EDINBURGH, Wednesday, lunchtime. Sandwiches packed, macramé gas mask to hand, I've come to the frontline between exclusive Bruntsfield and even more exclusive Morningside where class warfare has apparently broken out. The reason? Hungry state school pupils are allegedly being made to wait outside a Tesco Metro while their posh counterparts from a nearby private school waltz right in.

I'm here to queue in solidarity and protest peacefully, but already things are kicking off. Riot police are pushing back a baying crowd. Bricks, bottles and half-eaten steak bakes are flying overhead. Snatch squads are grabbing anyone not wearing a Barbour and the Black Bloc is kettled outside the artisan breadmaker, along with an anarchist vegan pirate who's live blogging the riot.

Hang on, though: on second glance that's actually James Matthews from Sky News.

Anyway it's mayhem. It's class war. It's the Battle of Orgreave x the Poll Tax riots x one of those diddy parliaments where fights break out over who's got the best moustache. Macramé is useless against the tear gas, so I grab a silk headscarf from a passing pensioner and use that. But she must have a cat and I start sneezing and coughing anyway.

Except not really. I write all this on the bus on the way up there but when I arrive there's actually nothing to see. Where's the queue gone? Where's the barrier? Where are the sneering toffs and starving proles? “We're not supposed to talk about it,” says a Tesco employee, not talking about it with a wry shake of the head and a telling roll of the eyes.

The kids from the state school – Boroughmuir, a couple of streets away – have obviously voted with their feet and gone to Starbucks, where the lunch of choice seems to be Gingerbread lattes and Chocolate Fudge frappuccinos (I'm sure they cover some of the basic food groups). Still waltzing in unhindered are the kids from the private school, George Watson's College. It's where Sir Malcolm Rifkind went, by the way, a man who's very fond of a Barbour and therefore unlikely to get lifted by a police snatch squad.

So, did it happen? Were the Boroughmuir kids made to queue while the Watson's kids were not? Certainly a parent complained on social media and before you knew it the tabloids had as stark an example of social inequality as they could ever want, served up to them on a plate with a silver spoon in its mouth.

Tesco have since issued a statement saying: "This is completely untrue – there has never been any discrimination between state and private school children at this store."

I had a sort of premonition that things wouldn't always be rosy for T in the Park when a shoe that was mine filled with urine that wasn't while I watched a band there some years ago. But I didn't see a nesting osprey becoming the source of the annual rock festival's troubles.

I'm sure there are other reasons behind the organisers' announcement on Thursday that they're cancelling the 2017 event. But an official statement addressed to “the best fans in the world” (ha!) made particular emphasis of the problem with the ospreys, and the logistical and financial “constraints … the resulting planning conditions put upon us”.

Birds, eh? Can't shoot them, can't scare them off with the threat of another headline slot from Kasabian. Au revoir, then, T in the Park. See you again in 2018, maybe, for a hopefully trouble- and osprey-free event. Why not book The Eagles for the comeback show?

In one respect I love the phrase “saved for the nation”. Every time a punch-drunk Scotland goalkeeper peels off his gloves for the last time and hands them over to the next heroic volunteer, a stamp should be produced with his likeness and those words on it. But I'm wary when the phrase is applied to a painting, as it was recently in regard to The Monarch Of The Glen, and I'm downright suspicious when it's used in connection with a building.

This was the case on Wednesday when Chancellor Philip Hammond announced a £7.6 million grant to “save” an enormous stately home, a pile he says was the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride And Prejudice and which the Jane Austen Society says almost certainly was not. Either way, wealth is coming to "Pemberley", actually a place called Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham.

Saved for the nation? Hardly. What Hammond actually means is it's getting a cappuccino machine for the cafe and new carpets for its five miles of corridors – all at taxpayers' expense – and then it's being turned into a tourist attraction so those same taxpayers can be relieved of more of their hard-earned cash to see round it.

Here's a better idea: give it to Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney to live in, and they can invite their new friends at Edinburgh's Social Bite to give the rest of the 350 rooms (no-one's sure of the exact number) to homeless people and rough sleepers. The extensive grounds could be used for a homeless village such as the one unveiled last week, also by Social Bite. Theirs will be built from specially-designed modular houses costing around £30,000 each. And if you still want to charge people to visit, you can do that. Social Bite made their name running sandwich shops in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow along social enterprise lines, so you know the cafe will be excellent.

The T in the Park ospreys aren't the only rare breed making waves this week. The Knapdale beavers are too – as well as making dams, which is what they do in the wild when they aren't being hunted to extinction. You see, even a nocturnal, semi-aquatic rodent has its uses as long as you know which bit to squeeze: a gland located at the south end of a north-facing one contains something called castoreum, a yellow goo the beavers mix with urine to spray on trees and we mix with something else to make perfume to spray on our décolletage. It's probably a Farrow & Ball paint colour too. Of course no self-respecting beaver is going to sit still while the man from the perfumery laboratory snaps on the blue latex gloves, so it's easier to kill them first.

Anyway, back to nature. The Knapdale colony was introduced in 2009 but since then legal and illegal re-introductions have seen Scotland's beaver population rise to about 250. Now, four centuries after they were wiped out, the increasing presence of beavers in the wild has seen them finally granted protected status by the Scottish Government and recognised as a native British species. Well done. Lovely beavers.

But perhaps Holyrood could now do the same for the wallabies which have been stomping around Inchconnachan island on Loch Lomond for the last 60 years. Not strictly a native species, I know, and their anal glands aren't useful for anything but the tourists like them. Do it now before Article 50 is triggered and they have to go home.