YESTERDAY morning started with one of those reminders of life’s basic nature. It all began when the downstairs loo started blocking up.

We tried caustic soda to no effect. Then we used a trick discovered online involving making a seal over the lavatory with Sellotape; only we didn’t have any wide enough and used cling film instead. The idea was to create a vacuum that would on flushing plunge the blockage away. Not a success.

Then we heard an intestinal gurgle beneath where we stood. We inherited this downstairs shower room when we moved into this house. The estate agent called it a wet room and never a truer word did an estate agent speak: it was wet, soaking wet as the shower had no doors. We had doors fitted but everything else is as it was.

The gurgle led to the shower, and when we inspected the trap in the floor, that too was flooded.

So I went outside and lifted the manhole cover from the drain next to the shower room, and into which all waste water seems to flow. It was full and contained evidence of what the toilet was used for. Not a pretty sight before breakfast.

My wife went off to work, leaving me in charge, and how she returned nine hours later to a house unflooded is a miracle.

I phoned an unblocking company and the man said I should contact Yorkshire Water first. The woman who answered the phone had a decent wodge of Yorkshire accent, as did the woman I spoke to in the drains department (perhaps you have to pass an accent test before you can work there).

The second woman wanted to know the direction of my drains, a personal question as we’d only just been introduced. She also wanted to know if we shared with next door. If your drain is shared with your neighbour, Yorkshire Water is obliged to sort out the problem; if the drain is private and unattached, the problem is yours to solve.

A man duly arrived and I offered to make him a drink. “Yes, that’s a blocked drain,” he said, looking down at the unhappy evidence. “Coffee with milk, please.”

The drain runs down the garden to another manhole cover, which I had been unable to dislodge. With assorted tools and a grunt or two, the man removed the cover and peered down a deep brick shaft. This was, he said, a Windsor trap that connected to a main sewer somewhere and was designed to prevent anything backing up. All was clear here.

At this point the drains man, a friendly sort and cheerful in his work, returned to the other drain. He got me to ask the neighbour to flush their toilet to see if our flooded drain would be disturbed. There was not so much as a ripple and he decreed no drain cohabitation had been going on, and therefore the blockage was not the responsibility of Yorkshire Water.

I had earlier established that a man with a high-pressure hose would charge £80 plus VAT to blast out the drain.

As a goodwill gesture, the man from Yorkshire Water got a reel from his van. This was a long thick wire with a camera on the end, and he pushed this through the drain, managing to unblock it. He then ran the wire through again, showing me the pictures on a screen above the winding mechanism. The images were oddly medical in nature and reminded me of the time I had to go to hospital and swallow a long flex with a stomach-searching camera attached.

The problem, likely as not, was caused by the roots of trees working into the pipe and then attracting grease from cooking and so on.

The man finished his coffee and left to probe someone else’s drains, although not before admiring the old Volvo and telling me he had one that was even older and used to be a police car.

I was left satisfied at a job done well: back-breaking phone and coffee-making work, me; real work, the man from Yorkshire Water. But the incident did stand as a queasy reminder: never mind how civilised we are, we are only ever a step or two away from hidden unpleasantness.

SOMETIMES you know something is wrong and never mind how much the snake-oil salesman offers words of placatory slipperiness.

Now it is probably unfair of me to bring out the snake oil when talking about fracking, but that’s just the way things roll round here occasionally.

Snake oil was originally found in America, much like fracking, where it featured in the 19^th-century practice of selling cure-all elixirs in travelling medicine shows. All sorts of benefits would be dubiously claimed for snake oil, much in the way that fracking companies make assorted claims for the economic benefits of blasting huge quantities of water, chemicals and silica sand down to 10,000 feet to fracture deep-buried rocks and release gas.

Some of the objections to fracking are based on what hard-headed sorts would characterise as misguided romanticism getting in the way of economic reality. Well, I am all for that imprudent sentiment on this matter.

Tomorrow, North Yorkshire county council will hear from some of the thousands who object to the planning application to frack a well close to the small Ryedale village of Kirby Misperton.

To even think of allowing fracking in the beautiful North Yorkshire countryside, some of the loveliest to be found anywhere, seems little short of mad and criminally irresponsible.

I don’t wish on this occasion to explore what might or might not happen when the earth is blasted to release the gas trapped below. Some of the horror stories from the US of fire burping out of taps may or may not apply here. But what we should instead concentrate on is the thought that some of our loveliest green acres could be contaminated by this process.

