Are you suffering from patchy memory? Do you conveniently forget terrible things you once did? Is there a 14-year lacuna in your mind? Is everything now mostly just a blank? Do you enter a room at your club and forget what you went in there for?

If you answered yes to any of the above, it is likely that you are a Tory thinking of jumping ship to Reform UK.

Whatever the case, help is at hand. That renowned quacksalver Nigel Farage will sign your sicknote and dispense quick-capitulation tablets that will make you denounce your former party in a shameless second. What’s more, those magic memory pills will erase everything you believed in until five minutes ago.

And you will then reel off flagrantly hypocritical speeches about how your old party should never be allowed near power again.

In that one particular you will be right. But everything else you spout should be ignored by all sensible people.

In the latest people smuggling news, Suella Braverman has followed Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi in leaving the Conservatives for Reform UK.

And in case you’ve forgotten, that’s the former Home Secretary who was forced to resign by Liz Truss and later sacked by Rishi Sunak.

Forced to resign by Liz Truss, the worst prime minister in political history, now reduced to shouting out conspiracy theories on her own YouTube show. Or perhaps it’s only available to view on Oh-Not-You-Tube.

“Britain is suffering, she is not well,” Braverman said as she hopped barges. “Our nation stands weak and humiliated on the world stage.”

Those pills must have really kicked in. She seems to have quite forgotten that she served as part of the Tory government for nine years. Perhaps she was being held hostage or something, waiting to be rescued by the People’s Army of Nigel.

It’s all very well slagging off broken Britain. Just wait till someone tells her who broke it.

And there is something else in those pills. A malign ingredient that makes you see things that are not there. Swallow one of Farage’s Magic Pills and the great city of London becomes a crime-swamped hellhole in which no-one is safe.

He’s always going around the world telling that lie. So just remember this. London isn’t broken. Britain isn’t broke. Farage just wants people to think it is. He only knows how to break things. That’s why he spills poison into the world’s ear. Only it isn’t Hamlet’s father who will be done for on this occasion. It’s the rest of us, poisoned by his vial of lies.

No-one was that surprised when Robert Jenrick skipped over to Reform, as he’d been trying out nasty far-right lines for ages, like a man pulling faces in a hall of fascist mirrors. As for Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor eventually paid HMCR just under £5m after making what he called a “careless mistake” over his tax. Oh, and don’t forget he was the one who claimed expenses for heating his horses.

These shapeshifting Tories are like that unfortunate museum visitor whose tumble down a staircase smashed three priceless Chinese vases.

Nick Flynn later blamed his fall at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge on a “Norman Wisdom moment” and a loose shoelace.

If any departing Tory tries to pull that one, you’ll know that they’ve overdosed on Nigel’s pills.

And there is something else in Farage patent medicine. What else can explain the hold that fake man of the people has over everyone. He’s hypnotised the lot of you with his shouty open mouth, rotten teeth – so rich and yet no time for the dentist – and endless lies and scheming, his tireless begging of US billionaire bucks, his pursuit of power without doing any actual politics.

And here’s the really odd thing. Something so obvious it hardly needs saying. But let’s spell it out anyway. If Reform UK is stuffed full of disgraced ex-Tories, then it’s just the Conservative Party with a different lanyard. Not rebellious. Not different. Not outsiders. Old kids, same block.

Time to beware yet again of quack doctor Farage and his tincture of Thatcherism. At the last election everyone was so sick of the Tories that Labour was handed an unexpected landslide. It would be mad if the follow-on from that was to then elect an even worse sort of Tory party.

I am sitting on the train, doom scrolling.

In the US a slavery exhibit is being removed from an historic site in Philadelphia. This is to please Donald Trump who thinks remembering slavery is ‘anti-American’.

As the train rattles towards Leeds, I remember how slave trader Edward Colston was dunked in Bristol docks during an anti-racism protest in 2020. The toppling of his statue was seen at the time by right-leaning historians as a disgraceful rewriting of history.

And now an extremely right-wing, autocratic US president is removing reminders of slavery from US history. One irony in this is that Trump would surely have been a slave owner had he been around back then.

Thinking about all this is depressing. As is doom scrolling the latest slipperiness from his British acolyte, Nigel Farage. A man who lies and shouts and evades and blusters. All so that he can dodge whatever question is sent his way and in so doing fool enough idiots into casting a vote for his party.

A man whose every political sin or omission is forgiven or ignored by the media (financial ‘irregularities’, past or present racism, spending half his time in the US toadying to Big Oil).

