When Will There Be Good News is a novel by Kate Atkinson, published in 2008 and the third in her highly enjoyable series featuring Jackson Brodie.

By chance, that title chimes with a growing public alienation with news, judging by the unscientific observations of friends and the steadier calculus provided last month by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute.

These thoughts about news also percolate through the mind of someone who spent a lifetime in an around journalism until last December.

Since retiring from my last regular gig with PA Media, I have confined my journalism to occasional feature writing for the Yorkshire Post, a fine diversion for a good newspaper, and twittering about life in this blog.

As for that last job, working for a news agency certainly plunges you into the undammable flow of what we call news, while reinforcing the idea that there is some sort of media agenda.

Not the agenda exemplified by the malignant bias of newspapers such as the Mail, Telegraph and Express, but the way news organisations report on the same things at the same time, all in a headless rush to whatever next.

And never more so that with all that churning tedium of ‘news’ about royalty. Imagine what could be covered if all the lazy obsequiousness was stripped out of the headlines. It’ll never happen, but it should.

By chance, I was working on the PA newswire on the day the late Queen died. That experience left me awed by the skill and dedication involved in producing so much news at such speed; yet it was hard not to wonder who would read all those words.

After a working life mostly spent in features, that newswire job was exacting and interesting, although it coincided with my own creeping doubts about news.

Once upon an ink-smudged finger, I was an all-round news addict, reading, watching and listening to almost anything and everything. Nowadays I take more of a semi-detached squint at what’s going on, wanting to know while admitting you can’t keep up with everything.

Partly this drift was down to that shameless trio of Brexit, Trump and Johnson. All the news everyday was shaped by that gruesome threesome for what seemed like ever, until even my news-alert mind began to stutter, and my mouth began to cry: “Oh do shut the flip up!” (polite version).

Then there are the endless stupid culture war stories, promoted by the right in the US and echoed by their shabby cousins over here.

You know the stuff, stories that aren’t about anything other than being a way to stir the grievance pot.

You know the guff, everything shit about life being blamed on unspecified liberal forces, such as the woke/Remainer elite, but never on those who are in power.

You know the cast-iron cobblers, invented non-stories about children at a school in Sussex identifying as cats, when no such thing ever happened, and yet just about everyone reports on this thing that never happened. Social media rattles its empty tin, and then politicians join in the dumb chorus, happy for the distraction from all those rotten things that are actually happening.

Well, you know the routine.

Now to that anecdotal evidence. Friends often say, unprompted, that they rarely watch the news. Too depressing, too distressing or just too much to absorb without damaging their mental health – that seems to be the consensus.

And it’s a knotty one. Does knowing about all the bad things than happen to good people make you better informed about the world; or is it just what you might term ‘misery porn’, watching suffering from the comfort of home?

My friends are not alone.

According to the latest study by the Reuters Institute, the number of people taking a strong interest in the news globally has dropped by around a quarter in the past six years.

It found that 48% of people around the world “are very or extremely interested in the news – down from 63% in 2017”, according to the BBC website.

In the UK, the proportion of news followers is lower than the global average at 43%. Worldwide, 36% of people say they “sometimes or often actively avoid the news”.

Perhaps there is just too much news to absorb without coming to harm. Or maybe news is just another product and people aren’t buying like they used to.

A depressing thought for journalists, many of whom work flat out to deliver news for papers, TV, the internet and so forth. Most journalists are good people just doing a job. Sadly, some of them work for newspapers owned by billionaires who set their agenda.

Sadder still, many work for the Daily Mail, a news empire seemingly intent on backing every stupid thing Boris Johnson does, from trumpeting his appalling stint as prime minister, to paying him a fortune to write a poor column after his ejection from Number 10.

According to that Reuters report, most people now access news on TikTok, a mystery to me. I still buy two print newspapers a week, and also dip in and out on social media and on my phone.

Social media has made everything worse, heightening our differences, and given platforms to haters everywhere. Yet it has also allowed those who grumble about the mainstream media to have a public grumble, as they so often do.

When Will There Be Good News? Oh, probably never – or perhaps ‘good news’ isn’t really news at all, even though it should be.

Some habits are hard to break. I won’t turn my back on the headlines entirely, but I have stepped back a foot or two, tuning in more often to BBC Radio 3 for some classical destressing.

