Words from long ago still come to the surface with a pop.

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me…” has been doing that since A-level English and Shakespeare’s Richard II.

I was thinking about time when brushing my teeth the other morning. To be honest, I’ve spent more than is slated to remain, but we’ll return to that, once I’ve finished with this old electric toothbrush.

We are advised to brush twice a day, three minutes apiece. That’s six minutes a day. Multiply that by 365 and you are brushing for 2,190 minutes a year, nearly two days.

All for good for your teeth, but an impatient person might well think, six minutes, you want me to spend six minutes a day brushing my teeth. I am not that agitated by nature, but still. It’s funny how being told to put aside time for doing something beneficial can rattle your internal stopwatch.

The thing is, nobody ever tells you to devote so many minutes a day to reading newspapers or crime books, listening to music, playing the guitar. Happy would be such ‘wasted’ time.

This week there are also blood pressure readings to be sent to the doctors, morning and evening. Before each reading, you must sit still for five minutes. Five whole minutes of nothing! Those five minutes don’t exactly fly.

Mandated minutes never do.

As Oliver Burkeman points out in his book Four Thousand Weeks, Time And How To Use It, we tend to obsess about the to-do list, panic about those unread emails, while forgetting we are only here for a limited time. Four thousand weeks, on average, as Burkeman points out. Shockingly, that puts me somewhere around the 3,500 mark.

Time and how to use it has been on my mind, you see, as it is 525,600 minutes or so since I had that heart attack. A whole year. All those amassed minutes spent putting myself back together again. This has been achieved after a fashion. I am now as I was then, apart from a spot of coronary plumbing, and a fistful of tablets each day (now reduced in number by two).

The life you have is the one you’ve got. As a fit and active man, I was unlucky to have had a heart attack, perhaps; but lucky to have suffered nothing worse, and to be in decent enough nick again.

Afterwards it wasn’t so much the big things that mattered. Not the holidays, ambitions and bucket-lists, although a long holiday abroad would be lovely.

A heart attack turns you into a sentimental sort who opines that life is composed of friends and loved ones, companionable pints of beer, walks in the country, chatting on the marital sofa while watching television, the company of your grown-up children, the delight in watching your granddaughter grow.

Each day should with luck contain a cupful of joy, even when everything goes wrong, and a cold wind blows.

Here’s another quotation.

“Forever is composed of nows”.

It’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson. To be honest, I must have been through a few ‘nows’ as that one had slipped my mind. But there it is, in my university copy of The Complete Poems signed (by me, not Emily, sadly) and dated 1977.

Thinking that your life is made up of ‘nows’ is not a bad way to look at it. Now should be enough to keep us going, rather than ‘then’ and ‘if only’.

If we wish to keep a grip on our sanity, do we switch off anything and everything said by the new/old American president? After all, most of what issues from Donald Trump’s pouty mouth constitutes angry noise and stray atoms of verbal crud.

The trouble is, once you say you don’t want to think or talk about whatever stupid thing Trump has said, he splutters something so especially awful you can’t help yourself.

So it is with his presidential statement following the worst US air disaster in a decade, when an American Airlines jet collided with a US army helicopter near Washington DC, killing all 67 passengers.

At such moments, the role of the president is to console and offer condolences on behalf of the state. Trump did that for a while yesterday, before swinging right back to combative mode, speculating, without evidence, that diversity rules under his predecessors may be to blame for the disaster.

When asked by a reporter how he knew this as the investigation had only just begun, Trump said: “Because I have common sense.”

At that moment the bodies were still being fished out of the Potomac River. Many people had lost loved ones. And all Trump wanted to do was make a cheap political point, still ranting at a rally rather than leading a moment of sombre reflection.

It is hard to imagine other presidents dragging grieving relatives through the political mud like that.

Appalling, but it fits with Trump’s habit of flooding the public arena with so much shit that nobody knows where to look or where to stand.

Is it healthy to worry about these things? In the latest episode of Strong Message Here, an engaging BBC podcast about political language, journalist Helen Lewis and comedy writer Armando Iannucci investigate the symptoms of what is known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.

This psychological condition denotes a person who is obsessed with hating to an unreasonable level everything Trump says and does. There are sound reasons for being thus afflicted, as I know from endlessly worrying away at his first presidency, but it can bring you low without offering a way out. And it means we end up talking about the dreadful man all the time.

