The idea for this one came at the back with a smell of diesel. Most buses in York whiz around silently. This one was old school.

After dropping the car off at the local garage, I walked a while, then hopped on an unaccustomed number. Never ventured on this route before, but you take your excitement where you find it.

Tourists from a village near Winchester sat next to me. They asked where the bus went and commented on the diesel rattle.

All the buses used to be like this, old and horrid and smelling of a petrol station forecourt. People who bang on about how they hate electric cars should be made to travel only on diesel boneshakers, leaving the rest of us to enjoy the modern age.

Electric cars were the future once, and perhaps they still are, although plenty of people delight in bringing them down. As for the oil companies, they just want us addicted to fossil fuels, like the fossil fools we are.

Those companies are far too powerful, but they love the addled king over the water, who is downgrading everything environmental, although you could just stop that sentence at ‘everything’.

He loves the black stuff, that man, and witters “drill, baby, drill” like a cosplay oilman. Or a demented dentist.

Electric cars are not the future in the US, as he doesn’t like them, even though the billionaire who makes them spent millions of dollars paying for his election. There’s gratitude for you.

Confusingly, he turned the White House into a car lot the other day as a tacky advert for Tesla cars. He even swears he is going to buy one, even though only drives those little electric carts he uses for cheating at golf.

As for me, I have made the principled decision not to buy a Tesla because of Elon ‘Hitler salute’ Musk. This is an easy principle to maintain as I can’t afford one. But you have to make a stand. With enough money I would fancy a Volvo or a VW with a plug.

The bus stopped in a cloud of diesel, and I went off to interview a Polish man who, with his wife, has opened a bakery and bistro in York. People coming over here to make lovely food and brighten our dull lives. It’s almost as if Nigel Farage never existed, which was tragically not the case last time I checked.

Also that morning I bumped into someone from old people’s badminton, then popped into my favourite bookshop to say how much I’d enjoyed the last book from there. Night Waking by Sarah Moss, in case you’re wondering.

Outside the shop the sun was shining, spring was here, but other springs were on my mind.

We’d been with my mother last weekend, driving round and round the tiny lanes in the back of nowhere, or Macclesfield to be precise, while she tried to remember exactly where her friend lived. When we finally arrived, as we got out of the car there was a loud metallic springing noise, an unwelcome echo of that once made by Zebedee on the Magic Roundabout.

It was not encouraging.

The bus back was electric, swift and silent. Wonderful vehicles, apart from when they loom behind you without a warning when you are cycling.

Hopping off, I walked up the hill, then down to the garage, where the mechanic hoisted up the car and pointed to the broken spring. And two knackered shock-absorbers.

The next shock I had to absorb was the cost.

Later, he led me to my revived car. The garage has a carwash and the car being finished off was an electric Audi.

“What’ll happen when we all drive those?” I asked.

“Petrol,” he said. “You need to keep driving petrol.”

I didn’t tell him about my electric dreams.

Just then an unnecessarily modified Ford drove past with one of those loud popping exhausts. Then circled by again, just in case nobody had noticed the first time.

How will fumy young poseurs cope when the petrol runs out?

We’ve always talked about going to the annual Hold Steady gig at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, without doing anything about it.

But now we are here.

I got my eldest boy into this American band years back now. We saw them early on with Counting Crows in Manchester. And now we are here for their Weekender party, a regular date on the Camden calendar.

The venue is one loud, heaving party, all joyous and hectic, sweaty and beery.

As we end up in a lively scrum near the front, I am glad of my son’s presence. This trip was his idea, he did all the organising, and now he has my back.

It doesn’t take much to get this crowd going, and it’s fair to say they are not careful with their beer. Without the support of those around them, the least stable fans would fall over, and some do that anyway, redistributing their drinks as they go down.

It’s surprising just how much the fans adore this band. A fine adoration, for sure, but I had no idea the fans would be so ardent, and so physical, so completely into the Hold Steady. Theirs is a raucous ecstasy, leaping about, flinging their arms, jumping like pneumatic drills, and shouting the lyrics back at Finn.

Standing near the front now seems to have been a little reckless. The mostly blokeish mob surges forward, then falls back, pushing and pressing in a hefty conga line.

“Are you all right, Dad?” says Spencer behind me, as the wave returns.

