Today it is ten years since I shuffled onto this ledge. Perhaps I should have a word with my slighter younger self. Are you sure you want to spend a whole decade writing a blog read by a handful of people?

To which my slightly older self might reply – Yeah, well, shows how little you know about life, matey.

All those words. Possibly as many as 300,000 by now, as 28,000 were written last year. But I am too lazy to count.

Why I started is easy to explain. I’d been made redundant after 27 years on one newspaper. That was shocking, the worst of days, but people are made redundant all the time. Especially if they are foolish enough to work on newspapers.

Time offers perspective, distance. Oh, that’s when that happened. It was awful. But other things have occurred since. Good things, bad things; near misses, scratches on the paintwork.

I spent that first post-redundancy year as a freelance feature writer, only to conclude my elbows were not nearly sharp enough. It would have been sensible to have saved the redundancy money and tried any old job. But I stuck at journalism, all I knew.

You do what you do.

All those words.

The first blogs were written to make sense of my changed life. And then I just kept going. Early on I wondered if someone might notice and offer me a column, to follow up the one I wrote for 25 years. A foolish notion, but life is full of those. Anyway, writing this blog has kept me saner than if I did not have those words to file.

Much can happen in ten years. A much-loved granddaughter was born. My father died, alongside other older relatives, and a cousin my own age. I had that heart attack, and could have died myself, but that gave me another topic, words tapped out as my bruised heart sought to recapture its rhythm. Personal catastrophes can be helpful like that.

Before writing this, I skimmed over some of my first efforts, wondering what to write – or even whether to mark the anniversary at all. In the end I sat down and wrote this one. Because words. Because, oh, you have to keep going.

Books, literature, films and music have been addressed. As has baking my own bread – a subject on which I rarely remain silent for long, as those dearest to me may testify with a sigh.

But all too often, all too easily, it’s been about politics. Some of my political blogs hope to amuse, while others are just pebbles dropped into the deep sour well.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone should care what I think about politics or anything else. An unhelpful doubt to harbour if pontification is your game.

I return to politics because it’s there, a ready scab to pick at. Lately I have sworn more than once not to write about the idiot cruel vanities of Donald Trump, a pledge broken almost as soon as it was made. The world would be a better and kinder place if everyone ignored all the stupid spite spilling from that man’s tight puckered mouth.

Is it time instead to now address the inconsequentialities of life? Writing about politics can stir opinions stronger than your own, hurled back like rocks. Or indeed the scone we ate in a café while on a family holiday this week in Withernsea.

That scone was long past fresh, but then so am I. The holiday was lovely, by the way, three generations in one house near the sea in a tired town with a lovely long beach, and a favourite new bar.

By some quirk of time, I was the oldest family member on that holiday. It happens eventually.

Away from this blog, newspaper features have been written, mostly for the Yorkshire Post Magazine, almost 80 in ten years, with two appearing last Saturday. A sort of validation, suggesting I can still pull off what might be called my craft.

I still enjoy meeting people to hear their stories; their stories told in my words, a good union. Some of those I interview email to say how much they liked a feature; others offer only silence.

Alongside the blogs have been the novels, either now forgotten or never yet published, but still being written, on and off, alongside a memoir.

Some days I feel like I have survived a lot, without ever getting going properly. But that’s just what life is like.

After my year as a freelance feature writer, I had other jobs in journalism. Two editing spells at PA Media, alongside two side hustles as a journalism lecturer, weaving lessons from the frayed fabric of my working life. Given another go, I’d have done the lecturing for longer, but my time at the whiteboard ran out.

Now I am mostly retired, mostly happy, buoyed by family and friends. As for this ledge, I plan to hang around, agitating away at this and that.

If you have been reading, thank you. What a fine, if select, bunch you are.

Repeats on the television, repeats in real life. Playing now on the American politics channel is the old Springsteen/Trump bout. Over here, GB Spews is dusting off old episodes of It Ain’t Half Brexit Mum.

Trump-bashing from Springsteen? Oh, I can take as much as the Boss wishes to dish out. The Maga minions are not happy, though, tutting and muttering beneath their silly red caps.

That’s not to mention the reaction from Trump himself.

As Springsteen began the latest leg of his tour with the E Street Band, he took to the stage early in Manchester and made a speech saying the US was “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration”.

He also referenced the “very weird, strange and dangerous shit” happening in America before condemning Trump for “persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent”.

To which Bruce might also have added that Trump was hollowing out the US state to his own advantage, destroying higher education and health care, all while apparently regarding the presidency as a giant cash machine.