Perhaps we need a Trump settings button, a bit like with your phone. My phone is now in downtime mode from 7pm to 7am. This is to stop me scrolling X/Twitter and so on, along with the ceaseless torrent of news headlines, while also watching television and or reading the newspaper.

A division of attention that is not good for what I am attempting to watch or read, or probably for my general mental stability.

This strategy seems to be working. You can override the block, but mostly I only do this to stream music.

Everything else has to wait, and this is fine and good.

I need to find that settings button in my mind.

Incidentally, I always like a word that is new to me.

Thanks then to the website Zeteo for pointing me towards its latest episode of America Unhinged on YouTube, where Francesca Fiorentini and Wajahat Ali discuss how Trump blames the DC plane crash on everyone except himself.

That new word, contained in an email from Zeteo, is kakistocratic. This comes from kakistocracy, meaning “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state”.

Wow, what a discovery. I intend to drop that one into this blog whenever possible. Saying that, I don’t wish to write about Trump too often as it gives me a headache.

If you seek a bright side to all this, like Eric Idle singing as he hangs from the cross, perhaps Trump’s end lies in his bad reaction to that awful plane disaster – alongside other deeply questionable decisions, such as pardoning the 1500 law-breaking rioters of Capitol Hill.

In Trump’s behaviour lie the seeds of his undoing.

Well, that’s my hopeful theory, but I hereby pledge to shut up about him for a while.

But not before this footnote, courtesy of Newsweek.

Trump condemned a Federal Aviation Administration initiative to hire people with disabilities in the wake of the Washington, D.C., plane collision, despite a similar initiative having been launched during his first term in office…

People often brandish opinions about TV programmes or films they have not seen. It’s a terrible habit, but one that is to be reproduced here.

I didn’t watch Donald Trump’s inauguration, lacking the willingness or inclination, but I read the ‘reviews’ and sifted the snippets with one wary eye.

Trump the Redux: Racist Grandpa’s Revenge is clearly going to be a difficult watch.

I am not going to list all the disreputable credits.

Here are a few slipping by: the drilling for oil and ignoring the climate crisis, the threatened mass deportations, the tax cuts for the very wealthy, the proposed ending of the right to citizenship to the children of migrants either in the US illegally or on temporary visas, and so on, wearily, scarily, until this mafioso film finally ends.

Oh, and not forgetting the pointless and petulant renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

As with many films nowadays, it is difficult to concentrate with the volume up so loud.

Let’s ignore the shouting and instead look at Trump and media money, old and new.

After the inauguration was moved indoors because of the cold, Trump’s possible worries about crowd size, and/or the integrity of his ‘hair’, there wasn’t much room for ordinary people.

Instead assorted tech leaders crammed into the front row, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jess Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

Not forgetting (if only we could) Elon Musk, owner of X/Twitter and much else besides.

Musk spent $277m supporting Trump at the election – and now the world’s richest man has an unelected seat in the White House, where he decides who gets money from the government, while himself earning a fortune from the government.

Whether that cosy arrangement fits the definition of corruption is entirely up to you.

Oh, and not forgetting (part two), that Trump has launched his own bitcoin named $TRUMP – an unfitting wheeze, but those magic digital beans could make him a fortune.

As for the tech bros, they all bustled over to Trump once they saw where the wind was blowing, donating to his inauguration fund as they snuffled after a good return and hoped-for protection for their already bloated industry.

But there is another interesting strand here, to be found by following what the Trumpian venture capitalist Peter Thiel insists on calling the DISC (the “distributed idea suppression complex”, aka the media).

I never knew that’s what my industry was called. Thanks to Lady Liberty in Private Eye for that corker. Thanks, also, to editor Ian Hislop for the spot-on cover to the new edition. Do try to enlarge this picture. Or, better still, buy a copy.

Rupert Murdoch is an old, nay ancient, hand at this game. Just yesterday, Murdoch spent a reported £10m to settle his legal dispute with the Duke of Sussex, delivering a “full and unequivocal apology” to Harry.

News Group Newspapers, publisher of the Sun and the Times, has spent a reported £1bn over 15 years to settle 1,300 complaints alleging phone hacking and other unlawful activities.

In settling, Murdoch will hope to have silenced further revelations that could have arisen in a full court case.

But here’s another old ink stain.

