OUR latest Airbnb guest takes two sugars in his coffee and once was struck by lightning. One of these facts is perhaps more unusual than the other.

It is always a surprise when someone wants sugar in their tea or coffee. At breakfast yesterday he took a sip and winced. “I’ll have some sugar in that please, mate. Two teaspoons,” said the Australian, adding that he wished he could shake the habit.

We go without the sugar in this house, at least in drinks, but we still take the sweet stuff in other ways, the occasional cake perhaps or marmalade on buttered toast at the weekend (heaven on a breakfast plate for me after a five-day sentence of porridge).

The radio was on as I made breakfast and the sugar lobby was peddling a line stickier than their conscience in response to the Department of Health’s long-awaited childhood obesity strategy. This initiative contains some useful suggestions, but could perhaps be summed up as the blandishments of sweet nothings.

Prime Minister Theresa May put so much faith in her new policy that she let it be released while she was away walking in Switzerland, having allowed one uncomfortable-looking official prime ministerial holiday snap of her and her husband with their hiking sticks.

At least we no longer have to suffer David Cameron looking pinkly satisfied in Cornwall; and the good news for him is that he no longer has to pretend that he loves going to cloudy Cornwall, but can instead bugger off to wherever his sunny money will take him.

Anyway, sugar. Despite widespread shock and disappointment about the childhood obesity strategy, the human sugar cubes from the food industry were in place to speak the nonsense that pays their wages.

The policy was widely dismissed by leading retailers and even the boss of Sainsbury’s. Yet Ian Wright, director general of the Food and Drink Federation, insisted the soft drinks tax was a “disappointing diversion from effective measures to tackle obesity”. He added that the 20 per cent reduction in the sugar contained in yoghurts, desserts and pasta sauces “focuses too strongly on the role of this single nutrient, when obesity is caused by excess calories from any nutrient”.

I am not the first person to notice the striking similarities between such doublespeak and the way the tobacco apologists used to deny the links between smoking and cancer. The sugar lobby will no doubt keep saying these things until our children are too fat to stand and their teeth have all fallen out.

The British Retail Consortium, which represents grocers, said it would have been better if the government had imposed mandatory cuts to sugar levels in food, as leaving it to voluntary action by manufacturers would allow some producers to take advantage by keeping the sugar levels high in their products.

Public Health England had advised that two measures would have had the greatest impact on childhood obesity: stopping price-cutting promotions of junk food in supermarkets; and limiting advertising of unhealthy food to children through television and social media.

Both are sensible suggestions. Cut-price promotions of junk food in particular can trap parents, especially the low-paid, leaving it more likely that poorer children will end up the most overweight. In a sugar-coated nutshell: poor quality food costs much less than decent food.

Neither of these two ideas appears in the strategy announced yesterday, suggesting that Mrs May has briskly swatted away any attempts to control the way the food industry operates.

Let them eat cake and crisps too, then show them on the television news running around and getting red in the face. Children were shown doing just that last night on the BBC news, and while exercise is undoubtedly beneficial, a bit of running around at a summer holiday club won’t be enough to undo the damage done by too much food shot through with sugar.

Our guest hasn’t come downstairs yet, but I have the sugar bowl at the ready. And that lightning? Oh, he was working at a mine in Queensland when a sudden electrostatic discharge hit the ground as he touched his car in the car park. The shock was so great he thought he’d broken his arm. He survived but eventually had to give up work. But not sugar.

TALKING in tongues is what happens to some evangelical worshippers during a service, yet you could say that it occurs in politics, too.

A long-read feature in last Sunday’s Observer looked at the division in the Church of England between the dwindling band of traditional worshippers and the rise of the evangelicals, with their practices such as speaking in tongues, or shaking and collapsing as the Holy Spirit takes over their body.

As a man without religion, such extravagant spirituality makes me uncomfortable. This is for perhaps two reasons: one, I don’t understand it; two, somewhere in the agnostic corridors of my mind I sniff some sort of a scam. Isn’t faith meant to be just that: an act of faith in what cannot be seen? Also it seems rather show-offy, but there you go.

Harriet Sherwood’s report in the Observer charted the orchestrated rise of the evangelicals, thanks to Holy Trinity Brompton church, which started the ripples that have now spread around the country, with the hefty financial backing of the Church of England, and the explicit support of Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury.

The report argued that the traditionalists in the church fear the focus on evangelism risks giving the church over to the zealots. This was ringing political bells for me when, just as Sherwood had made a parallel with the way Tony Blair dragged the Labour party into the modern age, the following quote from an anonymous critic popped up: “Actually, the more apt comparison is with Corbyn and Momentum. The diehards become more frenzied, while everyone else looks on in total incomprehension – and in many cases are repulsed.”

