I LIKE the notion of “peak stuff” – the idea that we have sufficient already and don’t need to buy more.

Of course this is a western luxury, as there are still parts of the world where people do not even have enough food to live on, so their concept of “stuff” will be different to ours.

A boss of Ikea raised this “peak stuff” idea in a speech recently. When I heard the headline on the radio, I joined in the harrumphing chorus. He said what! The boss of Ikea thinks we have too much furniture? The instinct to jerk the knee and point a finger shaking with outrage is all very well if you are the editor of the Daily Mail, but the rest of us ought to take a deep breath.

Lungs filled and air released, let’s have another look. The facts of the matter are more nuanced. Steve Howard is not the Ikea boss but an Ikea boss – head of the company’s sustainability unit.

Beyond the novelty of a furniture boss telling us we don’t need any more furniture, Howard was actually saying something interesting. Here is it: “If we look on a global basis, in the west we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff … peak home furnishings.”

This state of affairs could be called “peak curtains” he added – which may come as a surprise to my wife and her sewing machine. The curtains keep on coming in this house.

While we are gathered here to discuss a serious matter, we cannot move on without a bit of self-assembled irreverence. I wonder if the Ikea sustainability unit came in a flat-pack with a fiddly little metal spanner. And was much swearing involved in putting it together?

Personally I feel this means I will never again have to set foot inside Ikea. Next time a visit is suggested, I will sigh sorrowfully and say that the boss of idea thinks we don’t need any more stuff, so we can just stay at home instead.

The fact that this isn’t exactly true will be overlooked when it comes to the important matter of finding reasons to avoid going to Ikea.

Yet there is still something appealing in what the Ikea man has so say. We do want too much of everything, and indeed our whole economic system is built round this insatiable desire for stuff. How often we see a businessman or politician insert their hand into the bag of spurious economic facts and pull out a sticky-bun statistic or two. Any new development, any new runway or road – all are justified because they will increase the economy by X millions or Y billions.

Mostly this calculation is based on us buying more stuff. I often feel grumpy about this. It’s as if we are being told to spend money on stuff we don’t need just to keep the economy afloat.

This matter does come wrapped in the potential for hypocrisy, it is true. We can all think of stuff we like to buy. Here are my offerings: wine and cheese, flour to make bread, bottles of decent beer, malt whisky, a good book or maybe even a bad one; CDs if you can still find them; new strings for the guitar; decent shoes or replacement Levis without the holes; a new jacket or jumper.

We can all find things we like to buy. But is more always the answer – or is the economy eventually going to overheat and explode with the effort of maintaining this endless flow of stuff?

Will Hutton, who is always worth a read, wrote in The Observer last weekend about why having more no longer satisfies us. He quoted a book I haven’t read, but one which sounds interesting.

In Economics of Good And Evil, economist Tomas Sedlacek insists we are enslaved to a defunct economistic view of the world. His thesis calls on the cumbersome-sounding concept of “humanomics” – and the idea that “happiness results from deploying our human intelligence to act creatively on nature”, as Hutton puts it.

Hutton summarises Sedlacek’s views in a neat sentence: “Most people today work in jobs they do not much like, to buy goods they do not much value.”

We always will need to spend; we will always need stuff. But the notion that we have to have more of everything is not sustainable – it’s a highway to nowhere, littered with the packaging of whatever thing it was we just bought.

As for the Ikea man, Steve Howard believes his company will have to think differently – helping consumers to recycle what they already have. Well, so long as it doesn’t involve a little spanner and swearing, I’m all for that.

I can work naked, unshaven and when I like… Ah, just to explain there should be quotation marks in there. That isn’t me speaking. I always have clothes on, although I have been known to type in pyjamas and two-day stubble.

The person quoted took part in a survey of freelances conducted by the Press Gazette, a trade publication for journalists and those still trying to pretend that’s what they are.

This survey found that freelancers were happier than regular staff, but increasingly worried about money.