It’s a long time since I studied The Ancient Mariner at school, but one line sticks in my mind: “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink after paying billions in dividends to shareholders…”

Or perhaps it was “Boy have you seen all those floaters in the sea, like a painted shit upon a painted ocean…”

It’s possible time has fuzzed some of Coleridge’s poetic words, but then time has also shown the free-market zealotry of Margaret Thatcher to be a big fat con.

In March 1989, when questioned by Neil Kinnock about her plans to privatise the water industry, the then Tory prime minister was shrilly dismissive in that way she had.

She lectured that privatisation was a “better deal for the consumer” and would be “better for the environment”. Dialling up the hectoring, she said: “The privatised water supply is very much more efficient than a public organisation.”

Well, it’s certainly been more efficient in acquiring huge amounts of debt in order to stump up for those dividends.

As for those environmental benefits, just consider the raw sewage discharged into our rivers and coastal seas more than 300,000 times last year, according to the Daily Mirror.

Oh, and those benefits to consumers have seen a 40% increase in bills since privatisation, with the Times reporting the likelihood of 40% more as the private companies tackle the sewage crisis, caused by them failing to sort out our ancient sewage systems because they were too busy paying all those dividends.

Interestingly, water companies had no debt when they were privatised, but have since borrowed £53bn, much of which “has been used to help pay £72bn in dividends”, according to the Financial Times.

And now Thames Water is on the verge of collapse and may have to be bailed out by the government. Perhaps they could celebrate this latest privatisation success by taking a ride on one of the privatised railways we are now all paying for again after they failed.

All of which seems to chime with a sense that nothing works properly in this country anymore – and most of us are feeling poorer.

When Ronald Reagan campaigned for the US presidency in 1980 he asked a winning question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Now it’s a downer to have to remember Margaret Thatcher’s dodgy transatlantic buddy as he was just as bad as her. But it’s a question that could be adapted for Britain today: “Are you better off today than you were 13 years ago?”

That’ll be a resounding no.

The other day, the Guardian’s economics columnist Aditya Chakrabortty wrote a column that was shared by one friend on Facebook, then mentioned in the pub by another friend, suggesting the arrival of a moment.

Chakrabortty based much of his analysis on a new book, When Nothing Works, written by a team of scholars and published by Manchester University Press.

Addressing one strand of their analysis into our stagnant society, Chakrabortty wrote “if the same share of GDP was paid out in wages today as in 1976, the average working-age household would have an extra £9,744 a year”.

That’s ten grand a year we’ve lost, not through being lazy at work but because Thatcherite politics destroyed trade unions and created a low-wage workforce.

All politicians, from Sunak to Starmer, talk about “growing the economy” (horrid phrase, but there you go) – but who benefits from that growth? Not the everyday worker; not the teachers or doctors going on strike because their wages are falling behind thanks to that mean double act of austerity and inflation.

Often you’ll hear Rishi Sunak, the prime minister nobody voted for, complaining that nurses and doctors and teachers can’t have a decent pay rise because it would fuel inflation (mysteriously, the same argument doesn’t seem to run with top City bankers or mega rich unelected prime ministers).

Last Sunday’s Observer reported that in fact pay rises for the top 10% of UK earners have “clearly outstripped” those for the rest of the workforce and had driven recent inflation.

So, it’s not all those nurses, teachers and doctors pumping up inflation with their calls for modest pay rises – it’s the pay rises of top earners, according to figures from the National Office of Statistics.

I dimly recall stories from just the other day about how Sunak was about to make a huge announcement about boosting the NHS and employing more doctors and nurses. At the very same time that he is refusing to pay NHS workers, and teachers, fairly – causing many to leave their important professions.

But, yeah, inflation is all their fault.

HUNTING foxes always struck me as a cruel and ridiculous pursuit, but time can make a hypocrite of us.

It’s not that I now support those mounted posh people who want to wear pink, colour-coded to match their porty faces, and blow bugles while their hounds tear foxes apart. It’s just that we are plagued with foxes in our garden.

Next door’s plot is abandoned and has become an accidental nature reserve, an urban Serengeti filled with brambles two-fingers thick and six-foot tall.

The other week, looking down from an upstairs window in our semi, I saw six or seven foxes up close to the neighbour’s conservatory. Three generations, at a guess. They stared back for a defiant vulpine moment, then turned to trot back into the thickets.

At night they enter our garden to dig holes in the veg patch, excavate around the roots of apple trees, upend some plants, and to sit on others, flattening the feathered leaves of delicate grasses, say.