And yes, the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn are the evangelicals of the Labour party, so wrapped up in their enthusiasm, so entirely contained in the vacuum of their beliefs, that they cannot see any other shades of truth. Often they refer to their leader by his first name only, with earnest and heartfelt mantras of ‘Jeremy this’ and ‘Jeremy that’.

There is nothing wrong with their enthusiasm as such; nothing necessarily wrong with much of what Mr Corbyn believes. It’s just that evangelicals tend only to turn their bright eyes in one direction. Those who gather in the cloistered cell of Corbynism are so taken with their man’s message that they cannot see any other truth at all. They are so convinced that Jeremy will deliver on his bold platform of change that they cannot see the unlikelihood of such a happy eventuality ever occurring. You have to win elections for that to happen, and Mr Corbyn has trouble convincing his own MPs, never mind the sceptical electorate.

I am not sure where all this will end, although it’s a fair bet that Jeremy Corbyn will see off the challenge from Owen Smith. And then the evangelism will continue, as no doubt will the speaking in political tongues.

Another feature in the Observer – other Sunday titles are available but I don’t usually read them – boasted the rather splendid headline: “How we let bullshitters take control and debase the language of politics.”

The English example given was Vote Leave’s much-trumpeted slogan: “Let’s give our NHS the £350m the EU takes every week”. Everyone knew this was bullshit, but it put the message across. And when the Leave lobby won, the promise was dropped with cynical alacrity.

Much of the article by Steven Poole, author of Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas, dwelt naturally enough on Donald Trump, whose outrageous statements are legendary – and legendarily awful.

A recent example was the bizarre claim: “Obama’s the founder of Isis. He was the most valuable player.” Unabashed by having Tweeted such screaming nonsense, Trump followed up with “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?”

Poole makes the interesting point that Trump “is not a perversion of the tradition of political campaigning; he is the logical outcome of it. It doesn’t matter what you say, if it helps you get elected.”

His final point is key: “Trump is not a liar, exactly, but a bullshitter.” And in the post-truth world of American politics, that can be enough to win over voters wearied by the smooth operators of the political establishment.

With luck, Trump will loop one too many ludicrous statements around his neck and make a noose for himself before November.

As for Corbyn as prime minister, stranger things have happened. But not many.

AMID all the excitement about Britain’s best medal haul at an away Games, another sporting milestone should not be overlooked. On Monday I won a game of squash.

Not all sport is elite sport. Some sport falls more into the category of two middle-aged men getting red in the face as they tear around a squash court for 40 minutes. And one of them losing. Usually this one.

My success is only a spot of sweat on a pair of old sports shoes in comparison with all the Olympic glory being notched up by Britain.

This morning the attention is on the golden cycling couple of Laura Trott and Jason Kenny: she has become the most successful female British Olympian and he won a sixth gold in a dramatic keirin final (that’s the one where the man on the shopping bike sets the pace in the velodrome, before peeling quietly away and leaving the cyclists to their race).

My relationship with the Olympics begins in a grumpy way at the prospect of there being nothing but sport on the television. It doesn’t help when the coverage is of sports where the athletes have their turn, then the next one has a go, such as diving. Nothing against those boys and girls in their trunks and their remarkable abilities; it’s just that the gladiatorial games work better for me, a proper race or a match in tennis or badminton.

And as someone who bashes about a shuttlecock with friends once a week, I do love the badminton doubles. All that leaping four feet in the air before a smash; all those swift returns of impossible shots; all that wrist-flicking athleticism and those gravity defying lunges – yes, that’s badminton but not as we know it.

I don’t play tennis but always enjoy watching a match. I saw the start of the Andy Murray final against Juan Martin del Potro, but didn’t hang around long enough to see him win his second gold medal. It was gone 11pm already, one set all, and Murray was having his crisis moment. From the highlights, it seems both players were monumentally knackered by the end. But don’t even mention golf; how did that end up in the Olympics?

The sporting politics are all part of the Games, too of course, with the different countries standing off against each other. Back in 1996, Britain had its worst summer Olympics, with a single gold medal won by rowers Matthew Pinsent and Steve Redgrave. After that the Lottery funding tap was switched on thanks to the overlooked efforts of credulous fools everywhere. Two quid every week in this house and nothing to show for it apart from a free go one week.

Now properly funded, Britain is up there in second place, behind the Americans and above the Chinese, with the Chinese media expressing their disbelief as such a turnaround, while bemoaning their own disappointing medal tally.