In last Sunday’s Observer, the journalist Madeleine Bunting delivered a good and intelligent emotional blast against gas exploration in the countryside where she was born and grew up. Bunting is a noted commentator and also the author The Plot: A Biography of My Father’s English Acre.

The acre in question is a plot of land not far from the White Horse at Kilburn. Bunting’s sculptor father bought this land and built on it a chapel as a memorial to those who died and fought in the Second World War. I haven’t yet read the book, but I have stood on that plot with its long views over a fine panorama, taking a diversion there during a walk with friends, one of whom had read Bunting’s book.

Bunting makes many good points. Here is one: “What’s at stake here is whether an industry developed in relatively lightly populated areas of the rural US, Canada and Australia can be accommodated in England without being too obtrusive.” She adds that this is no consensus on this point: fracking company Third Energy says it will do things differently in North Yorkshire; thousands of local residents remain sceptical.

One of the best points Bunting makes in relation to the tiny village of Kirby Misperton is that fracking will lead to dozens of heavy goods vehicles driving down the narrow village lane for 12 hours a day. If this is true, it is complete madness – and reason enough, in the phrase used by the protest groups, to tell these modern-day prospectors to “frack off”.

Never mind how the company attempts to shield the drilling site, you cannot hide HGVs thundering along previously peaceful roads in North Yorkshire countryside.

Bunting makes the point that what’s at question here is “how we value the countryside and its particular qualities of quietness and slowness”; and how we maintain that “quality of placidity so quintessential to English rural life”.

What seems odd is that a Conservative government should be so keen on fracking – and therefore so seemingly hell-bent on allowing intrusive industrial processes to intrude on our lovely countryside. Once Tories genuinely wanted to preserve our way of life; now they seem happy to see it blasted to bits in the name of ideology or a quick buck.

I recognise that I live in the city and visit the countryside for recreation, and some supporters of fracking will dismiss my complaints on those grounds. All I can say is that potentially harming areas of the North York Moors or the Howardian Hills just in the name of eking out our gas supplies for a little longer is madness. Especially when this government has decided to turn its back on alternative forms of energy, and instead go in for a bit of macho earth-juddering.

Really, what the frack are they thinking of?

FOOD yesterday, drink today. My last blog concerned the BBC’s intention to remove 11,000 recipes from its BBC Food website, partly at the urging of the fingers-in-pies chancellor George Osborne.

A petition was launched and soon gathered more than 120,000 signatures. Hours later the BBC said the recipes wouldn’t disappear but would instead move to the BBC Good Food website, owned by its commercial arm BBC Worldwide.

I signed the petition, even though signing petitions jars my nerves – there are just too many nowadays – and my ledge-bound indignation caused a few others to sign, too.

As for Osborne, since when did chancellors care about BBC recipes? This chancellor really can’t stop interfering in everything under the sun; and with a few things that probably never see the sun.

Food done, let’s drink. Alcohol runs through this blog from time to time, much as it runs through this writer from time to time. Being the age I am and having the inclinations I do, this recent headline caught my eye: “Middle-aged men ignore safe alcohol limits.”

The story said middle-aged men drink above government guidelines and do not believe it does them any harm, according to findings from Drinkaware, the charity funded by the alcohol industry.

Earlier this year, the chief medical officer/chief bossy person lowered the suggested drinking limit for men from 21 units a week to 14 – the same as women. So part of the problem is that middle-aged men who were not considered to be drinking too much before have now been reclassified as potential problem drinkers.

I find these stories irritating and hectoring, but I do try to be honest when writing about alcohol. So here is an average week’s consumption: nothing Monday to Thursday, then maybe two pints or two or three bottles of beer over the weekend, along with a few glasses of wine, and sometimes a Friday-night whisky. If my wife likes the wine, she’ll have one glass, occasionally two; if she doesn’t I might drink the whole bottle over two days.

A glance at a government chart suggests this would be above the new limit but below the old one. Wine is my downfall in a sense, partly because I enjoy drinking it, but also because I finish off whatever is left by Sunday night.

This pattern is the same as it has been for years; and the days of abstinence are the same, too. Maybe one day I might give up, but it seems unlikely, and my father, who is heading for 84, still likes his wine, although he too has alcohol-free days. He also still goes swimming, as I go running, cycling, play squash and badminton.

I realise that alcohol can be a problem. Just popping into the centre of York on a Saturday afternoon and evening shows that: the place is teeming with drunk people and the atmosphere is alarming, and occasionally hostile. So many bars, so many pubs, they all stay open for most of the day, and sometimes the results aren’t pretty.