One freelance, who earns £15,000 to £20,000, says in the survey: “Freelancing has never been more precarious. Fees are at rock bottom and it’s not uncommon to be treated with utter disdain by commissioning editors – or completely ignored. Often you’ll pitch an idea but won’t get any response whatsoever, not even a brief ‘no thanks’.”

I have suffered from being ignored in this way. On day I looked in the mirror just to check I hadn’t turned invisible. No, still there; still the same face, only with accessorising worry lines.

The other week an editor on The Guardian actually replied to an email. I nearly fell off the study chair. My email had been forwarded to another department. Excitement mounted, a champagne cork was loosened (or a hand hovered over the box of teabags). I emailed the person he’d sent the email on to. Nothing, not a squeak. Another zilch of a zero. Further emails elicited the same lack of response.

Maybe that’s the wrong approach; emails are easy to send and  easier to ignore. If I laid all the lack of responses to my emails end to end, I would have a gang plank to walk along.

As mentioned before, I should point out that the Yorkshire Post is an honourable exception to this rule – as, too, now is Mensa Magazine. And thank you; much appreciated. I am available for all wordy tasks, including copywriting, and anything without words too if things don’t pick up.

Some respondents to the survey say they are happy to be away from office politics. Well, yes – up to a point, although I quite enjoyed the gossipy jostle, if not the wider machinations. Alone in the house there is little intrigue unless I gossip about myself. I tried this but ended up offending myself.

Someone else in the survey mentions the benefit of “no stupid meetings” and, yes, anyone who has ever been to a meeting anywhere will probably agree with that. Another says: “I start when I want, I go out for dog walks…the coffee is awesome and I frequently type in the nip.”

Ah, is there a freelance naturist society I don’t know about? If so, I still don’t want to know about it.

My day is mostly spent upstairs in the study, where I have just been typing up an interview with an author, although sometimes I come downstairs and work at the dining table for a change of scenery.

I did this just now and at this very moment the cat has jumped onto the table and is rubbing her head on the laptop screen, while gazing at me with mournful golden eyes that speak of an empty bowl.

That didn’t used to happen in the office. In a minute, missus. And I used to think some of my old colleagues were troublesome. That isn’t true by the way. They were and are a good bunch, whether they remain in place or have been scattered by the wind.

Many in the survey enjoy the freedom and flexibility of being a freelance. I do too, but freedom and flexibility don’t pay the bills.

To finish, I shall consult Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, a favourite book and one mentioned here before. Apparently the word freelance was probably coined by Sir Walter Scott and first appears in Ivanhoe as “a term for a knight with no allegiance to any single cause”.

The entry below is for “freeloader”, but that’s a whole different story.

ANYONE who cycles will be shocked by this. Or maybe they won’t be, the way things are.

A cyclist put a video online yesterday showing the moment he was knocked off his bike by a car that didn’t stop. The incident happened in November 2014, but the victim has only released the footage now to highlight what he sees as a lack of justice.

“At the time there was an ongoing criminal investigation and I didn’t want footage that I released online to hamper than investigation,” he told the BBC website. He shouldn’t have worried as the case fell apart.

The cyclist does not reveal his name, but calls himself Reginald Scot on his YouTube video. Odd perhaps that he chooses to remain anonymous, but this unseated cyclist does have reason to be annoyed.

First to that clip, shot from behind, presumably from a helmet camera. This shows a Volvo following the cyclist around a roundabout in Nottingham; its number plate is perfectly visible in the footage. The car stays at a safe distance, and then for no apparent reason accelerates and bumps into the bicycle. The camera tumbles, the cyclist can be heard groaning on the ground; and the car speeds off.

It turned out the car was a hire vehicle sub-leased through a number of companies. I don’t know why this should be, or if this is normal, but it was enough to stymie the investigation.

An investigating officer did manage to trace a man and woman who were eligible to drive the car at the time; he asked them who was driving but they did not respond, and they were then “summonsed to court for failing to stop at the scene of an accident, failing to report an accident and failing to respond to a legal request for driver details”.