Thanks to Zeto News for the reminder that Murdoch spent a fortune in the US setting up the propaganda factory known as Fox News. Trump was obsessed with Fox during his first presidency. And now he has handed out a reported 18 roles in his administration to current or former Fox employees.

As Zeto puts it, Trump is using Fox “as a staffing agency”. As for Murdoch, he used Fox to misshape the news to a form he found pleasing, much as he has done for decades with our newspapers here.

It’s not far-fetched to suggest that if Murdoch hadn’t founded Fox News, Trump would never have been president once, never mind twice.

Sharper minds than mine will dwell in detail on the cause of Trump’s victory. But I think it mostly came down to storytelling. Trump had a story to tell. It was filled with holes, lies, conspiracy theories, rage, fury, nastiness, and mad exaggeration. But it was a story with a shape.

The Democrats lacked a matching narrative of their own, even if Joe Biden did much good in the US (if not internationally).

Trump listened to what people were saying, what they were worrying about. Now that he’s elected, he almost certainly won’t feel any loyalty towards the ordinary voters who backed him, being too busy in his billionaire boys’ club.

You hear a lot about free speech from people who want other people to shut up.

Liz Truss, who was prime minister for about three blinks, is said to have sent the present incumbent (six rather long months, plus three or four blinks) a legal letter demanding he stop saying she crashed the economy.

These are “false and defamatory” claims, apparently. She also said Sir Keir Starmer harmed her reputation by helping her to lose her seat in the general election.

Oh, I think we can agree she did those things all by herself.

Funnily enough, this just reminds everyone that Truss did crash the economy, thus resuscitating the sin she wants forgotten.

When a misfiring attempt to censor information instead increases awareness of that information, it is sometimes known as the Streisand effect. This dates to 2003, when Barbra Streisand tried to suppress publication of photographs of her cliff-top residence in Malibu, California. And doing so she reminded everyone of where she lived all over again.

As for Truss, if she had any sense she would keep her head down. Instead, she stubbornly sticks her neck out and reminds us what a disaster she was.

Now she wants people to stop saying she did what we all know she did. Next thing you know that decaying lettuce she was compared to will be sending a cease and desist letter against her; or a Caesar salad and desist letter.

Plenty of very wealthy people love to burble about free speech. UK Reform leader Nigel Farage is always banging on about how Elon Musk has been great for free speech on X/Twitter.

Well, yes – but only if you want to feel free to spout batshit crazy far-right conspiracy theories. Musk has certainly thrown open the doors to that rotten casino, freeing up inflammatory speech of the variety he himself favours.

Should you wish to express anti-Trump or other left-wing views, your opinion may well be lost in the algorithm maze.

With his official role in the upcoming Trump II presidency, Musk has plenty of political power but not one cold ounce of responsibility. And, yes, he can do or say what he likes, but sending endless crazy hate tweets in the middle of the night is not the sign of a well mind.

We don’t have to listen. Yet Musk makes headlines over here with whatever damn stupid or inaccurate thing he mutters past midnight.

Alongside his cynical calls for a new public inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, he swears he is going to get rid of Starmer, tweeting to his 212 million followers: “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”

That’s a member of the incoming US administration trying to undermine a supposed ally. Whatever party you support, this should be a worry.

And have you noticed how those who drone on endlessly about sovereignty suddenly come over all gooey when this right-ring billionaire threatens to depose our elected prime minister.

Of course, Musk is Farage’s great pal. Well, I say pal, but after he dangled the promise of a $100m donation to Reform UK, Musk then declared that Farage was not the right man to lead the party. Not right-wing enough, apparently, which is a head-scratcher.

For far too long we have listened only to the shouters and the bores, the bullies and the bellowers. We have succumbed to their barroom barracking – it’s how we ended up with the still ticking disaster of Brexit, after all. Their day will surely end, although not for a while as Trump blusters back to the White House.

Mark Zuckerburg, another man of fathomless wealth and too much influence, has suddenly decided he favours free speech again. By which he means that he is bowing and scraping towards Trump by removing fact-checkers on Facebook in the US (or Meta or whatever stupid thing we’re meant to call it nowadays).

What a blatant bit of craven crawling. Trump needs fact checking as much as the next bloviating megalomaniac, but he hates being held to account, treating facts as mere dust. And now it looks like he will get away with whatever he wishes on Facebook.