It’s funny to think of it now, but when he was a toddler he used to hide behind his mother’s legs, or even under her skirts, too shy to be seen. And now he is a man of six foot two and acting as a human prop to his small old dad. Five foot eight, and I’m sticking to that now eroded truth.

I am glad that little boy grew into this man, I think, as the fans surge back again. I helped to look after him, and now he is looking after me in the midst of this happy riot.

The Hold Steady, fronted by Crain Finn for 20 years and more, tell stories of drugs and alcohol, religion and redemption, hope and despair. Often these rock yarns have roots in Minneapolis, where Finn grew up.

Rampaged youth is viewed through a long smudged lens. The songs are rocking, uplifting and yet gentle too, fond and packed with believable characters, all seeming so real.

Finn often sings and speaks about how he only just made in out of that party maze, as in this key lyric: “Killer parties almost killed me.”

A phrase that gave a title to their debut album in 2004. Two years later saw the release of what is considered their greatest album, Boys And Girls In America, and the opening track, Stuck Between Stations, gets the party started tonight.

Finn is, you have to admit, an unlikely rock star, a balding 53-year-old in heavy-framed black spectacles, perhaps a little tubby, looking like someone’s dad on a livelier night out than he intended. Yet as soon as he speaks or sings, the charisma shines out. There is something about this crumpled rock god, an everyday sort of hero.

It is a night of stories and songs, tales and tunes, and some killer chords. This band has survived lots of those, too. Two guest horn players turn six into eight, filling out the sound, and allowing songs such as Sequestered in Memphis to kick up a gear.

Chips Ahoy is another lively treasure. The opening lyrics get everyone going again –

“She put $900 on the fifth horse in the sixth race
I think his name was chips ahoy

Came in six lengths ahead

We spent the whole next week getting high.”

Stay Positive is in there too, one of the band’s sturdy anthems.

“There is so much joy in what we do up here,” says Finn towards the end.

After the last encore, as is traditional with this band, Finn chants: “We are the Hold Steady – you are the Hold Steady…”

This really does feel like a community or the livelier sort of church – even if you wouldn’t want to invite some of the worshippers round to your house after the ‘service’.

Everyone leaves hot and happy, a little battered and bruised, but feeling positive, as instructed.

We go back to our hotel smelling of beer. The next morning, probably still smelling of beer, we walk through Hyde Park in the sunshine, then visit the V&A Museum, before heading back through the park to Speakers’ Corner and Oxford Street, something to eat, a beer, then home.

Finn went with us too, still filling our heads with his killer songs and killer stories. How good it is to have finally made that gig. A glorious night. But next time, if there is one, I will stand further back.

SOME days I go for a run. One slow foot follows the other, my heart seeming steady, almost as if nothing ever went wrong in there.

The other morning I ran into a raggedy throng of young people. It must have been non-uniform day. Blazers had been put aside, trousers or skirts left at home, smart shoes stored wherever teenagers keep their footwear.

The answer long ago to that last matter was in the hall of our house, where trainers were moored like beached dinghies, especially when the boys had their friends round.

Counting the minutes to rest and a mug of tea, I labour on and chuckle to myself that these teenagers had swapped one uniform for another. How amusing. They are free to wear what they wish, and yet they all look exactly the same.

A man of my age cannot be expected to know much about what teenagers wear, but let’s settle for sportswear, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, hoodies and sweatshirts. Same colours, same styles, celebrating their sartorial freedom by being alike.

Those who cycled hung their helmets from their handlebars, in which position the usefulness of this form of head protection can be called into question.

This might make a blog, I thought, while trundling against the tide of youth. What they made of the ageing man sporting headphones atop a hand-knitted hat, his face red, his frown set for the finishing sofa, remains unknown. Probably nothing, as why would they.

Ha, but young people, they’re all the same, aren’t they?

Once cooled off and showered, I sought out my Levi jeans with the bottoms folded over – “I grow old … I grow old …/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”, as the poet TS Eliot put it – to be worn above sensible shoes or the more robust sort of trainers, paired with a checked or striped shirt or a nice woollen jumper, topped with a tweed jacket, all capped off with something flat up top.

Mine is a Peaky Blinders number, that crowning cliché.

I like that hat, those rolled-up jeans, those jumpers and jackets. When I see other men of a certain age dressed the same, as happens, I think, oh, they look good. Just as those teenagers must have thought about each other’s fashion choices that morning.