I know all this as my wife the gardener angrily points out these incursions on her territory. Sometimes the morning after rampant and noisy sex. No, not us; the foxes. As a feature in the Observer put it last October, “Many people don’t like foxes because they’re opportunistic scavengers, unclean, and make a lot of noise having sex.”

According to the Natural History Museum, “Red foxes are very vocal compared to other fox species. They use barks, whines and throaty noises for a number of communication purposes, from conversations with their young to alarm calls and aggressive ‘gekkering’.”

One of those “communication purposes” seems to be waking up restless people who are trying to sleep in a nearby attic. It’s a fox orgy out there some nights.

Then again, I made a lot of noise that time in the deckchair. It was a hot afternoon and surrendering to that canvas sling of material had seemed like a good idea at the time.

As my doze tipped towards something deeper, there was a terrible clamour. The cat had been napping too but a fox had wriggled under the hedge to where she’d been stretched out. The cat yowled and hissed; the fox made some horrid foxy noise. There was a stand-off, but not engineered by me, as I was still trying to get out of that deckchair.

The fox shot off, and the cat flattened her cross spires of fur, and rearranged her old bones, seeking to find again the comfort she’d just lost.

Quoted in that Observer feature, Professor Dawn Scott, executive dean for Nottingham Trent University’s School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences, said cats were far more likely to chase away foxes than the other way around.

“Cats nearly always win,” she said.

Good on cats. Although at 16, our cat is old and outnumbered.

A few years ago, before the foxes decamped to the wilderness next door, they set up home at the end of our garden, tunnelling into the soft sandy soil. We’d dug a pit for a bonfire, in the days when we still lit those, and the foxes carried on digging the hole we’d carelessly left there.

Eventually, we used BBC Radio Four to evict these unwanted tenants. On reading that foxes don’t like hearing human voices at night, I put batteries in an old radio and left it on at night by the mouth of the tunnel.

Some suburbanites love seeing urban foxes, others regard them as a menace. You can put me down under ‘menace’.

We are blocking up their routes into our garden when we spot them, but this may be futile as foxes are resourceful and can climb. In 2011, as the Shard skyscraper was being built in London, a fox was said to have moved in on the seventy-second floor, surviving on food scraps left by workers.

Foxhunting was banned in England and Wales in 2004, and a good thing, too. But nobody seems to have found a way to ban foxes from our garden.

What did we do to deserve Boris Johnson and how will we remove all those scratches and stains?

Mr Sheen will struggle with the crusted blotches and burns bequeathed by the former prime minister’s endless lies, dodges and deceptions. How to clean what oozed from his pretend-clownish exterior, like spillage from a bin-bag?

Let’s not forget the staining potential of his furious narcissism. Or his arrant cowardice, that way he has of rowdily running from responsibility, shouting like a posh Bart Simpson bloated with entitlement, “I Didn’t Do It, Nobody Saw Me Do It, There’s No Way You Can Prove Anything!”

A tough job for Mr Sheen, as I said, so let’s hand the microphone to Mr Shakespeare…

“He’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship’s entertainment…”

That’s from All’s Well That Ends Well, but it might as well have been written about Boris Johnson (thanks to Shakespeare Replies @TheBardAnswers for reminding me of the quote). This is a different drama, one called Nothing Ends Well When That Charlatan’s Around.

As soon as he learned that the privileges committee report on whether he intentionally misled parliament was not turning his way, Johnson shamelessly resigned as an MP with a bitter 1,000-word parting rant, naturally blaming everyone else, for nothing in Boris Johnson’s world is ever his fault.

He baselessly called the committee a “kangaroo court” and complained of a “witch-hunt”. How pathetic that a man with an ego like a raging boil about to burst should reduce himself to being a Trump tribute act.

Johnson’s departure was as cowardly as you’d expect. He got his sour retaliation in first then stomped off, unwilling to face Parliament or stand in a by-election.

A funny thing, though, that a “kangaroo court” should have allowed him to have legal representation – paid for by us, mugs that we are. As for that “witch-hunt”, oh, come off it. All parliamentary process was followed, and had the committee found in Johnson’s favour, he would have been singing its praises, rather than ranting like a pub bore freshly fallen from his barstool.

Johnson, Trump and Brexit – all arrived more or less in the same fetid political breath. The first two have been exposed as liars and sour losers; the third has turned out to be a gigantic con-trick of benefit to no-one at all, however much Johnson “got it done”.