The Crown Prosecution Service then became involved, and their efforts suggest, not for the first time, that they should be renamed the Crown Non-Prosecution Service: not enough evidence to prove who was driving at the moment of collision, apparently.

The charges relating to failing to stop or failing to report were dropped, although a 52-year-old man from Nottingham received six penalty points and was fined £150 for failing to provide driver details. So presumably he was identified to some extent.

The cyclist needed four months to recover from his injuries, and a further month of physiotherapy. He said: “It would never put me off cycling but it has made me very annoyed at the fact that cyclists are being let down time and time again when it comes to justice.”

Cycling is a fantastic way to get around, especially in a small city such as York, where you can travel to most places within 30 minutes. A regular route of mine runs from the outer reaches where we live, down through Holgate, over Tadcaster Road, skirting Knavesmire, round the back of Millthorpe School, over the lovely Millennium Bridge and the swollen Ouse, and then down the side of the barracks and across the midnight-black of Walmgate Stray in winter to the university.

All that for another appointment with defeat on the squash court.

Sometimes on that route the danger lies in other cyclists, mostly the pro-cyclists who pelt around at a furious pace, handling their bikes with great skill, while sometimes forgetting that not everyone shares their confident abilities.

And the lights! I know people go on about cyclists not having lights, but some of these pro-cyclists are madly dazzling, with two or even three front lights.

But away from that relatively slight risk, the potential danger always lies with cars – or, worse, lumbering great trucks that could obliterate a cyclist as you or I might squash a fly. Cars that drive too fast; cars that pull into a road without looking properly; cars that come so close their wing-mirrors threaten to unseat you (this happened to a friend and caused terrible injuries and much suffering).

So if you’re in a car, be careful (that includes me, too). Look out for cyclists, give them a wide berth. And if you’re a driver who is able enough, ride a bicycle along a busy road: it might just make you see the world – and the risks – a little differently.

EUROPE. Why is it that brain-freeze afflicts me every time I write that word? Maybe it’s the complexity of our relationship with the EU. Perhaps it’s because David Cameron talks so much about Europe without achieving anything you can poke with a stick.

Whether the prime minister’s latest deal is something to flourish with pride or merely a tattered compromise is open to interpretation this morning.

Anyone flicking through the newspapers for guidance will come away with a headache.

Most of the headlines make play of the ‘you’/EU line, the best being the Sun which, beneath a strapline reading “Our deal turns to face” has “Who do EU think you’re kidding?”, with David Cameron morphed into Captain Mainwaring. The PM will love the way his increasingly flabby face is such a good fit for that role.

According to that newspaper, Cameron has achieved little if any of what he wanted, with his demands on benefits, laws and borders all being rejected.

In short, the paper says, the deal “stinks”. Perhaps it smells of Camembert – or even, more curiously, of Cameron-bert, a new and unpalatable Euro cheese with a thin cheddar casing and a squishy French filling.

The Daily Mail is no keener, using the headline: “The great delusion!” The paper admires David Cameron but says that “on the EU, his capacity for self-delusion is breathtaking”. Only on the EU? Self-delusion is that man’s middle name, thanks to his ability to change his tune about anything and everything.

Cameron will find little succour, unexpectedly, in the Eurosceptic Express (that might almost be the venerable tabloid’s new name). “Cameron’s EU deal is a joke” the headline reads, and you can almost see it flecked with furious spittle.

The Independent goes for a gentler, more sophisticated line, although still calling on the title of the TV show: “Deal or no deal?” A footnote reads: “You decide. Full text of the draft agreement inside.”

I rather like this approach and will adopt it myself. Go on, you decide. Whether we should stay in Europe is both massively important and, unfortunately, almost wholly boring. It is also impenetrable in a sense, as whatever happens the only people who really care are the extremists, usually those spittle merchants on the right; although, to be fair, the left has its Europe-haters too.