Let’s hope there are a few remaining true journalists in the US who will do their job. Mind you, many of those on the Washington Post are reported to be fleeing because owner Jeff Bezos – the billionaire founder of Amazon (there are too many billionaires in this story, and in this world) – forced the paper to drop its planned support for Kamala Harris before the election.

These billionaires, they all want something from Trump. It’s an unholy moneyed club, if you ask me.

Idle curiosity reveals that in 2024 this ledge amassed 28,000 words across 39 blogs. A search of last year’s text file also uncovers certain obsessions. Politics was mentioned 23 times, the long dead Margaret Thatcher, four times

Nigel Farage 20 times, Donald Trump 73 times. Yet my granddaughter only appeared four times, and she is properly lovely. What sort of priority does this suggest?

My heart attack raised 31 results, and, yes, I have banged on about that a bit. I even composed on piece late in the year about what I’d learned about having a heart attack, and what I’d learned about banging on about it.

Prime minister Keir Starmer earned 20 mentions. Rishi Sunak, now rubbed from the blackboard of public life, warranted ten. Boris Johnson earned 10, more than Liz Truss at six (she’ll blame my counting system, saying it’s a deep-state fix or something).

Kemi Badenoch, the new loon the Tories chose as leader, was worthy of a solitary mention from her time as “the reliably mad business secretary” (my words, not hers).

The general election that now seems so distant was mentioned seven times.

Twitter/X owner and Trump fanboy Elon Musk warranted 10 mentions. The BBC was referred to 47 times… sometimes in a praiseworthy manner, at others being complained about for all the free publicity it gives to Nigel Farage.

Squash was mentioned 14 times (no word of a win).

Cheese was mentioned 46 times, approximately the number of times I would eat cheese on toast in a week, if left to my own devices. Cheese also earned a bonus check or two in those heart attack columns.

Novels have been alluded to six times, to remind myself to start another. God was cited on 12 occasions, largely in the context of having ‘saved’ Donald Trump from an assassin’s bullet; a God responsible for such a ‘miracle’ turns out not to be for me.

Sourdough bread appeared only once. Remarkable, considering how often I wang on about baking the stuff.

GB News was mentioned nine times, eight more times than I have ever watched it.

The Daily Mail won six mentions, the Telegraph 18. This is odd as I don’t care what those newspapers think about anything; all I do is look at the front pages to warm up my left-over anger.

Take yesterday morning. The knighthood for London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan got both newspapers in a spiteful lather, leaving the astute political commentator Steve Richards to tweet: “It’s impossible to have any understanding of British politics without constantly referencing how right wing and hypocritical the media is here.”

Here are those grubby pages…

The Tories knighted and ennobled all sorts of unworthy characters (Sir Gavin Williamson, anyone?) and the attack on Khan seems to be only a sidestep from straight racism.

Mind you, I do wish politicians would stop giving each other honours.

But does worrying about all this stuff do any good, solve anything, make the world better? Is carping from the sidelines with a degree of wit a worthy pastime? It’s certainly fun, but sometimes I wonder about all the politics on this ledge, gathered like the dead sweepings of autumn. To swear off politics all together would be a regret, though, as politics remains my go-to cause of inspiration. The push and shove of it is engaging, even if often what we are shown is a distraction from what’s really going on.

One old friend said after reading my latest heart attack reflection that I was wasted on politics. A kind thought, but I might be lost without it.

Anywhere, here is the actor Kieran Culkin speaking in a recent Guardian interview with Charlotte Edwardes, complaining that “all the big stuff like Trump, or climate, or war, or phones, it’s too much… it’s overwhelming”.

Culkin will switch on the news, “Watch for 10 minutes and go, ‘Oh, we’re all fucked. Got it.’ Like, that’s the narrative. I try not to dwell on it too much…”

‘Oh, we’re all fucked. Got it.’

Not a cheerful motto, but a good one.

As it’s the first day of a fresh one, Happy New Year. Let’s say hello to 2025 and shut the door on 2024 (not my favourite year of all the years).

Are you awake, nodding off or perhaps just woke? I only ask after seeing a silly headline on – checks for loose slates – the GB News website.

This read: “UK goes woke as average Briton ditches late nights for early mornings by going to sleep 20 minutes earlier than 2020.”

It caught my eye for a number of reasons.