But speaking as a middle-aged man who drinks at home and has an occasional pint out, this safe limit is ignored partly because it has been so drastically changed. And also because middle-age people don’t like being bossed around.

The experts quoted in the story all said health warnings should be put on all alcoholic drinks. Well, go ahead – but I am not sure this will make the slightest difference. Middle-aged men, along with everyone else, will just carry on enjoying their drink and will ignore the warnings.

This isn’t to say that educating people about the potential harm caused by alcohol is a waste of time; just that doing it in a nanny-stage nagging manner might well be.

And, yes, some middle-aged men do drink a lot. On Sunday we went to see a film at City Screen, then popped into the Maltings for one drink. Returning on the bus, we witnessed a spot of real-life theatre as a man, probably older than middle-aged, carried on a rambling shouted conversation with the bus driver from a few seats back. They knew each other and the man said he’d been out drinking for eight hours. “And in that time I’ve heard people talk a lot of shite,” he said.

Returning home, and with that florid man in mind, I ended the day with one glass of wine, making a weekend tally of two bottles of beer, one pint of beer and three glasses of red wine (fairly low in alcohol at 12 per cent).

And I have to say that I enjoyed every slurp and sip.

ANYONE who likes to cook will have used a recipe or two from the BBC website. My best finds have included Paul Hollywood’s method for hot cross buns – the first one to really work in years of trying – and Simon Hopkinson’s take on coq au vin, where you marinate the chicken pieces overnight in red wine.

I am grateful to these two cooks, and many others, for showing how to make something, and showing how to do it well.

After today my gratitude will have to find a new home, as the BBC has decided to remove all recipes from its website. Some 11,000 online recipes are to be shelved following a review of the BBC’s online output that aims to save £15 million a year by removing magazine-style content from the website.

This follows what is widely regarded to have been a bruising battle with the government leading up to last week’s white paper; the outcome to which was generally seen to have been good for the Corporation. So why the mean-minded removal of all those useful recipes?

It’s all George Osborne’s fault. Heavens, doesn’t that man have enough to do without spoiling people’s fun in the kitchen? Last summer the chancellor said the BBC was being “imperial in its ambitions” by expanding into magazine territory by including recipes.

According to reports this morning, the changes will make the website more distinctive. A BBC insider quoted in the Guardian says: “These changes won’t be popular with all members of the public, but we think they are the right thing to do.”

So not content with cooking up a national stew of economic arrogance, Osborne has strong-armed the BBC into removing a vast and useful fund of recipes on the grounds that the BBC shouldn’t be a national newspaper as well as the national broadcaster. A little odd in that the BBC broadcasts so many food programmes.

So to satisfy the whims of that strange and hardly compelling man, the BBC is removing lots of useful recipes that have taught many people how to cook.

Sharing knowledge about food is a wonderful and useful thing; teaching people how to cook is keeping alive a humdrum but vital skill. So how does this cleansing of recipes from the BBC website add to the pleasure of the nation or the usefulness of the corporation?

It doesn’t at all; it is just more mean tinkering from a man who should concentrate on running/ruining the economy rather than sticking his fingers into so many pies. And if you want the recipe for that pie, it has probably just been removed.

Here is my offering for U Turn If You Want To Pie:

Take the many stupid sayings of one irksome chancellor and sprinkle with salt; fry in a tablespoon of olive oil until well-cooked but not too brown; roll out ready-made flaky ideas pasty; carefully arrange the wasted words on the pastry, and fold over; form the pie into the shape of the letter U; bake until overdone (to match the chancellor’s rhetoric). Serve with all-in-this-together gravy.

Sadly, there probably won’t be a U-turn on this policy as the BBC is falling into line on this one. In protest, the chef Jack Monroe has already promised to post recipes online as a public benefit, saying in a Facebook post: “I learned to cook on the dole using free recipes online and for the BBC to reduce this vital service is an abomination.”

Quite so; and so too is that man the chancellor.

Well, you could have knocked me over with a pork pie. Sir Eric Pickles, that man of Dickensian dimension and character, has just said something sensible.

Being in agreement with Pickles is a shocking state of affairs, and one which may take some adjustment.

The Tory former communities secretary was speaking about the latest bit of flammable nonsense from Boris Johnson when he compared the European Union’s attempts to unify Europe with the actions of Adolf Hitler.

