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.