Trump had an orange meltdown on his Truth Social platform where in the small hours he conducts myriad petty vendettas. He said Springsteen was “dumb as a rock” – quite something from a man who makes boulders look intellectual.

Trump also said Springsteen was a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker”.

His own skin could be as prune-like as anything and no one would be any wiser, thanks to that tangerine tan.

From horrid glimpse, while summoning TS Eliot’s line about “the skull beneath the skin”, the skin beneath the faux tan is emulsion white.

Music aside – and I do love a bit of Bruce – Springsteen looks to be in enviably good nick, whereas Trump suggests a shambling tower made of too many burgers.

How unseemly that Trump should be carrying on so when 80 is on the horizon. And take that from a man who can see 70 just over the next hill.

All power to Bruce. Sing that message out loud. Too few Americans have your platform or dare raise their voice.

And those voices need raising. At the time of typing, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has just moved to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enrol international students – ramping up his attempt to control/destroy the country’s top universities.

Now let’s change channels.

Whatever you think of Keir Starmer – and his ‘island of strangers’ remark was a new low – he does have a certain stubborn pragmatism and sticks at what he wants to achieve.

Starmer’s new EU deal is another bit of pragmatism. Nothing flashy, nothing remarkable. Just a sensible acknowledgement that we should have a stronger relationship with our nearest neighbours.

The political fallout was predictable. The Tories called the modest deal a Brexit ‘surrender’, Reform UK’s new MP Sarah Pochin said it was a ‘complete betrayal of Brexit’, while Boris Johnson, well, Boris Johnson blathered something interminably stupid. Much of the confected anger concerned the fishing deal – an exact copy of the one Johnson struck.

The new deal isn’t any sort of a betrayal. Brexit itself was a betrayal of good sense, and a monumentally pointless act of self-harm.

The members of that ranting chorus will never forgive or forget. Let’s leave them to their sour grumbles and get on with ordering life sensibly.

And the generator of grievance politics, the man who pursued Brexit so noisily and nastily, where was he when the deal was discussed in Parliament? Nigel Farage MP was on holiday in France. Nothing so piddling for him as taking part in a debate concerned what he has spent half his life banging on about.

Nigel Farage in the Daily Mail…

How do you deal with a problem like Nigel Farage? Not by being more Nigel, for starters.

A lesson lost on Keir Starmer, whose plans to curb net migration announced yesterday caused anguish among some MPs. Did he really have to say that the UK risked becoming an “an island of strangers” without tough new immigration policies?

A sorry scrap of rhetoric too close to something Enoch Powell might have spat out. Labour’s plans are more thoughtful than that. But still – you don’t beat Nigel by being more Nigel.

Personally, I think we all need to be a lot less Nigel.

If I see one more photograph of Farage with his mouth agape in a manic grin – count those fillings; map out those tobacco tidemarks; spy the remains of those long lunches – it will finish me off.

Political commentators of assorted shades are highly excited by the rise of Reform UK, the latest of Farage’s self-made political parties. By the way, I prefer Reform Yuck, as that seems more fitting. Puerile, perhaps. But really – this is a ‘party for the people’ run by ex-public schoolboy millionaires. So, yes, yuck.

Success in the English local elections, one mayoral victory and a paper-thin by-election win in Runcorn are being flourished as stone-carved proof that Farage will be the next prime minister. Mostly by a certain Mr N Farage, whose nuclear self-belief has never been in short supply. Yet beneath that cawl of confidence hides a thin-skinned man who brooks nether disagreement nor questions.

The very idea that such a terrible man could be prime minister falls a mountain short of decency. Of it does if you ask me. The trouble is, I swore voters in the US wouldn’t be stupid enough to give the orange-hued would-be dictator Donald Trump another turn. And we all know how that worked out.

It is still possible everything might fall apart for Farage. This master of the dark arts of self-promotion remains more of a political entertainer than a true politician, a song-and-dance man who hums a hateful tune.

True politics is a slog; it’s boring and takes effort. Farage is far more interested in counting his following on TikTok. That, by the way, is impressive but will it last and will it translate into votes at a long-distant election?

Let’s hope not.

Farage is an expert at setting the political mood – or, perhaps more tellingly, at fouling the political mood. His is the politics of grievance. He has to be against something: the EU, Net Zero policies, cycle lanes, you name it, Nigel will hate it.