Not him again, you may well say. Not that shameless man again. Not that indefatigable stirrer of shit.

You may well have a point.

I stop to consider what is going on in this train. A toddler in the seat ahead leans to kiss the window. She looks round at me, then turns away. That window is clearly more interesting than an old man in a cap.

Normally the train goes straight to Halifax but today you have to change at Leeds. A longer trip but I have done too much driving lately.

At Leeds station the train to Chester is leaving soon, stopping at Halifax. Boarding with a minute to spare, I sit at one of those tables for four people.

A woman diagonally over the way is having one of those phone conversations better suited to somewhere less public. She is discussing, it gradually transpires, her divorce. She shares various details about the man she wants rid of, his unkindness, the things he has done or said. She mentions mental health problems she has had in the past.

Matter of fact and unself-pitying, she even laughs at times. But still, it’s not a phone call I’d conduct in public, on a train, across from an old man with listening ears under his cap.

As the train pulls into Halifax, I stand to leave and she continues discussing her divorce. I miss the rest of her story. Often I sit with headphones on, doom scrolling. Leaving your ears open has advantages, and disadvantages. Doom scrolling mostly just has disadvantages; if you stop doing it, nothing in the world changes but your mood does lift a little.

I am in Halifax to interview a potter in his studio. We chat surrounded by drying pots and mugs, like something off The Great Pottery Throw Down.

Later I am back on the slow train. I glance at my phone. Trump has said that Nato allies did not properly fight alongside the US in Afghanistan, where as in fact 457 of our troops died. This statement from Trump is so outrageously wrong even Keir Starmer is getting cross.

I put down my phone. Behind me a young woman is listening to music on her phone without headphones. How generous of her to share. I put on my headphones to listen to the new album from the American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, who had a stroke five years ago but has made a significant recovery. She is sounding good. She is also sounding mightily angry about the US.

The man in front has something up on his laptop. He is using headphones, so that’s a mercy. After a while I realise he is watching Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a new Netflix drama. We are going to give that a try. But not tonight because it is the final of The Traitors on BBC1. Once snotty about that sort of thing, I have enjoyed this series.

Don’t tell anyone or whatever credibility I have left will be gone.

Headlines in the Telegraph and the Sun

This one will address pubs and beer, but first a gulp or two of less appealing liquids.

Here are things that aren’t happening, never mind what certain people say.

The Labour government isn’t cancelling local elections, never mind how often Nigel Farage hisses like a Siamese cat with its head stuck in a tin. It is true that elections for nine councils in England have been postponed from May 2025 to May 2026, so that the councils can take part in local government reorganisation.

All other local elections will go ahead as planned in May, not that the government is looking forward to them.

Nothing has been cancelled, although the people saying that things have been should be.

PS: the Government also did not cancel Christmas; despite what you might have read online, the season went ahead as normal, for good or ill.

Sir Keir Starmer does not wish to cancel the social media site X never mind what Elon Musk, the site’s 54-year-old multi-billionaire owner, says. Musk always carries on like a whiny14-year-old.

What government ministers have said, reasonably enough, is that people should not be able to use X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to create sexualised images of women without their knowledge or consent. Some of these altered images are also said to have been of children. Why would that even be a thing?

Musk has agreed, mid massive sulk, that only people who pay him to use X can now do that awful thing.

Nothing to do with suppressing free speech. It’s about decency and not behaving like a dick. Or a 14-year-old who can only see the world through his. And, no, I would not like to change ‘dick’ to ‘duck’, as suggested just now by Word’s artificial intelligence interference monitor.

And, no, this does not make Britain a police state, Mr Musk.

For clarification, a police state is a country where an innocent 37-year-old woman is shot dead in her car by a government ICE agent, as happened earlier this week.

Her name was Renee Nicole Good (above). She was a mother and a Christian, or so it is reported. It is also reported that the man who shot her is a Christian, although where does that get us?

Before anyone knew what had happened, Trump and his gruesome acolytes went on television to say without evidence that it had been her own fault. They put on their fibbing faces, the only ones that fit, and said Good ran over the agent who then shot her in self-defence. Yet assorted film clips from different angles appear to show that the agent remained quite uninjured.

This is what happens when everyone lies to back up the lies of the man who lied before they all did. A sorry game of liars’ leapfrog.

Also, back on our own shores, London is not a crime-ridden hellhole, never mind what assorted right-wingers here and in the US say. Go for a weekend and find out for yourself. You’ll have a good time.

Trump does have his fans over here who nuzzle up to that old orange face and sing his praises.