Drawing comparisons with Ken Livingstone, another former London mayor with a big mouth, who was suspended from Labour for suggesting that Hitler supported Zionism, Pickles said: “If the last few weeks tell us anything: it is rarely a help to mention Hitler in support of an argument by an ex-mayor of London.”

How true, and how alarming to find oneself nodding along to words that rolled from that famously orotund mouth. Perhaps disagreeing with someone because of the way they look and sound is unfair; disagreeing with what they usually stand for is a different matter, of course.

Anyway Sir Eric – was he knighted for unstinting services to pomposity? – is right about Boris, and never mind what various Eurosceptic newspapers are trying to argue this morning.

In its leader, the Daily Mail wonders “what did Mr Johnson actually say that was wrong… is this really a cynical, hysterical argument, or simply the voice of logic and common sense?”

To the first part of that question the answer is ‘yes’; and to the second it is ‘no with knobs on’. Boris Johnson wouldn’t know logic and common sense if he accidentally tripped over it during a photo opportunity – “Ah, sorry – didn’t see that lying there…”

Sadly, this is another example of the debate around the Europe vote being devalued by thin arguments, silliness and nastiness. As the Times puts it this morning: “Britain deserves better than the shrill point-scoring into which this debate has descended.”

As for dragging Hitler into the argument, that is always a sign of weakness and better suits a saloon-bar bore than an intelligent man who wishes to be taken seriously as a politician.

It has long been the case that playing the Hitler card in an argument is an act of desperation. As long ago as 1951, the philosopher Leo Strauss coined a phrase for this tactic, Reductio ad Hitlerum, although that was more to do with comparing an opponent’s views with those of Hitler (according to a quick Google).

In his Hitler moment during his interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Boris Johnson spoke of the aspiration to entrench European unity, saying “and it ends tragically… the EU is an attempt to do this by different methods”.

Ah, yes – would that be Hitler’s attempts to ban our kettles or straighten our bananas (or whatever Euro-myth is favour of the moment)?

Perhaps we could have a ban on mentioning Hitler at least until the vote next month. Incidentally, I am still with David Cameron on the need for Britain to stay in Europe – and agreeing with that man is almost as upsetting as being in accord with something plucked from the Pickles jar.

YESTERDAY I did something dangerous in the afternoon and, likely as not, today I’ll do the same. Creature of habit, you see.

I defied the headline on the front of the Daily Express and went and had a nap anyway. I like my naps and have been having them for a long time.

Put some music on, read half a page in the newspaper, and off I go. This is mostly a weekend habit, compensation for on-and-off sleeping; it is one of life’s great pleasures, to me at least. And my father.

As a teenager, I remember my father going off to listen to music as cover for having a doze. He’d pulled the sliding doors to that divided the front and back rooms in our 1960s house, shut the other door as well, put on some Beethoven and fall asleep. So it’s a family tradition, although without the Beethoven on my part. Folk, jazz, a requiem perhaps – there always is music.

The headline on the front page of yesterday’s Daily Express read: “WHY A NAP IS BAD FOR YOU” while the sub-head warned: “40 winks during the day raises risk of heart attack.”

Well, lots of thing can raise the risk of a heart attack, including reading headlines on the front of the Daily Express. Often those headlines urge extreme caution about the weather – “UK WILL BE HOTTER THAN HELL” or perhaps “UK SET FOR ARCTIC WINTER”, alarmist weather reports being the thing. Armageddon is always just around the corner, although the other day the paper offered some variety by warning that the EU wanted to take our kettles away. I just had a look and ours is still there. Phew, just as well or else I wouldn’t be writing this with a cup of tea to hand.

The story in the Express was all to do with high blood pressure, with worries that a nap is not a restorative interlude but can in fact alter your blood pressure. “Some studies have reported it reduces blood pressure, while others have found it increases it,” the paper warned. Ah, I see. One of those sort of medical stories (red wine is good for you/bad for you/oh go on, I’ll have one anyway).

The report was based on research carried out by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which pooled data from nine previous studies with a total of 112,267 participants. This found that “those stealing forty winks in the middle of the day were between 13 and 19 per cent more likely to have hypertension”. Yet the researchers then looked at night-time naps by those who work night shifts and found no such link.

Make of that what you will. If you are the editor of the Daily Express, you might make a heart attack out of it. Does the editor of the Daily Express ever take a nap? Who knows; probably too busy.

There is so much advice, so many media panics, that in the end you just have to make your own way through the hazardous thicket of life.

