HERE are two stories scooped from the bran tub of news. You never know what you might find in there.

First up is “veteran TV presenter Noel Edmonds” – shorthand for that annoying beardy bloke who has seemingly managed to stay in employment since moving pictures were first trapped inside a box.

The Deal Or No Deal presenter was late for a meeting and adopted the Nigel Farage excuse: blame immigration. The Ukip leader, you may recall, was once late arriving in Wales due to heavy traffic on the M4. He blamed his six-hour journey on “a population that is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be”.

That was back in 2014, and today Noel Edmonds is on the front of the Daily Express, asking “Am I alone in feeling Britain is full?” He put the question on Twitter after he was late for what the Express calls “a crunch business meeting”. No elaboration is offered on the exact nature of that meeting. What is a crunch business meeting and is it different to a Crunchie business meeting, where self-important people sit around eating chocolate bars filled with honeycomb?

Self-importance is more than a throwaway line here. What Edmonds does in linking his late arrival to rising immigration is to conflate two unconnected things – and make himself the important part of the equation.

The rights and wrongs of immigration should be debated – but should be debated sensibly. Instead Edmonds adopts what is known technically as the Farage Fumble. This manoeuvre puts the individual before everything else: the ‘self’ stuck in a traffic jam rises above the general situation and, feeling offended or annoyed, looks for someone to blame. And who is easier to blame than immigrants?

All these immigrants, they come over here and spend the money they don’t have on expensive cars in a plot to clog up our motorways and stop people going about their daily business.

As for that ‘open door’ policy on immigration, that doesn’t really exist at all. It’s mostly a construct to stoke outrage, isn’t it? Last time I looked that door at Calais looked firmly shut, with queues of miserable and desperate people stuck on the other side.

Let’s put Noel back in the bran tub where he belongs.

Two people who aren’t at all miserable at the moment are David and Carol Martin from Hawick in the Borders – pronounced “Hoyk”, as David helpfully told reporters who’d gathered to learn about the couple’s £33 million win on the Lottery.

Now I knew that because we had a holiday there once.

Carol and David seem to be the ultimate nice and ordinary couple – as if ordered by Camelot central casting to avoid future moneyed mortification. They charmed the reporters at the press conference, saying that they drank lots of Tetley Tea to celebrate, with David adding that now he could spend £200 on a nice pair of brogues.

Funnily enough that’s just what I would do too – although my choice of tea wouldn’t go down so well with the Daily Mirror, which reported the Tetley line. Perhaps the Guardian or Times would pass on the detail that I celebrated with dahjeeling – damn, drink it, can’t spell it – with leaf Darjeeling tea.

Anyway, David and Carol seem like a decent couple who say they will help family and friends, and donate some of the money to flood victims in their home town. They are unlikely to be an embarrassment with their considerable fortune. Good fortune, I guess. And as a broke man on a ledge I was hoping to win. But so much money must be scary. How do you live an ordinary life after that? I guess you just don’t, but you do have to live some sort of a life.

David and Carol said they hadn’t intended to go public with news of their win. “You can’t hide 33 million quid,” David told reporters, adding “And you [meaning reporters] would be there in Hawick knocking on our neighbours’ doors.”

I would have kept quiet myself, but then my good fortune has never run to more than 25 quid.

After the adulation come the moans. Some growling grumps do not appreciate the wall-to-wall attention accorded to David Bowie. Not me – I enjoy this celebration of a musician and artist who for once deserved that tarnished old badge of cultural icon.

We don’t unite over that many things, so coming together to examine and praise a noted life is mostly for the good.

Anyway there is no pre-arranged scale stipulating that we should only give so many minutes, so much printer’s ink to a certain individual. Okay, there is an arranged level of grief awaiting the Queen, but other than that we can take our pick: public grief is democratic.