And yet, in that scrappy piece of resignation graffiti, he claimed he was being got rid of because of Brexit, spinning out his own branded conspiracy theories for his followers to parrot.

As for his supposed world-beating election success, all kudos to Professor Colin Talbot for pointing out on Twitter that Johnson’s popularity is a myth, as he won “just 1.2% or 329,767 extra votes” to Theresa May.

His 80-seat “landslide” was due to our first-past-the-post voting system, helped by having Jeremy Corbyn as an opponent.

He’s the very worst of us, but he’s gone (for now, hopefully for good). But I will take a deep breath now. Perhaps the good that can come from this, apart from the Tories tearing each other to shreds, is that we can stop thinking about bloody Boris Johnson at all. God knows, we’ve wasted more than enough time and energy on that terrible man, the first prime minister to be convicted of breaking the law while in office.

Let Max Hastings have the last word, as he knows Johnson – “He is perhaps the most selfish human being I have ever met, indifferent to the welfare of anyone save himself… He is a stranger to truth, a lifelong liar about big things and small.”

Yup, that wraps it up.

The Heege Manuscript (National Library of Scotland)

It’s not often that I wish to convey words from a Cabinet office spokesperson, but here goes.

The wielder of official dodgy excuses says the Covid inquiry does not have the power to request “unambiguously irrelevant information”.

This is because retired judge Heather Hallett, who is leading the inquiry, is demanding to see unredacted WhatsApp messages between former prime minister Boris Johnson and 40 senior government ministers.

There is more in that official quote, but blah-de-blah and all that. Those three highlighted words say a lot about priorities in modern Britain.

‘Unambiguously irrelevant information…’

After all, too many newspapers and broadcasters are happy to spiel off “unambiguously irrelevant information” about Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby. We’ve been wading through the stuff for days, with even the BBC tirelessly pushing this story to the top of the attention pile.

If I never have to hear Phil and Holly mentioned again, it will be three days too soon. Are people really interested in every twitch of this tedious story?

Perhaps they are, perhaps it’s just me – and perhaps interminably jabbering on about the squabble between two pampered daytime TV presenters, and the faintly grubby reasons behind their row, is just more compelling than hearing yet more about politics.

Certainly, today’s edition of the Sun hopes so, splashing with the headline: “Defiant Holly Back On Monday.” Is that the most newsworthy story of the day – or just a way to downplay a possible Covid cover-up, as reported by the front pages of the Guardian, the Mirror and, surprisingly, the Telegraph?

The Telegraph suggests the government is withholding messages to protect Rishi Sunak, rather than Johnson.

Ah, slippery Sunak, pretending to be Mr Reasonable when really he’s as prone to dodging the truth as Johnson. He’s a weird sort of squeaky-clean fibber, rather than a flamboyant one – and he’s up to his Thunderbirds eyebrows in dirty Covid water, as he was in Johnson’s cabinet at the time.

Johnson agreed to hold a Covid inquiry, and it’s only now being dragged into life. As Simon Jenkins usefully points out in his Guardian column, Sweden has already published a report into its controversial Covid policy, and it runs to 1,700 pages. Yet still we fumble and fudge our way along.

As the inquiry is tasked with discovering “how decisions were made”, all government messages are relevant, whether or not they embarrass Johnson, Sunak or the pair of ’em.

Another headline in the Guardian refers to ‘Mad and offensive’ texts…

But these are not WhatsApp or phone messages between ministers, but medieval texts, as the full headline makes clear: “‘Mad and offensive’ texts shed light on the role played by minstrels in medieval society”.

Their ‘job’ ran from “mocking kings and priests to encouraging audiences to get drunk”, according to newly discovered texts at the National Library of Scotland. The texts are part of a booklet known as the Heege Manuscript, discovered by Dr James Wade of the University of Cambridge.

Wade believes echoes of minstrel humour can be found “in shows such as Mock The Week, situational comedies and slapstick”.

“The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British stand-up comedy,” he said.

Mock The Week (BBC)

This is true, although it is an unfortunate example. Mock The Week was dropped by the BBC, seemingly after pressure from Tory-appointed figures at the corporation who objected to the piss being taken out of the government.

That’s also why, at a guess, Have I Got News For You always contains at least one, er, laboured Keir Starmer joke or jibe, almost as if a new BBC rule demands this in the name of satirical balance.