Among Brits lurking in that squeamish vicinity are two former Tory prime ministers. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are seemingly in competition to see who can crawl the most to Trump. I don’t care who wins as they are both, to quote their unworthy hero, losers.

And, no, never mind what you might have read in the Telegraph or the Mail, the government isn’t waging war on country pubs by wanting to reduce the drink-drive limit.

As this was going to be my original starting point, let’s put in an item break and go for a drink.

I STARTED swallowing beer as a slightly under-aged drinker in the 1970s and continue now as a slightly over-aged drinker. A decent hand-pulled pint is one of the sainted glories of British life.

And, yes, pubs have faced difficult times, so news that the government may relent on its plan to raise business rates for pubs is a good thing.

No less a York authority that John Pybus, landlord of the splendidly eccentric Blue Bell pub in Fossgate, told the BBC website: “I think a lot of businesses are going to be squeezed into non-existence in the next financial year.”

But drink-driving is a different matter. Years ago I used to have the odd glass of wine at lunch and drive home later. But now if I’m behind the wheel, I don’t drink.

And why should reducing the drink-drive limit hurt country pubs when there is so much alcohol-free beer available nowadays?

Our local bar always has one alcohol-free beer on tap. Not a patch on the real stuff but perfectly OK. It won’t spoil lunch or a night out.

Still the usual suspects spout on, even though this is about road safety, keeping people whole.

As we know, Nigel Farage, the brag and moan man of politics, complains about everything all the time. He says that lowering the drink drive limit would be “absolutely ridiculous and wholly unnecessary”. He also claims the proposals were the work of the “Islington, north London bicycling classes” who “hate” rural Britain.

Ah, there he goes, wheeling out those stale cliches again. What a load of beer-dribbling twaddle.

Should you yearn for more, here’s Stanley Johnson burbling in the Telegraph over the froth of his pint – “We must be allowed to have a pint and still drive. It is an essential freedom.”

Ah, yes, the essential freedom to get pissed and run someone over. What a twerp.

Full disclosure: I have been known to have two pints – or even two-and-a-half very occasionally, look at me go – and to then cycle home, although not all the way to Islington.

Perhaps that is not something to boast about. Anyway mostly now I am carried home by my bus pass, which is almost certainly safer.

As today is Sunday, I shall be going for a pint or two later. A short walk away so need for the alcohol free.

THIS time last year, I looked back at what this blog had covered in the previous 12 months. Nigel Farage was mentioned 20 times, Donald Trump 73 times – another ‘win’ to go with his fake peace prize from FIFA.

That exercise won’t be repeated as it’s too depressing to be reminded how often those two occupy space in my mind.

This does though present a problem for a blogger who tends to write about politics. Do those who indulge my words and opinions want more Trump and Farage or is everyone frayed half to death by all the attention given to such terrible men.

What bliss it would be to ignore Trump, to drop him into history’s over-filled bin or, better to still, to wipe away his name as if from a blackboard (not a whiteboard, as he probably thinks those are better).

But just when you think it would be best to ignore Trump for now, to think of something else, anything else, he goes and invades Venezuela, kidnapping the president and his wife, declaring he will now be running the country, while also calling on his billionaire pals to share in the oil spoils.

This matter requires a better understanding of foreign affairs, a firmer grasp of the ways of old men who want to take the world with them, than I possess.

The US has just conducted something between a hostile takeover and a war. It isn’t about drugs, as Trump maintains. To recall that famous catchphrase from the Watergate scandal film All The President’s Men, “follow the money”.

The US attack is reported to have created a financial windfall for billionaire investor Paul Singer, who is said to have donated untold millions to Trump and Republicans in Congress.

Trump will now do whatever the hell he wants in the world, while ignoring international law. And it’s all about the money, alongside Trump’s wish to cause distraction (especially from those Epstein files), and to act like a tough guy even though he’s a spoilt softie who cheats at golf.

One of Trump’s often professed mad ideas has been that the US should conquer the Arctic territory of Greenland. Keir Starmer actually spoke against Trump on this, insisting that Denmark and Greenland should determine Greenland’s future.

This was encouraging in an age of what some are calling sycophantic diplomacy. This is what goes on if all the world has to pretend that a mad president isn’t mad at all, instead saying what a grand old president he is; or something like that.

Oh, as well as Greenland, Trump seems to be eyeing Columbia, Mexico, Iran and Cuba. America First is no longer a slogan for that country’s domestic politics – it means putting America first against all other countries. Shooting first and asking questions later. Or not asking anything at all, just shooting.