Although happy to be called ‘woke’, I am also often awake when sleep would be desirable. It’s a long-running problem. When our now fully grown children were young, I kept a rolled-up futon mattress and a sleeping bag behind the sofa in the front room. When slumber was but a cruel tease, I would trudge downstairs and lie on my makeshift bed.

During one run of bad sleep, I re-read Ulysses by James Joyce. Even that mighty task sometimes failed to untick those little boxes in the head.

I don’t go looking for things on the GB News website but someone on X/Twitter mocked that headline, bringing it to my attention. As is now known, Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a bin bursting with right-wing detritus. That stink you discover when pulling a bulging bag from the dustbin? Yup, that’s what X/Twitter smells like on a bad day.

I should have left long ago. My still being there is mostly down to stubbornness: why should I go just because it’s been taken over by thugs? But I have found other places and will probably soon be gone.

Musk is the world’s richest man, and the most annoying. He owns many things, including the once and future president of the US, having bought himself a role in Trump’s new administration.

Frankly this is appalling, but I have enough mental traffic keeping me awake at night already. Mostly matters of little significance, but in the small hours these loom boulder-large, only to shrink to a pea by the ruffled sheet of morning.

Still, at least the Trump/Musk circus has the potential to go horribly wrong, with the lions eating each other, the jugglers dropping everything, the fire-eaters swallowing their flames and dying from scalding indigestion. And the head clown making an even bigger fool of himself than anyone imagined.

That GB News headline was mocked for suggesting that going to bed early was woke. If so, my being awake late is actually anti-woke, but honestly I’d rather be asleep any night. Instead I am awake and woke, as discussed here in earlier blogs.

Summoning a sigh, I read the story. A thin dull piece of work. They must have spent all the dosh on hiring Nigel Farage, a man much skilled at taking other people’s money.

Some of those commenting beneath that tweet suggested that ‘woke’ in that headline was being used as a pun. This stirred up a sluggish debate about whether GB News would even know what pun might be. As far as I can tell, mostly they are engaged in bigging up Nigel Farage and sticking the word woke on passersby.

The story in question, such as it was, seemed to be based on a press release from Virgin Media O2 suggesting people were switching off their devices 20 minutes earlier than in 2020.

A tale as scrawny as that mattress I used to pull from behind the sofa. Nowadays we have a spare room for my spare hours.

As this is my last ledge of the year, have a good Christmas and sleep well at night. If insomnia strikes, feel free to borrow my ancient copy of Ulysses, held together with Sellotape and filled with callow observations written long ago in biro by a onetime student of English literature who slept at night but didn’t know much about life.

Are protestors a force for good or a social nuisance who need tearing off a strip? You’ll not be surprised to hear it all depends.

The other day York was filled with tractors driven by grumbling farmers. It was quite a sight, all those mammoth wheels rolling through the city, thrilling in a way, even if you didn’t really agree. On the bus at the time, I kept my heckles to myself.

A similar but much larger protest snarled up London, too.

In footage shared on social media, the progress of an ambulance through the capital appeared to be impeded by a rumbling phalanx of tractors. This caused the usual antisocial squabble. Some said, with a marked lack of politeness, that it was a lie to say the ambulance had been blocked by the farmers. Others insisted just as strongly that it had.

Whatever the case, when the same scenario arose during Just Stop Oil protests, assorted newspapers, right-wing pundits and general grouches raised a raucous chorus demanding the protestors be arrested and sent to prison.

Subsequently, five environmental activists behind protests that brought part of the M25 to a standstill were jailed for four and five years apiece.

The people who whined then about blocking roads to save the planet stayed curiously silent on farmers causing a similar ruckus.

You need to be wearing your double-standards lenses to see what’s going on here. In populist shorthand, farmers protesting about changes to inheritance tax are heroes, while those who wring their hands about our rapidly fraying environment are social pariahs who deserve to be cast out (or imprisoned).

If you are Judith Woods writing a column for the Daily Telegraph: “The farmers have taught climate militants a lesson in how to protest with civility.”

Take off those glasses for a moment. Is it really civilised to block up towns and cities with muddy tractors? Isn’t it civilised to stick up for the planet? Surely some farmers might even agree with the environmental protestors.

All those banners proclaiming No Farmers, No Food – while strictly speaking true – could just as easily be replaced by ones saying: No Planet, No Food.