Much of the newspaper coverage is too skewed to help, especially those in the anti-brigade.

From the more ‘sensible’ newspapers, The Guardian draws up a list of “bold comments and pledges” made by the prime minister since 2009 – heavens, does that take up the entire newspaper? – including limiting the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction, reversing the working time directive and reforming the Common Agricultural Policy. The draft plan delivers “only a handful” of these aims, according to the paper.

The Daily Telegraph looks back to Harold Wilson’s declaration in 1975 that he would not “pretend that we got everything we wanted” but that he’d secured “big and significant improvements”.  Unlike Wilson, the paper says, Cameron “refuses to accept that he has got anything other than a great deal”.

The prime minister must have been on the same self-delusion tablets that George Osborne swallowed before boasting about his pitiful tax arrangement with Google.

The Times points out that the agreement was drafted by the EU chief Donald Tusk and says this reveals that: “Mr Cameron has approached it from the start as a supplicant, not a true reformer”. Only the Financial Times suggests that Mr Cameron “looks set to secure a reasonable deal for Britain”.

So there you have it; or there you don’t. Who knows. Deal or no deal? I don’t know about anyone else, but in the end I will vote with my gut. And at the moment my gut is leaning towards Europe, but maybe that’s just be the way I am sitting.

Is George’s powerhouse solid enough to hit with a spanner and produce a ringing sound; or is it a slippery political construct aimed at soft-soaping northerners?

Personally I believe the northern powerhouse is all down to George Osborne’s hi-viz addiction. The chancellor does pop one on at every opportunity, turning himself into an illuminated twerp (if not an illuminating one).

Sometimes I imagine he dons hi-viz pyjamas at night. Perhaps he wears the hard hat to bed too, and then does a little Village People dance between the door and the bed. Then I tell myself to stop imagining such terrifying scenarios.

If the northern powerhouse is anything it is a cultural phenomenon too. So what are we to make of news that the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is to hive off the Royal Photograph Society collection from the National Media Museum?

Bradford’s museum has housed these world-renowned photographs since 2003. Yet now they are to be carted off to the V&A, presumably on the grounds that there isn’t nearly enough for people to see and do in London.

According to a press release quietly slipped out by the two museums, the National Media Museum will now “focus on the science, technology and culture of light and sound and will retain material relevant to that”. And if you can understand what that means, you should apply to run what’s left of Bradford’s museum.

Local MP Judith Cummins suggests this move is a blow to the long-term viability of the National Media Museum. “Visitor numbers have been rising so to now learn that an important collection, which is ten per cent of the collection as a whole, is to be shipped off to London starts alarm bells ringing.”

If you live in the north, it is hard not to feel London has far too much cultural clout already.

With that in mind, here is a quote from Michael Pritchard, the director general of the Royal Photographic Society: “The move of the RPS Collection to London from Bradford will increase accessibility in both a geographical sense and through the resources that the V&A is able to bring ensure public and research access. The Media Museum has suffered declining staff and funding cuts over recent years which has impacted on public access to the collection despite the very best efforts of the curatorial staff.”

Let’s analyse that for a moment. This move will increase accessibility in “a geographical sense”. Well, only if you live in London or the south east. If you live in the north, it will decrease accessibility in a geographical sense.

And the patronising final sentence? That can be translated as follows: “The country really cannot afford to have a northern museum looking after something so important. I mean, God, have you ever been to Bradford?”

Simple-minded dwellers of the north make a mistake when they see the word ‘national’ attached to an institution. They assume ‘national’ means what it says in the dictionary, as in relating to a whole country and its people. Whereas in fact what ‘national’ too often means is “snaffled up by London again”.

Hence the National Theatre, a very fine place and somewhere I once spent many happy hours, is an important theatre in London – where they are lots of other big theatres that attract large amounts of public support.

The capital will always have more pull, but if the government really wants to shift the nation away from London by a degree or two, it should divert more of that national cultural money to the north.