As for Farage, he’s the biggest Trump sycophant around, a Donald tribute act at the windy end of Clacton pier.

But the parallels here are worrying, and once again it’s all about the money.

Christopher Harborne, a leading cryptocurrency investor who lives abroad and once bankrolled Boris Johnson as an MP, recently donated £9m to Reform UK.

Should one small party be free to accept so much money; who else is funding Farage; and what proportion of such donations come from abroad and the US in particular?

Oh, and how much is spent on all those bots that support Reform UK, those digital splodges of aggression from accounts with two followers, or none at all?

Without social media, and his admitted skills at exploiting it, Farage would struggle to get anywhere. He’s never had time for political foot-slogging. Twisting things on social media and hanging around big money men to see what falls from their pockets is so much more congenial.

Just think, if social media hadn’t been invented, we would all find more productive ways to spend our time. And Trump and Farage might not be here to spoil our lives.

Oh, and it shouldn’t need pointing out but posting on social media that Trump should invade Britain and remove our prime minister isn’t patriotism. It’s treason, basically.

It’s unfashionable to defend Keir Starmer. I have my qualms but still believe that he offers a safe, diligent and thoughtful presence during troubled times. He is also quietly getting on with undoing the mess of long Tory years. And would you really rather have that chancer Nigel Farage, who offers refuge to the worst Tories?

Anyway, here is something sensible Starmer has just said about populism, that hard to shift graffiti of politics…

“We need to shoot down this idea that slogans and easy answers will fix the country. Johnson pretended to drive a bulldozer through a wall saying that would get us £350m a week for the NHS. It didn’t happen. Farage pretended that leaving the EU would reduce immigration. The opposite happened. We’ve already taken steps on food and agriculture to align with the EU’s single market. I think we should get closer. If it’s in our national interest to have even closer alignment with the Single Market, we should consider that and go that far.”

We are where my mother lives before driving back to York for Christmas.

Dashing out on a mission I pass one of the neighbours. We’ve spoken before but she’s forgotten that. ‘Are you a new resident?’ she asks.

A while later I go to put a bag of rubbish down a chute and meet a dog called George. Pets aren’t allowed here and George’s owner asks if I am all right with dogs. ‘So-so,’ I say.

‘I can see that,’ he says.

George runs up to me regardless, trailing his lead, then does a friendly circuit around my legs His owner calls him back and explains that the flat used to belong to his father.

Then he asks: ‘Are you a new resident?’

‘No,’ I say, trying not to sound mildly cross.

Twice within the space of an hour. I must look older than I thought. All that exercise and latent vanity and people still think I might live in a retirement home. This is both mildly annoying and yet unsurprising. I’ve just checked and the age limit is 60 and I am more than nine years past that.

So I could be in one of those apartments off the long corridor where often no one stirs, apart from a visiting dog called George.

But still, it’s a bit much. I will never live in one of those places until, well, age and fate suggest otherwise.

Mum is nearly 94, wobbly after a bad fall in the summer, and she still feels put out about living somewhere like that.

Now we are home in York, sitting on the sofa. I am typing this and mum is asking if I know where her phone is. I often ask myself the same about my own phone.

‘Are you sitting on it?’ I say. That turns out to be the solution.

Anyway, this is a diversion around the rocks of age rather than the usual Trump-bashing, Farage-despairing to be found around here. Such topics will almost certainly still be there in the new year. But for now I am parking the opinions for Christmas with all the usual familial suspects, aged three to 93.

The youngest member was asked at nursery what she was looking forward to at Christmas. ‘Meeting all my family,’ she said.

Have a happy Christmas, whatever your age, whether you are looking after or being looked after. Or just hoping to slope off to a party soon (guilty on that score) and later to visit the shed where a mini-cask of beer sits cooling.

LET this all make sense. Donald Trump now seems to think Europe is the enemy. Or this week’s enemy. It can be hard to keep up.

Any day now he’ll be shouting at his own shadow – “If you don’t stop following me around like that, I’ll have you deported in chains.”

Oh, and if you have ever posted anything mean about him, you’ll not be allowed into America. More of that in a moment.

First, the US has published a security strategy that runs to 29 pages. Alongside much puffery about how well Trump is dong – so well, so much better than anyone ever in history before, etc – there is a warning about Europe. Economic stagnation, censorship of free speech, the suppression of political opposition, falling birthrates and migration all “raise the stark prospect of civilization erasure”, according to Trump.