The Olympics is a sometimes queasy mixture of high ambition and low politics, astonishing skill and dedication, and obscene amounts of cash, often spent by countries without the proper means to do so. The spectacle is undeniable, the thrills when they come are great, but somewhere behind it all there is a sense of political chicanery and deals being done.

But none of this should detract from the achievements of the athletes. Britain is certainly having a great Games and we could all do with being cheered up.

Sometimes the stories from the Olympics can surprise in uplifting ways. No incident better summons up the spirt of the Olympics that that of the two women athletes who stopped to help each other up after falling together midway through their race.

With four laps to go in the 5000m in Rio, New Zealand distance runner Nikki Hamblin and US runner Abbey D’Agostino collided. The American injured her right leg as a result of the fall. She got up, fell to the ground again, crouching on all fours, her face distorted with pain. Hamblin stopped running, turned to D’Agostino and reached for her with open arms. All thoughts of winning gone.

The two women finished the race last and embraced closely before the American was led off in a wheelchair for treatment.

So the Olympics can have stories of nobility and humanity too. Sometimes the winners are those who lost. And that’s what I will be telling myself tonight in the week’s second game of squash. Because I almost never win on a Wednesday.

I CAN’T find something and frustration besets me. No matter how many dusty sheets of paper I rifle through, the one I seek just isn’t there.

I need this important document in order to fill out a tax-form as a self-(under)-employed person. So there is no choice but to contact my old employers, although not directly: no point phoning the York office as hardly anyone works there anymore. The modern, forward-thinking company divides itself up and scatters the pieces to the far corners, a bit to the south, a bit to the north, some to the west too. I have forgotten the east but there must be something there, too, as newspapers in Essex are about to lay off their photographers (oh the sorry echo of it).

Anyway… I phone Bradford, thinking that should do it, and press the relevant number for accounts. The woman who answers is pleasant and helpful. She also has a Welsh accent. She hasn’t moved towns or anything but is speaking from Newport in your actual South Wales. She wonders if I have tried phoning Bradford. So that’s what I do. Again. And again.

Unable to locate any sort of sentient accounting person in Bradford, I put myself through to Newport once more. A different helpful woman with a Welsh accent suggests phoning Bradford.

Ah, tried that, I say, hoping that my blood pressure hasn’t made my voice squeak.

Eventually, my helpful new friend in Newport finds a phone number in Southampton. So off I trundle to the south coast. This turns out to be the right port of call, although they need a letter from me as a phone call or email won’t suffice. So I sit right down and write a letter, and even stride out to be post box.

There is something exquisitely infuriating about losing a thing. You know it is there somewhere, only it isn’t. Perhaps there is a circle of hell in which the damned are condemned forever to seek what they cannot find. Or maybe that is just another definition of life. Who knows for sure.

In the past year or so, I have lost my way often, found it again, only to see it disappear once more. Working for yourself is like that, or it is if there isn’t enough work to be found.

Last weekend I had two features in the Yorkshire Post magazine and that was a genuine thrill. A true hooray moment. A two-in-one offer of Julian-ness. But the fee for two features only stretches so far and those bills don’t go away, never mind how many words you hurl at them.

There is another piece of paper I need to find. This is the one that tells me what to do with my life and how to go about it. I am sure I had it a few months ago, but now it has disappeared. Oh well. I shall keep on looking. I am sure I left my future lying around here somewhere.

Is it on that scrap of paper stuck to the fridge? Ah, no. That note is there to remind me that I have to go out soon to interview a man who makes beautiful objects out of Yorkshire wood. So for today at least, I have found my way again.

WE are off for a hipster’s breakfast in Manchester. There isn’t time for me to grow a suitably resplendent beard, but to be fair there wouldn’t be if I didn’t shave until a year next Tuesday.

My reasons for picking this coffee shop are contrary. A feature in the Observer cites Takk as a tired example of the “hipster aesthetic” that is “taking over the world, brick by exposed brick”.

Instead of putting me off, the snooty feature makes me want to visit. So the writer of the article, Kyle Chayka, ends up advertising a place he affects to disdain. This notion pleases me as we head there in the Manchester rain. Other sorts of rain are available, but cliché dictates that this city does rain best.

Kyle Chakya was rude about Takk because of its big glass windows, reclaimed wood and hanging Edison bulbs. Such coffee shops, he says, mimic “the same old tired style, a hipster reduction with elements of history and the remnants of industrial machinery that once occupied the neighbourhoods they take over”.

My guess is that this look has been around for a long time in the capital, and the writer of the article has succumbed to London-centric weariness.