Incidentally, last week the government announced that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills would close its Sheffield office – the biggest one it has outside London – in 2018, putting 247 jobs at risk. Where’s the work going? To London, naturally.

George Osborne’s powerhouse project is overseen by that department, and – what’s more – he recently made a big fuss about Sheffield being another hub in the powerhouse. But now he’s moving staff from Sheffield to London.

Rumours that Osborne plans to take the lead role in a West End show called Northern Powerhouse the Musical can be discounted as the imaginings of a fevered mind. Or at least I hope so.

Doing a favour for our daughter set me thinking. She asked me to look at her CV, which was fine and only needed a polish.

Having run my word-cleaning cloth over her perfectly acceptable efforts, I wondered about my own CV.

Online employment firms and even the Daily Telegraph are always offering to finesse my CV for me. I did send it off once for a trial and was given some pointers on how it could be improved. I took the advice on board – but decided that spending around £150 on having my back pages professionally reupholstered was not for me.

It is what it is; I am what I am – and, anyway, my CV reads quite well now, I’d say.

Strange, in a way, to be advising my daughter on how best to sell herself when I am having to do the same job on myself. My CV has accompanied many so far fruitless job applications, although some companies or institutions say they don’t wish to see a CV. I can’t say that I blame them, although there is a downside to ignoring the formal experience list. One of the biggest employment agencies is run by a man who said in an online interview that CVs only show what you have done in the past, not what you are capable of now.

So his firm sets you an online test comprising a series of timed tasks. Although keyboard quick in my old job, I was terrible at this exercise and got nowhere. The job was badly paid and in Leeds, so perhaps I wasn’t trying hard enough.

So I send off applications for jobs I am probably not suited to; and keep on with the freelance writing (paid but spasmodic employment) and the blogging (unpaid but enjoyable) – tasks to which I am suited. Bashing out words in a mostly literate rush seems to be something I can do.

Our middle boy has a number of zero-hour contract jobs but would like something more permanent, as there is the rent to pay on the flat he shares with his girlfriend. He keeps his spirits up, though, partly through his music. He is in a Manchester band called Sonic Bliss Machine and they play around the city.

Yesterday we drove to Salford to see him. He had band practise later so we put his guitar in the back of the old Volvo, then drove to Chorlton for lunch at somewhere called the Tea Hive. The food was good and I enjoyed my all-day breakfast (meat-eaters who live with vegetarians have to grab every carnivorous opportunity).

After lunch, we popped over the road to visit Unicorn Grocery, a workers’ co-operative grocers filled with fresh produce and huge bags of dates, nuts and so on. All very non-corporate and lovely, and I’d shop there if it wasn’t so far away. The place was full on a Sunday afternoon, and I left with a bag of bread flour (those usually find their way into my arms), some sundried tomatoes and a bottle of cider and perry vinegar.

The shop reminded me of Neal’s Yard Wholefoods in Convent Garden, now long since gone. When we lived in London in the 1980s, we bought huge jars of peanut butter and honey from there, before popping round the corner to Monmouth Street Coffee House for big value bags of coffee beans. Sadly, although still there, the coffee house is now trendy, expensive and a mini-chain.

We returned to the car, our son walked off with his guitar, and we drove back to York, where our eldest has no need of CV advice from me as he has a job as a primary school teacher. So at least he’s sorted.

A gale still buffets this lip of rock, but there was good cheer in the wind yesterday. Man On Ledge is on the shortlist for the UK Blog Awards 2016.

This ledge of mine has been a saviour in difficult times, a reason to hang on to my hat, as it were. I have written a blog almost every day since the beginning of June; more than 130,000 words the last time I looked.

Those laptop labours are massed like loose stones in mountain scree. Or like the diarrhoeic keyboard output of a man who can’t contain himself. The words pile up because composing them gives me something to do every day.

Blogging is my idea of fun. Some people may find this strange, but those who take succour from arranging words into some sort of order will understand.