It is also possible to feel for ordinary farmers – and to believe that what the government is trying to do is basically right.

For those targeted by the change are multimillionaires who snaffle up farmland to avoid paying inheritance tax (we’re looking at you for a start, Jeremy Clarkson).

This was something even the Daily Express noticed in June last year, under the headline: Rich snap up farmland to exploit inheritance tax loophole. The Express and other papers at the time reported that the value of agricultural land was hitting record highs as the wealthy sought loopholes to avoid inheritance tax.

Suddenly, Labour tries to do something about that, and they are the villains.

Mind you, one trouble with Keir Starmer’s party right now is that nothing seems thought through. Why did no-one predict the farmers’ fury and head them off at the gate? In the same vein, the ending of the winter fuel payment for the majority of pensioners seems to have caused more bad feeling than it has raised good money (says a man who is £200 or so down on the deal).

One suspicion of those protesting farmers lay in seeing Nigel Farage and his suspiciously clean wellies joining the march. This, remember, is the man whose beloved Brexit caused more harm to farmers than just about anything.

The leader of Reform UK is an extremely wealthy man – supported by other extremely wealthy men. A wealthy man who sucks up to men higher in the money tree, hoping for a pocketful of their dosh.

Never has a man of the people been so rich and so disconnected from the people he pretends to represent.

Never has a man of such scant scruple been so willing to exploit any situation to his own advantage. Never has… oh, just join the dots.

Labour, the Tories, the Lib-Dems, the Greens – the whole lot of them – need to keep reminding voters that Farage knows how to kick up a distraction, knows how to pick an empty-vessel fight, while having no real answers to anything. An immoral sort of fantasy politics that could become a horrible reality.

Whenever Farage is questioned strongly by a journalist, he kicks off, and retreats in a sulking stomp. A sure sign that he needs to be asked as many tough questions as possible.

Disgruntled farmers? Oh, they’re just today’s grist to his self-serving mill.

TV presenter Gregg Wallace makes another online statement… according to Have I Got News For You

MasterChef is a favourite programme in our house. Just about every edition ever made has been watched, laughed at, abused royally and yet found to be oddly engaging.

To explain, this only refers to the ‘proper’ MasterChef where ordinary contestants cook off against each other. The professional chefs and the celebrity amateurs hold little appeal.

MasterChef is enjoyable despite rather than because of Gregg Wallace. Rarely has a presenter seemed so very pleased with himself, grinning from lughole to lughole like a man possessed, his bald head gleaming in celebration of his own marvellousness.

It’s enough to give us baldies a bad name.

Now allegations about Wallace being a sexual nuisance are piling up like greasy plates in a sink.

Should anyone feel sorry for this much put-upon man? Well, a certain bald-headed correspondent called Gregg felt emboldened to speak up for him.

In a video rebuttal Wallace said the complaints against him came from “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age”. The same age as himself, as was widely pointed out.

That gleam you could see was the top of his head sinking into the hole he had just dug.

Wallace then apologised for what hadn’t been much of an apology, but has thankfully been silent since, apart from issuing denials through his solicitors (God, who’d have that job?).

What is it about older men? If only I knew one to ask.

Here’s a workable theory. Older men are aware of younger women because they have been noticing them since they were themselves young. A wary glance in a mirror should remind an older man how he looks now, and further remind him to grow up, behave nicely and stay away from the sleazeball stew.

Sadly, such self-assessment seems beyond some men on television. It is right that Wallace should be subject to scrutiny, especially as his ill-timed video statement seemed designed to stir up culture warriors shouting on his behalf about the world turning woke. And thus transforming the alleged aggressor into the ‘victim’.

But why has this story garnered quite so much attention? Partly it’s just media laziness, with everyone spinning out the same lines. At such times a sort of madness descends, as if nothing else is happening in the world.

This story has prominence for another reason, too. The usual suspect newspapers love to bash the BBC. Any negative story about the corporation is pushed to be top of the news agenda. And then the BBC turns up the heat on itself in a weird orgy of self-harm.

At the time of typing, a bit of corporate jiggery-pokery has seen the pulling of two MasterChef celebrity specials, while MasterChef: The Professionals will contain its run.

Fair enough – it has started and needs to finish.

OTHER sorts of slipperiness are available. Other annoyances can be arranged. Tomorrow night, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage will be a guest on Question Time for what is said to be the 38^th time. Does no other guest exist; is no other undying irritant available?