So last night I had a bottle of beer and some red wine, today I shall do the same. This morning I went for a run, five or six miles in the May sunshine. After lunch I shall almost certainly stare death in the face and fall into a post prandial slumber.

One day the editor of the Daily Express may well turn out to have been right. But I shall keep on napping. That’s just the devil-may-care attitude you get from those of us who like to do something dangerous in the afternoon.

NOTHING spells out the weirdness of the US to British eyes as much as that country’s attitude to guns. And nothing looks more squirm-inducing in its oddness than George Zimmerman auctioning the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin four years ago.

Zimmerman is the former neighbour watch volunteer who was acquitted two years ago in the death of the young and unarmed African American. Although he escaped prosecution, the case sparked protest and a debate across the US about race.

It would be fair to say that Zimmerman is not weighed down with contrition, as shown by his listing of the gun yesterday as “your opportunity to own a piece of American history”.

That sounds horribly close to bragging, doesn’t it? Here’s the gun I used to kill that vicious black hooligan; go on, get a piece of that. Trayvon Martin, in case you need reminding, was at the time engaged in the clearly nefarious activity known as returning from the local convenience store in Sanford, Florida while in possession of black skin.

Zimmerman phoned the police minutes before the killing to say he’d seen “a real suspicious guy” who “looks like he is up to no good”. A violent altercation followed and one man ended up dead; and funnily enough it was the unarmed young black man.

Initially, Zimmerman escaped prosecution, but protests around the US demanded a full investigation. He pleaded self-defence and was acquitted of murder.

When putting this vile gun up for sale, Zimmerman made an announcement on Twitter using the account of a Fox journalist (he’s been banned from Twitter): “What I’ve decided to do is not cower; I’m a free American I can do what I want with my possessions.”

Yes, he’s a free American; and Trayvon Martin is a dead American.

At this point I can say that I am tired of writing the name Zimmerman, especially as that man’s ownership of it seems like an insult to Bob Dylan. Other than that perhaps eccentrically personal response, I’d say that one of many reverberations of this story is that giving guns to idiots on neighbour watch duty is about as stupid as it gets.

How short the hop is between seeing something that looks suspicious and killing someone for no reason at all. We don’t do everything right in this country, but our attitude to guns is a hell of a lot more sensible than that which prevails in the United States.

And if my opening paragraph contains a sweeping statement, and one that no doubt sweeps up plenty of Americans who would like to see greater gun control, then it is fair to admit that assorted Americans from President Obama downwards have tried to do something about gun crime, to date without notable success.

There is one even more stupid thing that America could do than sending a man like George Zimmerman out on neighbourhood watch patrol armed with a gun. And that would be to elect as president a man like Donald Trump armed with, well, an army. If that happens the whole world will need watching.

NO politics for me this morning. Instead today’s distractions are sex, fashion and money. Write about what you know, they do say – ho-hum. Really today’s blog is concerned with the things you end up reading in the weekend newspapers (and often not at the weekend).

First up is a report in the Family section of last Saturday’s Guardian, under the headline: “In my 50s, having the best sex ever!” The story relayed in some colourful detail how Laurett Fenn was “single, menopausal and fed up living without sex” so downloaded several dating apps and embarked on a series of sexual adventures with younger men.

I read this because, well, who wouldn’t? Laurett – a pseudonym – ends up having a better sex life than in her twenties and “I’ve had men who wouldn’t have looked at me twice back then”.

My thoughts are nothing to do with my own sex life then or now, so much as to wonder what the reaction would be if a man had written such a piece. You know, a man in his fifties who was having lots of sex with gorgeous women in their twenties and thirties; a man worrying, perhaps, about what all that activity might be doing to his, er, equipment; a man constantly amazed that all these beautiful young women didn’t find him a turn-off?

These are the sort of concerns that afflict Laurett from her female perspective, but mostly she is on a high of sorts. She concludes her account by saying that she has “no idea where this endless parade of unimaginable pleasure will take me”. Probably to a book deal, I shouldn’t wonder.

One big question is how would all this sound if a man had written the piece. Would it be sleazier seen through a male eye?

I guess the point is that a middle-aged man sharing the details of such an adventuresome shag-fest would not be that remarkable, where it is unusual to read the woman’s point of view. Although perhaps not in that section of the Guardian, where another pseudonymous middle-aged woman writer has just finished a two-year column along similar lines. And is now writing a book about her adventures.

Next up is a sunny Sunday sort of story on the news pages of the Observer, under the headline: “As Britons bask in the sun, beach fashion is all about looking your best on Instagram”.