My ledge has also been a new-for-old thing: continuing the column I wrote for 25 years by another means. So being on the shortlist is lovely (fingers crossed for April 29).

Yesterday, after a sleepless night, I came up with a minute-by-minute account of writing this blog. My efforts brought the following cheerful rebuke from Steven Burkeman, a Press reader who has been kind enough to follow me to this new, windy place. Steven wrote: “What, no gazing out of the window? No checking emails/twitter etc? No getting up to get a cup of tea and a biscuit? Julian, despite your years of experience, you are but a beginner at the art of AP (authorial prevarication).”

Ah, well. Here are my observations about that.

Although there was artifice in the writing of that blog, it was an accurate account more or less. Blame the journalist in me, but I like to give myself an hour or so to bash something out. It concentrates what passes for my mind.

When my old newspaper came out in the afternoon and evening, with different editions drawing up and then leaving all the time, the start of the day could be busy. Occasionally much of the work prepared the previous afternoon ended up being pulled off the page to be replaced by something newer or newsier. On those days we would have an hour to 90 minutes to write, edit and layout a new features spread. And those flat-out hours were scarily enjoyable. Or enjoyably scary.

So my self-imposed deadline harks back to those days.

As for ‘authorial prevarication’, oh I can be as guilty of that as the next man or woman sitting down to write. Blog done, I turn to freelance journalism or press on with whatever novel I am attempting to finish. At this point, I often wander the endless corridors of Facebook or burrow into the damp soil of Twitter. Sometimes, as explained in an earlier blog, I settle back to gawp at the Mail’s sidebar of shame. Or check my two email accounts. Or take another look at my blog statistics (a sure way to drive yourself mad). Or skim the newspapers again and double-check the BBC.

Then there is Facebook again: has anyone said anything about me or my bloggy acres?

And often I wonder is it coffee time yet? Or pick up that electric guitar I foolishly bought years ago and crank out a few discordant chords.

So yes, Steven – I can waste time with the best of them. But I do like the creative jolt of a deadline. It’s like having a big hairy dog snapping at your heels.

Sometimes writing is a messy business given a tidy up. What follows is a guide to how this blog is being pieced together today, live and as it happens…

8.15am: Sit down at laptop with a head full of bad sleep. Skim the headlines. Reject Europe. Nothing personal, Europe. It’s just that whatever dodgy deal David Cameron might or might not be weaselling his way towards is elusive and plain boring anyway.

8.20am: Tired red eye slides to a story in the Daily Telegraph. This says Oxford University has decided to keep in place its statue of Cecil Rhodes. Ah, yes, remember something about that. The statue upset student activists because Rhodes was a Victorian imperialist and a racist.

8.25am: A thought stirs in my mind, like a fish at the bottom of a weed-wrapped pool. Hasn’t a statue of Rhodes already been brought down in South Africa because of similar protests? Ah, yes so it has (thank you Google, where would I be without you).

8.30am: Think about history, then remember I haven’t finished with Rhodes yet. Oriel College, owners of the statue, say it will remain. Now me and my tired mind think this is the right decision. You cannot go around censoring the past to suit the present, can you? The trouble is, the university logic appears to be less nuanced. It’s all about money, you see.

8.40am: Yes, the statue is staying in place because “furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down”, according to the Telegraph. Ah, so this isn’t about academic rigour or anything. Nope, just follow the money.

8.50am: Tell myself that this is disappointing. Look, shouldn’t a great university make a proper intellectual case for not tinkering with the past to suit the present? Yes, but in the end just follow the money. According to the Telegraph, donations worth £1.5 million have already been cancelled, with more to follow if the university bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.

9am: I reckon those students were wrong, however heartfelt their arguments about Rhodes, whose legacy still funds Rhodes scholarships for overseas students. These students, they’re like Doctor Who in a time-cleansing machine, wanting to tumble back in time and remove the bits they don’t like.

9.04am: Yawn.