Anyway, we like Takk. The staff are young and pleasant, the coffee is good and the breakfasts even better. A bacon sandwich made with sourdough toast for me, and poached eggs with avocado on rye toast for my wife. My sandwich is substantial and comes with a dash of that hipster reduction. Or maybe it’s spicy tomato sauce. Whatever it is, it tastes good.

Elsewhere in a long article, Kyle Chayka also argues that Airbnb is to partly blame for a creeping worldwide conformity in interior design. He says that consultants who work with hosts leave all Airbnbs looking identical as “a certain sameness is spreading, as users come to demand convenience and frictionlessness in lieu of meaningful engagement with a different place”.

Well, I don’t know about that. The ‘consultant’ for our Airbnb just chose a shade of Farrow and Ball paint she liked, as she always does. The colour downstairs is often remarked on by our guests. I guess some Airbnbs are apartments done up to cash in on the trend, while ours is just a room in a family home.

The article also cites a Harvard Business School study which suggested that Airbnb hosts “are less likely to accept guests with stereotypically African-American names”.

Not true at this house, where all names are welcome, including Chinese symbols we cannot translate. Some young Chinese guests help out by saying that they like to be known by English names instead, Kevin or Sophie perhaps.

Anyway, that article annoyed me. So I have taken a small revenge.

The hipster aesthetic can be spotted here in York at places such as the lovely Fossgate Social, which I often recommend to our guests.

As for Manchester, I guess that city can look after itself. We stayed for a night in a cheap but not cheerful hotel. We were mostly there to see our son play in the band Sonic Bliss Machine at a place called Night and Day, but we made full use of our time, visiting the Whitworth Gallery, which has been splendidly revamped, and the equally impressive Manchester City Art Gallery.

Heading for lunch with our boy and his girl, we popped into the John Rylands Library. What an inspirational place, a stunning marriage of old and new, with clean modern lines and open white space giving way to long gothic corridors and libraries like something out of Harry Potter. We only had ten minutes to spare, but will return.

I grew up in Manchester, or rather at a suburban remove, and always enjoy going back. My inner satnav went on the blink though, and we traipsed a long way in the wrong direction before finding the Whitworth.

Manchester is being dug up for new tramlines so the city is in chaos, but still felt good: big and messy, mundane and magnificent all at once.

There were an awful lot of beggars and homeless people. If you gave money to all of them, you’d soon be reduced to begging yourself. All cities have homeless people, but they do seem very visible in Manchester. I don’t know why that should be, but it’s surely not good for them, and can be unsettling.

This city is well worth a visit, though. As too is that hipster coffee bar at number six Tariff Street.

HERE is a reason not to visit Gravesend. Or another one.

According to Rosie Brighouse, the legal officer for Liberty, sleeping is banned in the Kent town.

Not all sleeping obviously, otherwise the place would be filled with red-eyed zombies bumping into lampposts. Or maybe it is. It’s a while since I visited.

No, the prohibition extends in the town’s parks and public spaces. And in its parked cars, too. “Unless you’re ‘homeless or a vulnerable adult’, you are banned from sleeping in any of the town’s open spaces – as well as in any vehicle, caravan or tent,” according to an interesting article by Rosie on the politics.co.uk website.

This seems unduly harsh on the occasionally dozy. Sometimes I have taken a nap in parks or gardens, thanks perhaps to half a lifetime of bad sleeping habits.

Slumber will sometimes occur, perhaps if we are visiting a garden (what a lot of gardens there in this country). After an hour or so of traipsing round on a warm day, I will leave my wife to her horticultural homage and find a bench. Or the branches of a tree to lie beneath. It’s a pleasant thing to do. But not in Gravesend, apparently.

Gravesham Borough Council has declared war on “recumbence and repose”, according to Rosie’s report. And what a nice turn of phrase she has there.

Anyone who lies down in public for a sleep in Gravesend risks a fine of £100. And that is asking for trouble from the somnambulant and the sluggish. And you don’t want to cross that sleepy-eyed lot, believe me.

Rosie’s report extends beyond the ban on sleeping in the town’s public spaces. Her wider point is that councils throughout the land are banning all sorts of activities, under something called a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO), a little-known new rule created by 2014’s Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act.

At the time of their introduction, Liberty, the cross-party, non-party civil liberties charity that monitors “fundamental rights and freedoms in the UK”, warned that PSPOs were too broad and vaguely worded, and allowed councils to ban almost anything they deemed to have a “detrimental effect” on people in the area.

These rules are not “a formal part of the criminal law of the land”, according to Liberty, but if you don’t pay the on-the-spot fine of £100, you could face a court appearance and a penalty of £1,000.

All for having an open-air nap, at least in Gravesend. Elsewhere the offences are many are various, and likely, according to Liberty, to mostly affect “the vulnerable and the voiceless”.