The BBC has long fallen over itself to promote Nigel Farage. Question Time should be open to anyone, but instead seems designed to give platform after platform to a man who needs no introduction, and who clearly hates the BBC anyway.

Just last January, Farage said he would boycott Question Time as it was ‘biased’. Yeah, too right – biased towards shoving his ugly mug on the television.

Interviewed on Sky News recently, Farage was asked why Reform MP James McMurdock remained a candidate when he’d been jailed for assault. Farage went a funny colour, muttered something about ‘you’ve had your fun and games’, and stormed off saying: “I’ve got a million followers on TikTok, you know”.

And this is the thin-skinned, pathetic stirrer of shit to whom Elon Musk apparently wants to donate $100m (£78m) to upend British politics. That doesn’t sound healthy at all to me.

Asked about this donation by the BBC, Farage did his oily who-me act, pausing only to say that Musk had done wonders for free speech since buying X/Twitter.

Ah, yes – all that work to boost right-wing rant merchants at the expense of liberals and helping to elect Donald Trump.

That sort of free speech ends up costing you dear.

ONE man’s petition demanding a general election has garnered more than 2.5m signatures. What a batshit stupid thing that is.

The petition is on the government website, where motions receiving more than 100,000 votes are ‘considered’ for debate in parliament.

Well, debate this. What this petition illustrates is how tirelessly sections of the right and far-right squirrel away on social media to grub up attention and create a distracting barney.

And yet again it shows how that bonkers billionaire and Trump fanboy Elon Musk uses his platform Twitter/X to support politicians he favours, and to attack those he dislikes.

Debate this, too. Our democracy takes place in Parliament. It’s slow, grinding and often disappoints. But we all take part. Sorry, Elon, we’re not having an election anytime soon because we had one months ago, when Labour won a massive majority.

All governments end up being unpopular, even if this one has been in a hurry to hit the disappointment spot. Keir Starmer seemed to be dusted in disillusion from the off. He should lighten up and go for an inspiring jog or something.

But never mind who is prime minister right now. If we did have democracy by petition, most governments would last only for a few weeks. As soon as we tired of one lot, we’d ask for another.

What’s brought this about? I’ve been thinking about this for a while and believe the answer lies simply in opportunity. This isn’t a surprising or smart observation, but sometimes we forget how the internet and social media have, to use a technical term, kicked politics in the bollocks.

For the right nowadays, a degree of truthfulness or playing by the old rules is mostly gone. Welcome instead to a social media free-for-all fuelled by lies. A cynical game that suits them more than it does the left.

That must surely be one reason Donald Trump won the US election. He took all the anger and refracted it back at his audience. They were angry, he was angry, all angry together. And anger won.

It’s not healthy if anger wins all the time. Those who benefit, like Trump and, to a lesser extent, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, grow strong through other people’s anger. To them fury is like blood to a vampire.

Farage is an old hand at splashing in this shallow, mean pool.  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he blabbered about the petition. At which point everyone chucked out reminders of the petition signed by 6.2 million people calling for for the revocation of Article 50 and for the UK to remain in the EU.

This election petition won’t lead to a general election, but it has been debated seriously on television, sometimes without any cautionary words explaining how Musk jumped in to stir this up, sending in battalions of bots.

How Musk loves to hate our government. He tolerated the last lot as they were right wing, and Rishi Sunak even ‘interviewed’ him about AI. What a squirmer that was.

It’s all so unhealthy and weird. Having inserted himself into American politics, Elon Musk now fancies himself a visiting expert on British politics. He laid into Starmer over the summer riots and chucks out eccentric opinions on contempt of court and hate speech. Now he has nudged along this specious election petition.

How many of those who signed are real, you know, flesh and blood people. How many live in this country? And how many of us think a numpty billionaire who knows nothing about British politics should just pipe down.

Perhaps there should be a petition about that.

JOB centres are “not fit for purpose”, according to the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall.

I’ll tell you what else is not fit for purpose. Politicians saying things are not fit for purpose.

If something is fit for purpose, it does the job required, I guess. But what a deathly phrase, sucking the oxygen from any sentence in which it lands with a thud.

An old BBC page aimed at keeping your English up to date (from November 2010) had this to say about “fit for purpose”.