In a poorly attended rally in Pennsylvania the other day, Trump raised the stark prospect that his own common decency had been erased for good. As if campaigning all over again, he wondered why the US only accepts people from “shithole countries” such as Somalia, adding: “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden… from Denmark?”

Incidentally, why citizens from those sane and well-run countries would wish to move to a dwindling US remains a mystery.

And, scarily, US policy is now hard to distinguish from a Fox News broadcast or an unhinged Daily Telegraph columnist going off on a white supremacist rant.

Trump says Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” and pledges to back far-right ultra-nationalist parties leading what he sees as the “resistance”.

Wow! Wake up Europe. Wake up Britain. Wake up the EU. Trump wants to rule the western world. That’s why he’s been putting out delusional messages about how all Europe is clamouring for him to be their president. They all love me, he says, reading off the cracked autocue of his mind. No we don’t. Many Europeans think you’re a dangerous, self-obsessional loon with thinner skin than the average sausage.

And wise up Keir Starmer. This is where crawling to Trump gets you. Offer him a totally unwarranted second state visit and he’ll grin like a self-swilled goon for a day only to throw it all back in your face.

Flatter his sorry old arse and all you’ll get in return are pledges to support the likes of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, and their far-right equivalents in other European countries.

A disproved right-wing conspiracy theory about “the great replacement theory” claims Muslims are moving into Europe in order to see off western culture. A foul fallacious idea now promulgated by the White House.

This is all bad, mad, wicked and wrong. Trump wants to extend his Maga movement into Europe, possibly to weaken or break the European Union. All of which must please Putin’s Russia no end.

No mystery then why wealthy, posh and entirely bogus man of the people Nigel Farage spends so much time in the US. He’s not interested in British politics as it is usually conducted. No, he’s after Trumpian help, money and validation. If you can’t see that, you’re looking down the wrong hole in the ground.

Trump also intends to introduce strict rules for anyone wishing to travel to the US. These include details of all social media accounts from the past five years. If you’ve said anything unkind about dwindling Don, you’ll not be let in. That’s me and approximately half of Europe staying at home then. Or visiting somewhere more congenial.

You may also have to provide your DNA. All phone numbers and email addresses from the past five years. And the same for family members. And – oh, I’ve had enough of repeating this authoritarian nonsense.

Ironies abound here. If free speech is so restricted in Europe, how come right-wingers receive so much unquestioning attention; how come Nigel Farage has so much exposure and media support, especially on the BBC?

And how come a president who endorses AI images of himself as a pilot king dumping loads of shit on his rebellious subjects gets to whinge about freedom of speech?

Oh, and if we’re talking about cultural invasion, which country has done the most to bombard the rest of the world with its values, music, films, TV and fast food? Yup, the US.

Now you may like US culture, or you may not. Personally I’ve always enjoyed many Hollywood films, the better sort of US TV and much of the music. Either way, we’re up to our necks in the stuff.

Now they’ve exported their barmy president, too. We’re sinking in Trump-swill. However much you try not to think about the man, he dwells in your tired mind. As this blog has just shown yet again.

LOOK, I can’t claim to understand how budgets work. I barely comprehend my own. I squint at the banking app and look away until my wife sidles over with a quaver of concern in her voice.

I trust my wife on finances more than I trust myself; and I trust the chancellor Rachel Reeves more than all those misogynistic twerps calling her Rachel From Accounts.

And I trust Reeves more than Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch or the editors of the usual suspect national newspapers that disparage or despise anything and everything this Labour government does.

Oh, and I definitely trust her more than Chris Mason, the BBC’s weaselly political editor.

The budget was in the headlines for days on end. This was mostly thanks to a whipped-up delirium of headlines claiming that Reeves had ‘lied’ about the state of the nation’s finances as predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

That set the outrage wind machine turning. Imagine, if you will, a giant film-set fan blowing angry hot air. Or that wind symbol found on old maps, a man with puffed red cheeks from time spent in bars, hiding a hernia got from lifting boxes heavy with weighted facts.

As for Mason, he fidgeted away doing what he always does, which is to amplify whatever the usual suspect newspapers peddled that morning. Without their biased bellowing, he wouldn’t know where to start or what to say.

After a working life spent in and around the inky sheets, I don’t always find it easy to face up to what newspapers are – or some of them, at least.

But the worst newspapers are little more than propaganda machines, aren’t they? Sure, readers who still buy them may do so for various honest reasons. The sport, the crossword, the features, the recipes, whatever.

But those squawking front pages? They are battering rams filled with boiling oil (to mix the medieval siege engine metaphors).