Wade relishes the evidence of medieval snarking, saying: “Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. This is something else. It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. Stand-up comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.”

Poking fun at everyone, high and low, remains the job of satirists today. No-one should be immune, but poking fun at those in power remains the most important piss-take of all.

Especially when you consider the satire-defeating politics we’ve had to endure in the past few years.

I think we can all agree that Boris Johnson has been undone by the blob. This is not the woke variety, more of which in a sentence or two, but the one that faces him in the mirror every morning.

Johnson is undermined by the many flaws in his character and the fact that he was, and remains, totally unsuitable for high office.

It was always going to end in an ungodly mess, and that disarray is still playing out, even as the mop-headed deceiver makes millions from having been a useless arse of a prime minister.

So, yes, when he eyes himself in the mirror, that’s the blob he should blame.

The other blob, the woke variety, is something you never used to hear about at all. And then of a sudden, there it was. Woke blobs wherever you looked. You can’t step outside the door without tripping over a woke blob, even though no-one can be sure what exactly one might be.

If your bus is running late; if the traffic is bad; if your custard is lumpy – just blame the woke blob. After all, those right-wing snowflake commentators can’t get enough of it.

Columnists on the Mail and Telegraph and deeply obsessed with woke blobs. Here is the reliably potty Allister Heath in the latter, worrying that, “The woke blob is about to achieve its greatest triumph: its final takeover of Britain.”

Wow – something made up and non-existent is taking over Britain. You might have thought the people ruining Britain were the right-wing politicians who are actually in power. But, no! It’s that woke blob, in a double act with “cultural Marxism” (actually a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory, but never mind, it’ll do if you’re on deadline for a column in the Mail or Telegraph).

Heath even refers in his article to “followers of Gramsci” taking over the world. No idea, so I looked him up. Ah, old Antonio ­– an Italian Marxist philosopher who, get this, died in 1937.

Blame the dead Italian leftie. Those dead Italian lefties get everywhere… and are now clearly out to get the last Tory PM but two.

In a sorry new twist, Johnson has again been referred to the police over potential rule breaches during Covid. Hilariously, and with a side-serving of karma, the government lawyers we are stumping up for discovered the new findings, which civil servants were then duty bound to hand over the police.

If Johnson had paid for his own legal advice, as he should have done, this would probably not have occurred. You are permitted to emit a loud ‘ha!’ at this juncture.

We all know that Johnson broke the lockdown rules and then lied about it. That’s just what he does. So, it’s hardly surprising that he appears to have broken or bent even more rules.

As for all this worrying about the woke blob, you have to pay to read those angry-angsty columns in the Telegraph and the Mail, and I am not doing that when I can write my own biased rubbish for free.

But still, it’s very odd all this political scapegoating. Never mind saying anything remotely adjacent to the truth, just hunt out a handy conspiracy theory.

An especially useful tip if you have been in power for years, nothing in the country is better than it was – indeed, everything is palpably worse than it was – and need someone or something to blame.

It can’t be your fault because, come off it, it never is.

And that’s where the woke blob comes in so useful. It doesn’t exist, it’s about as real as the Loch Mess Monster – and yet Tory politicians and their favoured commentators can’t get enough of it, crowding around the Messy Loch of Politics and pointing at a supposed monster that isn’t there at all.

And there you have it… a woke blog about the woke blob.

By the water in Assos

It was only a 15-minute drive from my mother’s house to Manchester airport. A short hop before a longer one to Greece, but the unruly gods of roadworks had other ideas.

A good job we left at 2.30am as the M56 was shut. Yes, that one ­– the one that goes to the airport. Round and round we looped, sucked into an inescapable diversion without so much as an “Airport This Way” sign.

My wife’s stress levels were driving that car more than the engine and my own anxiety nearly popped the glasses off my nose. A little light swearing was involved.

Eventually we arrived, parked up and dashed to the terminal, trailing suitcases and thoughts of how easily you could miss a flight.

A few hours later, as we prepared to land in Kefalonia, both of us had trouble catching the captain’s announcement thanks to the pressure in our ears.

“Welcome to Deaf-alonia,” I quipped.

Here’s what I think the captain said…

“It’s cloudy out there today and it is raining at the airport. And, yes, that was lightning that struck us a moment ago. Oh, look, there’s another flicker or two. We will have to circle the airport until the rain stops and those clouds clear. With luck we’ll be down before your holiday ends.

