one of the latest additions to the list, my belief that towing a caravan or trailer over, say, a tonne should require a towing licence. Most caravanners tow safely and well but there are many who don't, and as a caravanner I am more alert perhaps than a driver who is not a caravanner to the often shocking cases of dangerously loaded and mismatched caravan-vehicle combinations.

Opinion: Points of view from the Newcastle Herald's columnis

Six tonnes of vehicle and caravan at 90km/h can be a mortal danger to many thousands of people a day and a caravan swaying beyond a certain point is always going to end badly.

On almost every long trip my wife and I see an overturned caravan and tow vehicle, and on this trip we'd been driving for just 90 minutes when we came across a tow vehicle and a caravan on their roof.

The reasons for loss of control of a caravan include too much weight at the rear of the caravan, too little weight at the front of the caravan, a tow vehicle that is too light, a tyre blowout, and a driver who doesn't know how react to a swaying caravan.

So the towing licence would require completion of a course in at least trailer and caravan loading, the importance and meaning of the basic weight limits that apply to tow vehicles and caravans, hitching and unhitching, tyre pressures, the techniques of driving a vehicle and caravan, and, denying us the opportunity to delight in another's misery, reversing.

And I would make electronic sway control compulsory, for both existing and new caravans, and compulsory too would be a tyre-monitoring system for both the tow vehicle and the caravan.

But I don't want to risk incurring the wrath of my caravanning peers today.

What about the fact, as I've read, that criminals stop committing crime in their early 30s?

I find that intriguing, and I suspect that the reason they join the rest of us is that at about that age they develop a modicum of social capital.

That is, they have invested in the community, perhaps with children, a job, the respect of a boss and workmates, a social life with other than criminals, and the end result is that what their new, wider world thinks of them matters. Suddenly there is shame in being a criminal.

My guess is that a job or a meaningful role helping others as a volunteer would be the greatest catalyst for this change. But as a subject today it may be a little too solemn.

I've been waiting until I was in the right frame of mind to explore the reasons the appearance of men and women changes shortly after they marry or are exclusively partnered.

You need not have seen them before the metamorphosis to sense that a man or a woman is married, to see that they look married. It is more than a certain pudginess, more than the hair being a little behind the sharpest new cut, more than the absence of a face projecting an alert eagerness. Less wiggle, more wobble.

The transformation is most stark in reverse, from married to single, and it has a very short gestation in women. I can feel the heat already, so I'll stay in cooler climes today.

Barely a week passes that I am not puzzled and often shocked by what I see as an inconsistency in sentences for the most serious crimes.

One person who steals a certain amount of money gets home detention and another who steals a similar amount of money gets several years' jail, and while I know there are different circumstances I cannot grasp how even wildly different circumstances can justify wildly different penalties for the same crime.

But it is for murder and rape that the variation shocks me. I struggle to see why anyone who deliberately kills someone, other than in self defence of course, should be free to enjoy their life within 15 years or for that matter ever. And I cannot see how anybody who plunges a knife into another person's chest should be convicted of anything less than attempted murder or murder. A wounding or manslaughter charge seems to fall well short of the crime.

The widest gap seems to be in sentences for rape, and that applies also to sentences for rape at the worst end of the range. And while rape is one of our most serious crimes, with an impact on the victim that can be life long, I do not understand why it should incur a penalty more severe than that for murder.

But altogether too grave a subject for today.

So too is my firm belief that the caging of birds, whether they be budgies or cockatoos, is extreme cruelty. I am amazed that anybody who thinks even lightly can live with the sadism of caging a bird, of all animals, and calling it a pet.

In my adult life I have witnessed great struggles between labour and capital, or employees and employers, and in each the lot of the worker has improved and a balance has reigned for another decade. But for two decades provisions creating casual employment have been so exploited by employers that casual employees are the new poor.

Many are trapped in casual work, long after it served as an advantage to them, and while ever they are so trapped they will never own a house, buy a new car or afford the luxuries available to permanent employees. For those who want a small income for a small amount of work, casual employment is a fine thing. For those who want to earn a living, it is poverty.

Too grim today.

Among these and a couple of dozen others under Column Ideas in my Notes app is the subject I would have written about today, but for now I need a break.

Whether that is permanent remains to be seen, so I won't be deleting my Column Ideas file. And as I go I thank you, readers.

Jeff Corbett is a former Newcastle Herald journalist. He has contributed regular opinion columns to the pages of the Herald each week on Saturday.

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