The Mail and Telegraph, backed often by the Times and the much diminished Express, were outraged that Sir Keir Starmer won the election. And since that unexpected victory, all they have done is campaign to undermine Labour.

Now you might well think, what has Starmer done to deserve our support. And that’s the hole he has planted himself in. He’s loathed by the usual suspects; and those who should show him a little love are too often put off by the way he behaves.

Much as Donald Trump types his social media posts in capital letters, raging with incoherent capitals as the light fades, the Mail clutches its fake pearls and caps up the word SOCIALIST in headlines.

Meanwhile those who might like a socialist government fall off their chair at the notion of Starmer being a socialist.

Personally, it is Labour’s immigration policies that put me off the most, too closely shaped as they are in imitation of Farage and Reform UK. Labour makes the same shoddy mistake of assuming that most of the country’s problems are down to migrants crossing the channel in small boats.

Aside from that, I’d say Starmer, however unpopular in the moment, deserves to see out his time. Otherwise we’re allowing ourselves to be governed by short-term panic, political in-fighting and the shouting of loud-mouthed opportunists such as Farage (who hates the Tories – oh, look, he just told the FT that a deal/stich-up with the Tories is inevitable).

And what of those budget ‘lies’? Prof David Miles from the OBR later told MPs he did not believe the chancellor was being misleading about the state of the public finances. His statement undermined everything in those newspaper headlines. The apologies to Rachel Reeves were hard to find, unsurprisingly.

And the budget lifted 450,000 children out of poverty, protected renters’ rights, boosted earnings for the lowest paid, and the markets reacted well. So that’s all good. Although I have slipped in my own lie there. You know, I honestly don’t understand what the markets are, what they do and why we are always so in thrall to whatever it is they do.

And the BBC and that Mr Mason? Oh, the BBC should report impartially rather than pretending to do so while in fact reheating whatever stew of hostility has been sitting for too long on the headline hotplate.

The newspapers might be dwindling, certainly in print, but the influence the Mail and the Telegraph have over the BBC shows the lasting extent of their power. Oh, and the owners of the Mail are in the process of buying the Telegraph. Two haters for the price of one.

FARAGE FOOTNOTE: Nigel Farage said the budget was “great for you if you are a Somalian with 20 children”. That’s quite the racist statement from a man who swears he’s not a racist. He will, for sure, continue to duck and dive like this, insisting he is not what his own mouth and behaviour prove him to be.

(Image: Frank Ruiter from the BBC)

Are you a glass half-full person or has someone drilled a hole in the bottom of that glass?

I’d call myself a foolish optimist, certain everything will turn out right in the end. And when it doesn’t, I tell myself it surely will next time.

I went looking for quotes about optimism versus pessimism and found one from the American humourist and poet Don Marquis – “A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.” I like that as it has a certain Jack Dee-like grumpiness.

Then again, I’d be a lying optimist if I pretended to know anything about Don Marquis. His name was just the bran left after I sifted those quotes.

This is perhaps a circuitous way to discuss another skirmish in the standoff between Donald Trump and the BBC, but there is logic here. Five years or so ago, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman published an excellent book called Human Kind. It was subtitled A Hopeful History.

I chose his book as my read for our book club in a bar, where we match different books to a theme, to avoid us all having to yatter on about the same book.

Rutger believes that basically people are good. Early on in his “quest for a new view of humankind”, he sets out potential obstacles to optimism.

To stand up for human goodness, he says, “means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naïve. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic”.

Rutger could have been forgiven for feeling a touch cynical himself this week. In October he gave the BBC’s annual Reith Lecture in front of 500 people who heard him describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history”.

When the lecture began airing this week on BBC Radio 4, Rutger discovered that the BBC had removed those words – despite his lecture having been approved by the very same BBC.

What happened there? Between the lecture and the broadcast, Trump threatened to sue the BBC for at least $1 billion over a separate editing controversy involving Panorama, that’s what.

Bregman quite reasonably called the removal of his words from the lecture “self-censorship driven by fear”, noting the irony that his lecture was about elites’ “paralysing cowardice” and “bending the knee to authoritarianism”.

He told the Guardian: “I’m really sad about it. The whole team behind the Reith Lectures was incredible.

“And it was such an honour to deliver them, especially because the first Reith Lectures in 1948 were delivered by my intellectual hero Bertrand Russell, who was a huge advocate of free speech.

“I still hope lots of people will listen to the lectures. Because it seems to me that the message, about the cowardice of today’s elites, is more relevant than ever.”