“So, this is what it’s going to be like. You’ll love Kefalonia, even if when you arrive the rain will be falling harder than on a bleak Sunday in the Yorkshire Dales. You’ll get soaked just dragging the suitcases from the taxi.

“Later the downpour will lessen enough for you to glimpse an outline of the panorama where you are staying, but at first the view will be hiding, a bit like the sun.

The pool where we stayed

“But the sun will shine and you’ll go out every day, up and down those hills, in and out of the pool. Take it from me, you’ll love Argostoli with its bay and harbour front and cafes where the coffee comes with freshly baked orange cake at no extra cost.

“One morning you’ll spot a turtle turning in the water, and snap a picture just before his agent muscles in.

“You’ll find an ice cream place so good it has to be visited twice, just to make sure. And there’ll be seriousness too in a small museum exhibition about the earthquakes of 1953 that flattened the island. Almost everything you see today was built after the earth shook so cruelly, three times in that one year.

“You’ll book a coach trip to a gigantic cavern where stalactites patiently wait out time like stone icicles, most stolid as, well, a rock, but some curiously unfurling like flags in a breeze, and then it’ll be on to an underground lake.

“You’ll catch a passing glimpse of the beach from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (great novel, dodgy film, as so many Nicolas Cage films are), after which the valiant driver will thread his giant coach down the zig-zag road that unzips the tiny waterside village of Assos. I’ll tell you this for nothing, getting that coach road those bends with the precipitous drops at either side is a damn sight trickier than flying this plane.

“In Assos, where the earthquake toppled almost everything, you will see grand-looking house fronts still standing, without roof or rooms, like ghosts on the set of a sad film. But many buildings are new, and it’s a lovely spot for lunch on the harbour.

“I’d recommend the griddled whole sea bass and something vegetarian for your wife.

“You’ll also get to also visit upmarket Fiskardo, haunt of the famous in the summer. You won’t spot Johnny Depp, but you will chat to a friendly couple from Eastbourne while having a coffee overlooking the yachts.

“You’ll read three or four books apiece and visit that taverna at the bottom of the hill three times.

“Oh, and your wife will discover that Argostoli has a botanical garden that must be visited. Take her anywhere in the world and that woman can sniff out a garden. If you went to the deepest desert, she’d soon be telling it was open garden weekend at the local mirage.

“Nice garden, though. Enjoy your first proper holiday in a while and thanks for flying with We Must Do This Again Airways…”

Headline from a usual suspect newspaper…

The words below come from a report in the Guardian, but other examples of very peculiar Britishness are available. Read on and try to tell yourself we live in an ordinary country…

“The king and the queen consort will be anointed behind a specially created screen of fine embroidery, held by poles hewn from an ancient windblown Windsor oak and mounted with eagles cast in bronze and gilded in gold leaf, Buckingham Palace has announced.”

Yes, this weekend’s coronation – and not, as you might suppose, some weird mash-up of Tolkien, CS Lewis and King Arthur.

The “specially created screen” will hide the king and his queen consort at a key point in Saturday’s service.

This anointing is “traditionally regarded as a moment between the sovereign and God, and the screen is to be used to give sanctity to this moment”, according again to the Guardian.

No television cameras or photographers’ lenses will be allowed to squeeze between Charles and his God.

I was playing badminton earlier, which has nothing much to do with anything, except that three of us sat out a game and discussed the coronation. None of us exactly young – and all expressing either no enthusiasm for the coronation, or downright hostility.

The story of how royalty are presented to us is a servile tale told endlessly by broadcasters, newspapers and their columnists, favour-currying politicians, and the toadying ranks of royal correspondents and experts.

So tight is their focus on royalty that it is easy to forget plenty of people are either indifferent to the monarchy or dislike the notion that we are still ruled over by kings and queens selected by birth – and, apparently, given the nod from God.

To be found at the bottom of the same page in the Guardian is a story reporting a survey by the National centre for Social Research. A recent poll conducted by the centre found that only 30% of Britons said the monarchy was “very important” to them.

Further, 45% of respondents said the monarchy should be abolished.

This was just one survey, it is true, and all surveys can be picked over to show the findings in a certain light. But it does suggest our purported love for the monarchy has been oversold.

Not only that but we are asked to swear an oath of allegiance to King Charles as follows: “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law.  So help me God.”