The story is all about the “beautiful and the bendy”, which is troublesome for any personal parallels I might wish to make, as I am neither of those things.

Really this story strays into alien territory for me, and is all about how young bloggers are photographed as they traipse elegantly in the sunshine. Apparently, they don’t care about being seen on the beach as what they’re doing is parading outfits especially designed to be shown off on Instagram to their many followers.

These bright young things write a different sort of blog to this one. They put endless pictures of themselves in glamorous poses as they wear different sometimes skimpy outfits. It has to be said that some of the winners at the UK Blog Awards worked along similar lines.

Some of these bloggers have followers in their millions, so perhaps I should try something similar. I could do with a few more adherents. Do you think pictures of me in one or other of my four pairs of Levis might catch on? “These are the really old ones with the frayed leg ends and the beginnings of a wallet-shaped hole in the back pocket.” “These ones are newer and I like to roll up the ends and wear them with my best Doc Marten shoes…”

Perhaps not.

On to the Barbara Ellen column in the Observer now, where the following headline caught my eye: “It’s boom time for bank of mum and dad – if you chose the right parents.”

Barbara’s thoughts were concentrated round ever-longer borrowing and the return of 100 per cent mortgages – which in some cases involve the borrower finding a ‘backer’ who can stump up ten per cent of the property price (returned with interest after three years if the borrower hasn’t defaulted).

Mostly my reaction to this one was personal, and a little wryly sorrowful. Our three certainly didn’t choose the right parents when it comes to the bank of mum and dad. We might have some parental virtues, but being family bankers isn’t one of them at the moment.

So there you go, sex, fashion and money, as promised.

UNTIL reading a column just now, I’d never considered that Facebook staff vet the news. But apparently a story about right-wing websites being weeded out from trending news on the site was soon making news itself.

Here are two stories I spotted on Facebook this morning; there is no connection apart from the proximity of one to the other; and the fact that each involves a petition.

First up was a story shared by someone I know about another of those petitions calling on the BBC to sack political editor Laura Kuenssberg. Once again, supporters of Jeremy Corbyn are protesting about biased reporting of the Labour party – and complaining that their blessed leader is being treated unfairly.

Now I quite like Jeremy Corbyn but he doesn’t set me alight the way he does his keenest supporters. And I think the efforts of the Corbyn badge-wearers to spin the local election results as a great success are patently ridiculous. Combined with a splendid showing in London and a dreadful rout in Scotland, the local results were a mixed bag for Labour – and for all parties, with plenty of room for argument and interpretation.

On the BBC, that difficult job falls to Laura Kuenssberg, the Corporation’s first female political editor. And she has become an unhealthy obsession for plenty of Corbyn supporters, some of whom might well read this through Facebook and disagree with my thoughts here.

The story I saw first was a report in the Guardian on this latest petition, as shared on Facebook; next I read a follow-up report on the same site saying that campaign group 38 degrees had taken down the petition as it had become a focal point for misogynist abuse.

Many of those who signed were merely having their usual drone of a moan, but others were using abusive and sexist language about Kuenssberg.

I know the Corbyn loyalists will disagree, but Kuenssberg is a journalist doing a job and she should be allowed to get on with it; and I would think the same if the abuse was coming from right-wingers moaning that dear David was getting a rough ride from Laura.

And for Kuenssberg to receive an extra layering of sexist abuse is just disgraceful, isn’t it? I seem to recall that Jeremy Corbyn wanted a kinder sort of politics; perhaps he should remind some of his supporters of this.

Now the other story is just ridiculous, and a little unsavoury perhaps, but here goes. A petition in the US is taking the pro-life argument to a new level, with those signing calling for ejaculation to be made illegal. “Ejaculation is murder” say the placards.

“God made men’s semen for a purpose,” a spokeswoman says on the website where I saw this.

If this petition isn’t one big joke, and that is hard to determine online sometimes, then there are some interesting ramifications here, not least what exactly the role of the state would be in enforcing such a law. Will spotlights pierce through curtained windows; will FBI self-harm agents burst through bedroom doors, handcuffs and a slap at the ready?

As for Facebook, the site seems to have become the modern equivalent of those scruffy old news vendors who used to shout themselves hoarse on street corners.

“Read all about it” – from snaps of a friend’s garden, to international news and comment, and back to some bloke’s pictures of freshly baked bread (guilty on all floury counts).

As the newspaper people used to say, all human life is there, including sexist rants from people who should know better.