You are what you wear, they say. And someone else is almost certainly wearing it, too.

MY WIFE hardly listens to a word I say these days. Perhaps that happens after 40 years. She’s has heard everything I have to say at least once.

And anyway it is all my fault. I bought her wireless headphones for Christmas. She wears them when painting, cooking, reading. I’ll start to say something and think, oh, she’s plugged into a story or music or someone talking about art.

Then again, I am wearing my headphones as I type, with the volume up. This is not about getting even, it’s just to hide from the noise.

You may have read about that fog alarm at Longships Lighthouse, just off the Cornish headland, going off every 13 seconds for a week.

According to a report in the Guardian, “Local people have been advised to invest in a set of earplugs while visitors heading to the tourist destination said they feared being kept awake at night.”

I feel for them all. The other half of our semi is being remodelled almost from the ground up, while a bungalow has also been built at the end of the garden. It’s been going on for months, and the noise can’t be helped, but these past few days it’s been deafening, drills screaming and battering, metal and wood being cut or sawed, hammers hammering.

With luck the new neighbours, when all is done, will be quiet. Then again, we’ve been so long without a neighbour, they might think we’re the noisy ones, especially with someone or other playing the guitar at all hours.

Are you a capital sort or inclined to a lower-case view of the world? A recent headline in the Guardian – The death of capital letters: why gen Z loves lowercase – suggests it could be to do with age.

Then again, it might just be fashion. These things come round again, like flared trousers and fascism.

Perhaps it’s also a reaction against the orange-hued unmentionable potty-mouth who rants in capital letters on his social media posts. But let’s proceed without further mention of the man who fancies himself to be an Elvis Costello album title. King of America, in case you’re wondering.

It’s easy to muddle these alphabetical generations, to forget who belongs where. Gen Z embraces people born between 1997 and 2012. On the young side to one who appeared in 1956. That makes me one of those boomers, the generation who snaffled all the opportunity and stole all the money, although someone forgot to tell my bank account about this.

I don’t have anything against lowercase letters as such, or against young people who see cultural merit in purging capitals from what they write.

But where’s the cultural merit in beating up on the older guys?

The other day a committee of MPs warned against the “ageist stereotyping” that slams my generation for stockpiling wealth while younger generations struggle. As it happens, that report also highlighted a worrying degree of digital exclusion among older generations. Thankfully, on that score, I am digitally enabled to complete distraction.

Anyway, upper and lowercase letters. Overuse of lowercase can lead to confusion, as capital letters guide the eye through a sentence like grammatical fingerposts. Then again, too many capitals spoil the view and obscure meaning.

My theory is that the eye skims over lowercase letters, then finds traction with the occasional capital letter. But I’m not going to shout about it or hit the caps key.

Thanks to Simon Garfield’s engaging typographical wander Just My Type (published in 2010) for the following advice in relation to emails: “CAPITAL LETTERS LOOK LIKE YOU HATE SOMEONE AND ARE SHOUTING.”

Same thing on social media. Whereas too many lowercase letters suggests morally superior mumbling.

Thanks to Garfield, too, for the reminder about how we ended up referring to upper and lowercase letters. It’s all to do with old-style printing.

“The term comes from the position of the loose metal or wooden letters laid in front of the traditional compositor’s hands before they were used to form a word – the commonly used ones on an accessible lower level, the capitals above them, waiting their turn.”

That is also where to ‘mind their ps and qs’ originates, as the letters were so alike when dismantled from a block of type that care had to be taken into which compartment of a tray they should be tossed.

Karim Salama, founder of the digital marketing firm e-innovate, told the Guardian that the trend for lowercase letters was a reflection of gen Z’s need for self-expression. Not sure they invented self-expression, but let’s not quibble, or get into inter-generational spats, as we should all agree to just get on.

Salama said: “Using lowercase is straightforward and free from the constraints of past generations.”

We all end up being the past generation sometime or other. Anyway it might also be an understandable reaction against the bellow world, that cruel cacophonous place where he – and it usually is a ‘he’ – who shouts loudest, who bullies and bashes, who belittles and demeans, who lies and libels, comes out on top.

Lovers of lowercase might just be the quiet mutineers of the day, rebels without a capital cause; or perhaps they’re just following the latest linguistic trend.

Either way, another way with words will be along soon enough.

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.