Well, so help me God but I won’t be doing that, and I surely won’t be alone.

Such an oath is a solemn promise or statement calling on God to witness the truthfulness of the swearer’s testimony, according to Edward Vallance in a History Today essay from 2016.

But don’t go making that oath lightly…

“In the Tudor and Stuart period it was believed that those that swore falsely would be subject to divine punishment, not just in the next life but in this.”

Vallance mentions that in Dagon Demolished, a pamphlet published in 1660 by John Vicar, the grisly ends of those who broke their promise of allegiance to the king by swearing loyalty to the English republic in 1649 were detailed.

One Mr James Ashton of Oldham “became so full of Lice, continually, that all the shift and attendance that possible was used, could not cleanse him from this filthy Vermine”.

You have been warned.

More broadly, why are we all paying for this coronation at all? Its cost has been put at £100m, while Charles is estimated to be worth £2bn. He could easily have stumped up for the whole shindig himself.

Enjoy the long weekend; enjoy the coronation if it’s your thing; enjoy ignoring the musty, tradition-encrusted peculiar affair if it’s not. All options are fine, apart from the one that tells us what we feel when perhaps we don’t feel it at all.

If you ever consider the law to be an ass, then Charles Dickens is on your side.

Although the writer did not coin the phrase, he gave it prominence in Oliver Twist, published in 1838. Mr Bumble, the unhappy spouse of a domineering wife, is told in court that “…the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction”. To which Mr Bumble replies: “If the law supposes that the law is a ass – a idiot”.

He says this while “squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands”.

I wondered about doing that with my Peaky Blinders-style cap when reading about two court cases in the same copy of the Guardian.

In the first case, two Just Stop Oil protesters were jailed for more than two-and-half years each for scaling a bridge on the Dartford Crossing in October last year. Their protest forced police to close the bridge to traffic.

If you’d been stuck in those long queues, you may well appreciate the fate dealt to those who caused your delay. Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland acted, according to an Extinction Rebellion spokesman, in the name of “urgent and fear-reaching action on the climate and ecological emergency”.

The judge in the case, possibly mistaking himself for the Home Secretary, said: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.”

Shane Collery KC added of the two men that they “plainly believed you knew better than everyone else. In short, to hell with everyone else”.

And yet, in essence, what they were saying is that we’re all going to hell unless we do something to protect the environment.

A few pages further on comes this headline: “Farmer imprisoned for ‘wanton’ destruction of Herefordshire river.”

John Price was imprisoned for 12 months and ordered to pay prosecution costs of £600,000. His offence was the “wanton” destruction of what is considered to be – or was considered to be – one of the country’s most unspoiled rivers.

It’s certainly been spoiled now, after Price ripped up a mile-long stretch of the River Lugg, “wrecking the habitats of otters, kingfishers, trout and salmon”.

Using bulldozers and excavators, he dredged and “reprofiled” a stretch of the river that ran through his land. The environmental and ecological damage he caused could take decades to recover, according to the Environment Agency.

While it is foolish to compare one court case with another, it’s not half tempting sometimes.

Let’s place these two cases alongside each other…

Two environmental protesters who blocked a road are fined for two-and-half years, while a farmer who destroyed a treasured stretch of river gets 12 months.

Is the law saying that delaying commuters in the name of protecting the environment is a worse crime than actually taking a digger and ripping up a river? Is it saying that actively damaging the environment is less harmful than trying to protect it?

It’s not the first time in our history, of course, that protesters have ended up in prison after standing up for their cause.

In the years running up to the First World War One, almost 1,000 suffragettes were imprisoned. Emmeline Pankhurst went to jail three times.

Like the Just Stop Oil protesters of today, they were angry at being treated as criminals for demanding their rights. The right to vote back then – the right to protest about how we’re screwing up the environment now.

Are those Just Stop Oil protesters really “twice as bad” as that destructive farmer, at least as measured by the sentences they received?

It is could surely be argued that their sentence was severe because the present government is intolerant of protest (and many other things, being tolerant only of its own uselessness, you might say).

But there we have it: trying to protect the environment is a worse crime than grievously damaging the environment.

Incidentally, there is a petition against John Price’s sentence. Don’t think I’ll be signing that one.

I have a new guitar piece to learn. Yes, I still have lessons. Who knows, one day I might even be good. Whatever the case, I enjoy playing.

But what interests me here is how the placing of words can render them interesting.