9.05am: Focus again. Here is what Sean Power, development director at Oriel College, reportedly wrote to staff: “Pride in the institution is major currency when it comes to fundraising, and this has already been severally diminished. The fact that Rhodes was the College’s most generous benefactor only compounds the issue; ‘is this now we treat our donors?’ etc.” God, but that’s a depressing paragraph. Rub eyes. “Pride in the institution is major currency…” Where do they find these people?

9.10am: Didn’t Henry Ford say something about history being bunk? Yes, he did. Don’t even need to Google that, although the full quote is out of mind’s reach. The founder of the Ford Motor Company was speaking 100 years ago, in other words during the First World War, a time history cannot forget. But Ford, yes, he said it and then became history himself.

9.15pm: I think Ford’s point was that we should live in the present, as history is bound by tradition. “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today” (thanks, again, to Google).  History doesn’t work like that. One moment you are vitally in the present, beset by all the present problems; then time rolls on and you are the past.

9.20am: Scratch head. Is it fair to say that history is complicated, messy and open to many interpretations? The past is constantly being rewritten, for sure – but we shouldn’t try to change what we don’t like about the past.

9.25am: Another quick trawl. Ah, here is a quote by Mark Twain. Did that man ever say anything that didn’t end up in quotation marks? I am sure that in a book somewhere there must be a Twain quote saying: “Yes, coffee, thank you, milk and sugar.” Anyway what Twain said was this: “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” Now that is a quotation, suggesting that is always written with a partial eye. True enough, but if we can’t help but see the past through the present, we shouldn’t change the past to suit the present, should we?

9.30am: Read again, press button and publish…

TRUMP – even the name sounds funny. Donald is a pretty funny name too. But put the two together and you have one scary man.

He could win the Republican nomination. He could be president of the US. A ranting demagogue whose views are even madder than his hair. A crowd-stirring narcissist, a TV game show ruffian, a pouting populist. A mass of laughable contractions that aren’t remotely funny.

On Facebook yesterday a friend of a friend brought out Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable to show the definition of ‘trump’. A nice idea and as that’s a favourite book, I fished out my copy.

“Trump: This word, in such phrases as a ‘trumped up affair’ (falsely concocted), ‘trumpery’ (showy finery, worthless stuff) and the like, is the same world as trumpet, from French trompe, ‘a trumpet’ hence tromper, which, originally meaning ‘to play on a trumpet’ came to mean to beguile, deceive, impose on.”

It is also a British slang word for fart, something Brewer’s is too polite to mention.

Matt Frei used a Channel 4 documentary the other night to explore The Mad World Of Donald Trump. Before it screened, one of those warnings popped up on screen; not nudity, swearing or anything – but views of an extreme nature.

Everything about Donald Trump is of an extreme nature. His opinions are scattergun extreme. Find a target, shoot; swirl round, find another target, shoot again. Mexicans, Muslims, women – all are sprayed with hate-bullets when the moment suits. And it usually does suit this man and his toxic mouth.

None of this is by chance. His constituency in the US is the great mass of people who feel overlooked, downtrodden; they want someone to blame for their plight – and Trump is happy to point a jabbing finger. Say something flamingly, idiotically stupid. And stand back while they cheer him on.

Find someone to blame and you have – done what, exactly? Indulged in bullying. Muddied the waters. Thrown an innocent corpse or two in the river to feed the crocodiles of public opinion. Given the powerless a reason to feel powerful. Stirred up an almighty shit-storm.

All of this is trumped up, falsely concocted. Yet his supporters love him. They filled Matt Frei’s documentary with praise for his raging incoherence. They added a bit of raging incoherence of their own. Trump wants America to be great again. They want America to be great again.

So they’re all in this together. Beguiling and deceiving each other. Pretending Trump’s form of politics isn’t really politics. Yes, it is; it’s just a different sort of politics. Trumpery; showy, hateful stuff. Rampantly egotistical, as vainglorious as one of his ridiculous towers.