In Ferndown, East Dorset a space the council itself calls a “playing area of open space set aside in perpetuity for sport and recreation” now bans “cycling, skateboarding, model aircraft, ‘annoyingly’ flying kites and excessive noise”, according again to Rosie’s report.

How does one fly a kite annoyingly? Who knows, apart from those who drew up these ludicrous rules. The few times I have flown a kite, the annoying part comes when they crash to the ground. So is that now to be an offence in East Dorset?

The restrictions roll on. In the Forest of Dean – a place that will always be Dennis Potter-land to some of us – the council is consulting on criminalising anyone who lets their sheep enter the village of Bream, even though sheep have grazed there for centuries. Lancaster and Bassetlaw prefer a wide-brush approach, banning anything that causes “annoyance”.

In Kettering, the under-18s must be home by 11pm or risk fines or even a criminal record, while in Bassetlaw again, the under-16s cannot gather in groups of three or more if they’re “causing annoyance”.

And so it goes on. Annoyance is a funny thing. We can all be annoyed by all sorts of behaviour. Maybe I’d like to ban people who believe all those contradictory health stories in the Daily Mail. Or those who swallow a single word printed on the front page of the Daily Express. Or people who look like they voted Leave. I am not impressed by smokers who sit too close to where I am sitting outside. Or those who picnic on smelly takeaways.

But being at large in society demands a degree of tolerance and an acceptance of others. And allowing councils to ban whatever they fancy banning, that’s just open season for general intolerance.

And with that I am off to Gravesend for a nap.

THERESA May wishes to lead a government driven by the interests of the many – “ordinary families for whom life is harder than many people in politics realise”.

Turns out this involves waving wads of notes under the noses of residents affected by fracking and bunging a few more to anyone living near the site of an unpopular new housing estate. Oh, and she’d like to bring back grammar schools, too.

That’s quite a lot scribbled on the Post-it note she stuck on the front of David Cameron’s old Etonian exercise book.

So let’s look at those three proposals in that order, starting with using the £1 billion shale wealth fund, as set up by departed chancellor George Osborne, to give cash payments to households affected by fracking. The original idea had been to pass the money to local community groups, but Mrs May is said to favour a more direct approach – one that ordinary families of a cynical disposition might think of as a bribe.

This remoulded Tory party loves fracking, as did the now disbanded Cameron model. Mrs May has decided to poison the local well by instituting a weird postcode lottery where you can have a reported £10,000 or more if fracking is going to take place near to your property.

The arguments for and against fracking remain the same; what’s changed is that Mrs May wishes to circumvent local disputes by handing out government dosh, presumably in the hope that this will silence the dissenters.

Will this sum offset the drop in the value of a property potentially blighted by the ground being exploded underneath your house in the search for gas? Hard to say, as the only detail so far is that Mrs May has been going about the place with wads of notes under her smart blue coat, whispering “This’ll sweeten the blow, dearie.”

The thing is, this changes nothing – it just gives some people a random bribe from the state. If you ask me, fracking is an old-style bit of planet disruption, a final spin of the old oil and gas wheel: and this money represents a probably fairly measly bribe for accepting the damage to your community. Surely we should be looking at low-carbon energy, not bribing people to accept an unseemly dash for gas.

But others may be happy, as money seals the deal for some people, and years ago Mrs Thatcher ran a very successful side-line in flogging off cut-price council houses with little or no regard to future consequences (reducing housing stock and adding more fuel to the house-price bonfire).

Still with housing, some of the papers today report that the prime minister wishes to offer more state money to disgruntled locals if they live near to controversial new housing schemes. Is this the new May way: if you don’t like something, we’ll bung you some money to buy your silence? Once you begin to unwrap this new prime minister, she begins to look somewhat less scrupulous than you first imagined.

As for the suggestion to bring back grammar schools, that bit of tired old Tory ideology has been around for decades. Yesterday I wrote about the three Cole brothers, and here they are again (briefly this time, I promise). Two of us went to the local grammar school, a third failed the 11-plus and went to a secondary modern school; this started a much tougher and longer route to further education for the one of us who didn’t get through the grammar gates.

Those who love grammar schools tell you that they offer the best chance to less advantaged children, but they never tell you that the percentages are small, with most grammar schools favouring the already advantaged – and they always forget to mention that selective schools don’t only select, they reject too. The successful few who pass through those gates are vastly outnumbered by the many who are turned away.

Selection at 11 is a cruel way to run an education system, creating more problems than it solves, and fostering much less social mobility than the grammar groupies would have us believe. Or so says this old grammar school boy.