“This rather prim phrase began life in the field of consumer protection law, characterizing a manufactured product that does what it was designed to do. The implication for the consumer is that if something isn’t fit for purpose, you can take it back and get a refund or a replacement.”

If you managed to read that without nodding off, well done.

Job centres may well not be good at what they are supposed to do. But hearing that leaden phrase didn’t fill me with confidence that things would change.

It’s not always helpful to pull in personal experiences from a while ago, but here goes anyway.

My only experience of job centres was a month on Job Seekers’ Allowance in 2016, post redundancy. That did nothing for what was left of my self-esteem.

But one day I dashed from a meeting at the job centre to interview Jesus, so that was something. To elaborate, it was the actor Philip McGinley rather than the man himself. He was cast in the York Mystery Plays, a purpose he fitted very well.

Here I am after finishing Couch To 5k

It is nine months since my heart attack. Surviving something like that leaves you in a contradictory state. Here’s an example of what I mean by this. I hardly ever think about my heart attack, and yet I think about it all the time.

I try not to talk about it anymore. That heart attack happened to me and most people don’t need to hear about it now. Enough sweat has been squeezed from that sponge.

I might have died, and that is enough to know. We’re not here for ever, but that’s hardly a spoiler. A brush with mortality is a useful jolt of perspective. As the song puts it, Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think). It’s always later than you think, something we don’t like to think about.

Savouring life can be about the big things, but mostly it’s the quotidian, the everyday (such as stubbornly finding complicated words to usurp simple ones).

Here are good things. A long relationship, family and friends. Three grown-up children and one blossoming grandchild. Having a couple of pints in a local bar. Or a Friday night whisky at home. Making bread, sitting down to write. Cycling and playing the guitar.

And reading, there is and always has been reading. My present book is the new Jackson Brodie novel by Kate Atkinson. Like many people who write a bit or even a lot, I have great admiration for Atkinson. Second best to being her is to read her novels.

How glad I am still to be around to read that book.

Loved ones still ask how I am, and the only answer is I am fine. Doing what I did before, or as much as is possible or sensible.

Define ‘sensible’, please. Well, I drink and eat much as before, although with modifications. Exercise is taken as before, although with modifications. Life is lived as before, although with modifications.

I was sensible before I had a heart attack and look where it got me. Now I am sensible again, only a little more so.

There are limits. I will never join my wife in willingly entering a cold pond in the name of health and exercise. Cold water swimming is not recommended for a heart that has stuttered.

What a relief to have an excuse not to dip in freezing water, not that I would have gone anyway. Besides in our circle it’s mostly the women who go; they love that cold water and are welcome to it.

Something I have taken up again is running, to go along with the low-level squash and retired persons’ badminton.

Some months ago I asked the physio at the cardiology gym if running again was possible or even a good idea. She had a look in her eyes, a flicker of recognition: ah, one of those, a runner who just had a heart attack and wants to run again.

Her advice was sensible, if not exactly welcome: do Couch to 5k.

This is a programme devised by the NHS and the BBC to get people active. If you used to run half marathons, you might turn your nose up at that suggestion. Isn’t that for people who can’t even run three yards down the street?

Well, yes, it is, and it’s brilliant. For unfit people who want to run. And for runners who’ve had a heart attack.

There’s an app, there’s always an app nowadays. You begin by walking, interrupted with light jogging.

Over nine weeks you go from shuffle-walk-jog to running three miles. I used to run much further than that, but the achievement of running three miles – and three times in the final week – made me giddier than all those long runs in the past.

Laura, a friend in your ear

You can chose your guide for these runs. I went with Laura, the original voice of Couch To 5k. She is the perfect motivational mate, lovely and encouraging, jollying you along through your headphones with each step. You can go with celebrity voices, but honestly Laura is all you need.

As a ‘graduate’ runner, I have moved on and now Jo Whiley is the voice in my ear. Famous, but no Laura.

It strikes me that we could all do with a Laura in our lives. A friendly voice in the ear to guide you along. To offer encouragement and praise.

To make you write that book or even to get you outside and in the garden sometimes. To remind you to put your phone down or to stop scattering crumbs on the sofa. And not to drink that extra glass of red wine.

Ah, I may have one of those already.

I’ve learnt a lot from my heart attack, and I’ve learnt nothing at all. Mostly just that it’s glorious still to be around.