Frei’s documentary contained shocking footage of the Trump lovers in communion with their hero. It also contained interesting background details about Trump’s great inherited wealth – something he keeps quiet about when bragging of his business skills.

While his supporters swoon, others in his own party openly hate the man. “He’s a huckster, he’s a fraud – and that was from a Republican tactician in Frei’s film. Another Republican strategist, Rich Gallen, who was press secretary to the former vice-president Dan Quayle, said in an Observer report last Sunday that there was a confluence of anger at the pillars of American society, which explained the rise of two outsiders: Trump for the Republicans and the lone left-wing voice of Bernie Sanders for the Democrats.

“We’re in an era when nobody likes anything and the two people most vocal about not liking things are Trump and Sanders. From two different directions they’ve attracted people who like the way they see the world.”

Hate politics by all means. Despise politicians if you wish. Just watch out when something worse, far worse, rolls along to fill the vacuum you helped create. Me too – I’ve done my share of politician bashing. Sorry if any of it’s my fault. Perhaps we should all be more careful in future.

SO where is Birgitte Nyborg when you need her? Nyborg was the prime minister in the Danish TV series Borgen – and, just to throw in a personal thought here, the sexiest politician who ever lived.

Much of the time in this superlative political drama from the makers of The Killing was spent knitting together unlikely political alliances, with Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) frowning at the eye of every storm.

So what would Nyborg make of Denmark’s decision to approve a plan to seize assets from refugees? Surely she would be appalled.

The biggest migration crisis in Europe since the Second World War is raising seemingly insoluble difficulties – but enacting a law that allows police to seize assets from refugees is a step too far.

Under this heartless new measure, Danish police can now search asylum seekers on arrival in the country and confiscate what are seen as non-essential items worth more than 10,000 krone (£1,000) that have no sentimental value to their owner.

Desperate people who have sailed and trudged from godforsaken places will have their pockets emptied by Danish police officers so their belongings can be assessed for economic and sentimental value.

Wow! Denmark you really have played a blinder there. Perhaps you would like asylum seekers to sing a song too and be judged by a gruesome X-Factor-style panel.

Denmark’s centre-right government justifies this procedure on the grounds that it covers the cost of each asylum seeker’s treatment by the state, and echoes the way Danish citizens on welfare are treated.

Sorry Denmark, this is a terrible idea, cruel and demeaning. The good and bad aspects of a country have to be balanced. So here is Denmark’s rough guide: good marks for butter and TV dramas; poor marks for bacon and treatment of asylum seekers.

Perhaps we should hear what a real Danish female politician has to say. Here is Pernille Skipper, owner of the coolest name around and a member of parliament for Enhedslisten, a left-wing Danish party: “Morally, it is a horrible way to treat people fleeing mass crimes, war, rapes. They are fleeing from war and how do we treat them? We take their jewellery.”

Quite so. As a man of a sometimes obvious cast of mind, I just searched for Skipper on Google. Do the same and you will discover that she just as glamorous as her fictional counterpart, as well as being a woman of sound good sense too.

Asylum seekers arriving in Denmark will still in general be treated humanely, but the nasty-minded new law that should worry us all.

This Danish move comes as central European leaders discuss plans to seal the borders of the Balkans. Now on a basic level it is easy to see why countries might wish to protect their borders. But sealing off the Balkans could well trap thousands of poor asylum seekers in Greece, a country weighed down with many domestic difficulties.

This is Europe’s problem so Europe should find an answer; this is the world’s problem so the world should find an answer. Just blocking the doors and saying that refugees should stay in the country where they first land is selfish and impractical.

This solution appeals to some of our own right-wing politicians, yet we cannot leave Greece to solve this problem alone.

But here’s an interesting thing. Reports at the weekend suggest Greek islanders could be nominated for the Nobel peace prize for their humanitarian efforts in helping asylum seekers on the frontline of the refugee crisis.

What a fantastic idea. Those Greek islanders who have helped people at the point of desperation remind us that humanity can rise above race, creed and nationality. Something the small-minded Danish government might remember.