The new piece is an arrangement of the folk song Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair.

Those words are so finely ordered. Had the song been entitled “My True Love’s Hair Is Black”, the phrase wouldn’t be much cop at all. Too ordinary, too mundane ­– and putting the emphasis on the person doing the adoring rather than the subject of their devotion.

By escaping that dull fate, the words resonate with a melancholic sort of love. And they are just more interesting. Now I’d better start practising.

I was about to write something political the other day when a baby appeared on the doorstep. The bell rang and there she was, looking quizzical, warming up her smile.

This happens often. Our daughter leaves the granddaughter outside in her seat and goes back to her car for other baby-shaped accoutrements. And whatever I was going to write is put aside.

Instead I sit around watching the baby. She is remarkably all-consuming, but it a beautiful distraction, so I don’t mind at all.

After she has gone, I think about writing, and sometimes tap at the laptop.

There is famously stuffy saying from the writer and literary critic Cyril Connolly. It goes like this: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

Connolly died 50 years ago and seems mostly to be remembered for saying that dull thing.

For me having children, and then a grandchild, has been an inspiration rather than a constraint, although blogs have been pushed back, novels left unadvanced (not much “good art” there but I can’t stop, never mind a lack of recent success).

Below is what I was going to write the other day, and now just did. If you don’t like politics, skip to the end for a spot of domestic self-mockery regarding shoes…

I WAS glumly amused, if you can be in such a state, to hear Rishi Sunak say an “anti-maths mindset” was damaging the economy.

Apparently, an inability with figures is costing us untold billions, according to the prime minister – a curiously unexamined number for someone who wants us to sharpen our mathematical skills.

How many billions and just how does a lack of maths cause that apparent loss; and is “growing the economy”, as they all seem to say nowadays, the only remaining ambition in politics?

This is another of those occasions when a prime minister extrapolates an aspect of their own life, such as when Margaret Thatcher used to pretend that living above her father’s grocer’s shop in Grantham somehow taught her to run a country.

Now Sunak seems to be saying: hey, kids – being good at maths made be a multi-millionaire, so give it a go!

The Labour Party has recently been criticised for a digital attack ad smearing Sunak with the accusation that he didn’t believe adults convicted of sexually abusing children should go to prison.

While this may fit the viciously negative style of modern politics, it was unpleasant and didn’t really work.

For such a jibe to hit home, it has to sum up what people are thinking. The Tories scored in 1979 with “Labour isn’t working” and a poster showing a long cue of jobless people (actually Tory activists, as Andrew Rawnsley pointed out in his Observer column the other day). Whether true or not, this chimed with the times.

A later ad depicting Tony Blair with “demon eyes” was just silly and did not hinder his election in 1997. Labour’s attack ad on Sunak seems to fall into that category.

Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer should try some maths lines on his opponent.

“It just doesn’t add up” might be a good slogan. Here’s another: “He only knows about subtraction”.  Or, in the style of a headline, “Sum mistake, surely.”

Of course, when it comes to “growing the economy”, Sunak seems to have been very successful at growing his personal economy, while being a little hazy about the details.

The prime minister’s extreme wealth sets him aside from ordinary life, but also presents a problem for Labour: should they attack or ignore his wealth?

Sunak is so rich he will have many fingers in countless pies. And sometimes the policies/pies he pursues may benefit himself – or his even wealthier wife, Akshata.

A telling example arose recently.

Sunak faced questions over a potential conflict of interest after it emerged a childcare firm part-owned by his wife would benefit from major changes in the budget.

Do they have so much money, so many investments, they can’t possibly remember the details; or does the prime minister believe it’s no business of ours to know?

Here is a great tweet in which a maths expert disparages government efforts to co-op him into Rishi’s maths class…

The government tried to use me in a campaign to defend their policy of forcing all students to study math to 18. Only problems are 1) I don't agree with the policy; 2) I only studied to 16; 3) They couldn't find ANYONE else so they scrapped the campaign. https://t.co/KhpVRHFxnL

— Stephen Follows (@StephenFollows) April 18, 2023

WELL, that’ll teach me to air domestic politics in this blog.

My previous thoughts on the correct way to arrange shoes in the hall produced only support for my wife’s view on this matter. While it remains obvious to me that she and you are all “shoe barbarians”, I shall retreat, licking my wounds (but still lining shoes with the toes facing outwards, no matter what everyone else says).