Although a self-confessed European liberal, Bregman is fair-minded in his lecture, confessing at one point his admiration for the far-right. Not for their beliefs – which stand in cynical counterpoint to his optimistic view of humankind – but rather in their persistence, their willingness to spend years or even decades moulding events in their favour.

He cited as an example the protracted battle to overturn the right to abortion in the US; again, he did not approve of this action but could appreciate the long-term effort involved. The left, he said, needed to be organised in a similarly efficient manner.

His lecture is well worth a listen; and Human Kind is well worth a read.

Still, it is hard sometimes to remain optimistic in a world run by a self-serving cabal of pessimists. Trump’s threat to sue the BBC may well not come about; and if it did, it could be found to be baseless.

Sadly, that is beside the point. Trump uses the law to wear down all opposition. And he employs bullying in the same way. The BBC board, running scared after his threat to sue, have done his bidding anyway by censoring criticism from an academic they invited to give a lecture.

Then again, I am optimistic that one day Rutger Bregman’s words about Trump will stand true.

Here is another quote from Human Kind:

“To stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership…”

Amen to that.

Image by Tom from Pixabay

I HAVE played the guitar for ever, not that you’d know it some stumble finger days.

At my boys’ grammar school in the early 1970s, I gave a mini-recital of a study by Matteo Carcassi, an Italian guitarist and composer born in Florence in 1792 (or so it says here on Wikipedia).

Etude Op 60, No 3. Recalling that title is no feat of memory. It’s just that I have picked up the piece again more than 50 years later.

My guitar teacher was called Robert. He used to cycle with a guitar in a hard case and a rucksack full of bricks. He was in training to ride somewhere far from Cheadle Hulme, Spain perhaps.

My performance went OK but Robert said I should have tuned my guitar beforehand. I made a mental note of his advice. It is still there just in case there ever is another public performance.

I abandoned the classical guitar as a teenager, you see. It didn’t exactly rock; and the pieces became harder and harder. A foolish decision, it now seems, but we are all made of those.

I have lessons again now, every other week online, with a teacher here in York. Andy is very good, keeps me ticking over and hardly ever sighs at my innate lack of rhythm. We cover all sorts from the Beatles to Bach, with blues and jazz in between, plus scales. The piece I am presently doing a disservice to is Strawberry Fields Forever.

I like all sorts of guitarists, but particularly folk-rockers such as the great Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch or John Martyn, another acoustic hero.

Over the years I have played, or tried to play, songs by Thompson as collected in his songbooks. When interviewing him once, I said his songs were hard to play. “They’re meant to be,” he said with a chuckle.

Anyway, back to Carcassi.

The sheet music for that one came in an email, as usual. With tablature alongside the score as my music reading is rusty. Printing this off, I squinted at the musical jigsaw puzzle. Ah, yes, that chord goes there, fits into that chord, as the tune rises up the neck.

Fingers old and not so pliable mostly knew where to go. I was back in the school hall, nervous with the audience before me. Playing a guitar I’d forgotten to tune. After my recital there was a guitar trio comprised of me, Robert, the cycling-with-bricks teacher, and a younger but better student who surely went on to grace other stages; unlike me.

A long time to have been playing the guitar. By this stage of life, you have done most things for an era or two. You stumble on. You get better. You get worse. But it’s the doing that matters. The keeping going, the pursuit of the unattainable, the barely attainable, the doable. You walk that road. Strum that chord. Write those words. Bake that bread, or whatever it is that you like to do.

To borrow a phrase, you just do it. And just doing is good, or better than not doing.

Late in the evening, after my wife has retreated upstairs, I play while watching television. A few scales. Or laying one chord on another. Over and over. And I always tune the guitar first.

After I stopped having classical lessons, I briefly taught a younger boy. He graduated to a proper guitar teacher, who said he’d been taught well, so that was something.

We have three grown-up children, and the middle one is a much better guitarist than his dad. Late at night at his house, after his partner has retreated, he fetches his guitar from his study, goes back downstairs and plays while waiting for their cat to come back indoors.

In the past week I have seen two singer-songwriters who can hold an audience with guitar and voice.

John Smith gave a captivating show at City Varieties in Leeds. He is on tour marking his twentieth anniversary as a professional musician, having started out supporting John Martyn two decades ago.

He fills an auditorium with his fiendish finger-picking and strumming and a resonant voice. He is engagingly self-mocking, too. And his performance of Winter, guitar open-tuned and laid across his lap, fingers beating out the rhythm on the body, was stunning.