What else do Nigel and Reform Yuck wish to do? Oh, only to ‘remoralise’ young people and force them to be patriotic, and if that doesn’t sound sinister to you, your filters could do with a service. Oh, they also want to erect statues to great British figures, and to end “all this woke nonsense”.

How very yawn.

For now, Reform benefits from disillusionment with the main parties. The Tories will take a long time to recover from their electoral drubbing last year; and Labour may well take as long to recover from the weight of their unexpected victory.

Also, Reform Yuck find strength in not being any of the above. Now that they are running some councils, people may well conclude in the end that they’re no better than all the above.

Anyone wishing to know what else Farage would do if he became prime minister may find enlightenment in a ‘manifesto’ cum advertising feature published in the Daily Mail.

The list of his desires included pledges to scrap inheritance tax on estates under £2 million, ditching net zero targets, dropping income tax for those earning under £20,000, fixing the NHS, and bringing back fracking.

Exactly how you fix the NHS while throwing away billions in income tax remains a mystery.

I wonder what the Economist makes of these plans. “Reform’s policies add up to an agenda of fiscal recklessness that rivals, and may well exceed, the disastrous 49-day, hair-raising, market-tanking premiership of Liz Truss in 2022,” the magazine said.

It also estimated that a Reform UK government would cost the economy around £200 billion while only saving £100 billion, creating a “colossal fiscal shock”.

Let’s end with letter in The Times, from Peter Dorey, of Bath. This has been much shared on social media and for good reason…

“I am intrigued that Nigel Farage wants schools to teach British values to remoralise young people. To me, British values include empathy, fairness, honesty, mutual tolerance, open-mindedness, promotion of national unity over divide and rule, and respect for experts and institutions. I do not discern any of these values in Mr Farage.”

I can’t think of anything better to add and will end there.

The similarities between myself and George Clooney have long been apparent, so long as you overlook my lack of hair and his silver sheen of handsomeness.

Similarly, the parallels between Mrs Clooney and my wife have long been apparent, apart from a few differences that are hardly worth mentioning.

Amal Clooney is also an international human rights barrister. The last time I checked, my wife isn’t one of those.

At the time of writing, she has just messaged to say her bus is stuck in traffic. That’s my wife and not the other Mrs C. Amal might catch a bus sometimes, but if she does it’s not something you hear much about.

Still, here we are, the pair of us, so easily confused with George and Amal, however unlikely that may seem. George is a Hollywood actor who makes women swoon. While it is a truth universally acknowledged that I am a retired journalist who made one woman swoon once long ago.

For some reason, my wife isn’t photographed wherever she goes, unlike Amal, who belongs to the secular royalty loved by newspapers. Snap, snap – there she goes.

Thanks to her work, Amal has also annoyed Donald Trump, so bully for her. She could be barred from entering the US by the Tango Man after a panel she sat on recommended an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on war crimes charges in Gaza.

Meanwhile, that bus my wife sat on has now crawled its way to the station.

Pardon the preamble, but that’s the way the words roll some days.

Here is the point of all this meandering.

The similarity between us is that we don’t argue. This is not to say that I don’t argue with Clooney or his wife, as I’ve never met them. It’s that I don’t argue with my wife, who I have met many times.

We have been married for 38 years, together for 40 or so. And we don’t argue. While my doppelganger George Clooney last week told a US morning TV show that he and Amal, who have been married for 12 years, have not had one argument.

“Is George Clooney right not to argue?” asked the headline above a report in the Guardian.

That depends on your views about rows.

Stefan Walters, a therapist quoted in the article, said: “Actually, arguing is a great skill for couples. Couples who argue actually end up staying together much more than couples who don’t.”

I’d argue that there is a man who says ‘actually’ more often than is strictly necessary, but there you go.

I asked a friend at badminton, who is in his eighties, for his views on marital quarrels. He said arguments had sustained him and his wife through more than 60 years of marriage.

They didn’t have huge arguments, he said, just one of them telling the other they hadn’t done what they were supposed to have done. By his telling, he was usually the one being ticked off, but they always made up.

With us there have been sulks and silences, although too few to mention. I guess I have the verbal fluency to argue, but not the inclination. My wife says she would probably cry if we did argue.

Someone I know used to argue with his wife all the time, usually on the phone, sometimes in person. It seemed to suit them, although they argued their way out of that marriage in the end.

We don’t argue and are still married. Our world view is similar, although my wife has a lower tolerance for politics, news and other worrisome things. When fed up with me, if you can imagine such an unlikely occurrence, she might perhaps go into the garden for some angry digging.

She has never yet dug a hole big enough to drop me into, which is encouraging.