A late change of plan allowed me to nip and see folk singer Chris Wood at the NCEM in York, having long admired his albums, especially So Much To Defend. His songs address the everyday, fatherhood, local football, the trials of being a musician, and are quietly philosophical, too.

Eccentric, quirky, the emotion spilling over at times. Another fine guitarist, despite some trouble with his lead.

He introduced a song written for a lifelong male friend. On hearing the song, the pal had said the song was shit. It wasn’t but that was Wood’s wry aside on male bonding, men hiding their affection behind rudeness. Another great night.

Panorama on Trump

Donald Trump vs the BBC is a thing now swollen like an appendix fit to burst. Let’s prod and see where we get.

The US president has threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars over an edition of Panorama. Wow, Trump watches Panorama! You’ll be telling me next that he hunkers down in front of Mastermind, shouting out answers through mouthfuls of cheeseburger.

Well, no – he doesn’t watch Panorama, even when it’s about him (his specialist subject). But he was alerted to a programme he never watches thanks to internal chaos at the BBC and pressure from the usual suspect newspapers.

The edition of Panorama in question was shown before last year’s US election and looked back at the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

It condensed into a clip a speech Trump made just before his supporters marched on the United States Capitol.

All the words used were undeniably spoken by Trump. You can find a transcript online. That was one long whiny ramble of a speech. It needed condensing more than anything that ever ended up in a can of soup.

Nothing Trump said makes you think, oh, he’s only trying to calm things down. The words ‘fight’ or’ march’ are not usually repeated so often when attempting conciliation (which, of course, he wasn’t).

Did Trump urge his supporters to march on the Capitol and protest about the election he lost? At such junctures it is traditional to say history will decide and nod your head sagely.

The trouble is, Trump has been busy rewriting history, removing official mentions of the Capitol riot, while also issuing pardons for around 1,000 of his supporters who were convicted of serious offences.

That edition of Panorama was only shown in this country – and, anyway, as Trump won the election shortly afterwards it can hardly be said to have damaged his reputation. He’s perfectly capable of doing that all by himself. Will he get anywhere with this Florida court case? Is he now going to sue all the world’s media? Or is it just part of his usual bully boy grift?

You won’t be surprised to hear that ejected Tory prime minister Boris Johnson is about to burst forth from that appendix. He set all this in motion when he reshaped the BBC in his image. As part of this, Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief, was appointed to the BBC’s board. This appears to have made the board in part anti-BBC.

Michael Prescott, a former Murdoch journalist and until recently an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, was the man who raised the contentious edit in a memo to the board.

He is said also to have made claims of systemic bias in coverage of Trump, Gaza and transgender rights, according to the Guardian.

All this led to the shock resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness.

Johnson, typically, says talk of this being a right-wing instigated attack on the BBC is “complete bollocks”. So it’s almost certainly completely true.

A headline in the Telegraph urges Trump to sue the BBC

Are the Telegraph, Mail and others attacking the BBC because that’s just what they do? Or do they want to bring about its collapse to make room for more right-wing broadcasters, maybe funded from the US? That’s a lasting worry.

And this row about the BBC being left-wing comes just as many people are complaining about the BBC being too friendly to the right, especially to Reform UK and Nigel Farage.

To my eyes the BBC clearly favours Farage. I even put in an official complaint (result: nothing much). Farage receives endless unquestioning airtime on the BBC. Yet he would abolish it in an instant – along with the NHS.

Farage, who spends more time in the US than in his constituency of Claton, turned on his usual Trumpy toady act, complaining about the BBC’s attack on the “leader of the free world”. Good god, if he’s our leader we’re done for.

Honestly, I am more concerned about an elected British politician expending so much energy on doing down his own country. And to think he calls himself a patriot.

The BBC should defend itself and not bow down to Trump. Sir Keir Starmer should look at the running of the BBC – but he says he won’t be doing that. Perhaps it would just be better if politicians of all persuasions had no say in who runs the BBC.

Lord Patten, a politician who sees both sides, has been chairman both of the BBC and the Conservative Party. He had this to say…

“I don’t think that we should allow ourselves to be bullied into thinking that the BBC is only any good, if it reflects the prejudice of the last person who shouted at it.”

Quite so.

The BBC, for its faults and annoyances, for its occasional self-importance and inwardness, is too important, too central to British life, to be brought down by right-wing media owners considering only their own interests and pockets.

Just ask the 11 million people who watched the final of Celebrity Traitors.