The mourning of a celebrity such as Bowie is grief at one remove, or massed sorrowful reflection if you prefer. We should see the past couple of days as the celebration of a life lived well. Bowie did what he wanted, created his artistic self from nothing, and led a successful life – cut short at 69, for sure, but everything ends and he lived by his own creativity, by his own rules and inclinations.

And he gave much to people – creating music they liked, and adopting various personas they either identified with at the time, or feel fondness for looking back.

Not that Ann Widdecombe is having any of it.

The former Tory MP turned novelist is in handwringing mood in the Daily Express today. “I do query the saturation coverage of his death, which had me switching from news channel to news channel in a quest to catch up with other news such as the doctors’ strike. According a pop star the same degree of reverential coverage which might reasonably be expected of a monarch says all that has to be said about modern priorities.”

Oh, I don’t know. Why not honour an epoch-defining musician? And that ‘pop star’ is telling – a phrase from a goutily displeased great aunt. Or indeed a former Tory MP turned novelist, and a woman not exactly shy of public attention herself.

Let the people enjoy their memories – and let them relive their past. For life can be refracted through a higher lens, and when we praise a dead celebrity, what we are also doing is recalling our own past, living key moments of our life again.

Over in the Daily Mail, Stephen Glover shares Ann’s concerns. “Dare I say that the torrent of adulation in some quarters has been slightly overdone? Isn’t it the case that in modern Britain the death of a statesman or great writer or brilliant Nobel Prize-winning scientist would have received one-tenth of the reverential coverage accorded to David Bowie?”

The telling phrase here is “in modern Britain” – that despairing label, that catch-all sigh of exasperation. Yet is modern Britain that different than Britain in the past? Charles Dickens died at his home at Gad’s Hill at the age of 58 on June 8, 1870. A true star of his own age, the great writer asked for a humble and private service at Rochester Cathedral. He didn’t get that but was instead buried at Westminster Abbey a week later in a grand funeral service that was followed by a procession of mourners that wound on for three days.

That sounds like the 19^th century equivalent of what we have seen in the past few days. So maybe we aren’t as different as we like to imagine.

Glover has a point about politicians – yes, we mean you, David and Tony – jumping on the cultural bandwagon. Far better to listen to someone who knew Bowie, such as the old keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman, who has been speaking movingly in interviews about his friend and fellow musician.

A fair bit of attention has greeted another story in the past couple of days: the news that media mogul Robert Murdoch is to marry Jerry Hall, onetime super-model and serial girlfriend to famous men, including Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry.

No, I still can’t get my head round that one. It feels as if my mental wires have fused somewhere and brought together two entirely unrelated famous people in a freakish aberration of the mind.

What a weight of words are supported by this little ledge. The first of these blogs appeared on the last day of May and more than 130,000 words have been amassed since then.

That’s an achievement, I’d say, the same length as a weighty whodunit. A lot of words tapped out for an hour or so most mornings, a helpful discipline in difficult times, a life-raft for a dented ego.

What it doesn’t represent is any money. Blogging is something people do for the fun of it. And that means for nothing. For me this is a positive experience, apart from the impecunious side.

You see I used to have a proper job. It didn’t pay a lot but had its rewards. For the most part newspapers don’t pay well, unless you are a big-name columnist. According to a report last May in the Daily Mirror, Boris Johnson earns the equivalent of £2,291 an hour as a columnist, on top of his salary as Mayor of London and an MP.

Pretending to be a clever buffoon, a clownish toff catering to the masses turns out to be a smart career move, although one I don’t have the background for. Or the flyaway hairstyle. Or the flyaway mouth.

Let’s leave aside the political part of Johnson’s pay packet and concentrate, with a degree of envy that is frankly disturbing, on what he earns for writing his column.

According to the Mirror, which studied the first register of MPs interests published after last May’s general election, Johnson was paid £22,916.66 by the Telegraph newspaper in May 2015 – for writing five columns, listed on the resister as adding up to ten hours’ work.

To which this penny-rattling newspaper columnist turned blogger can only say a Johnsonian bloody hell chaps, for fear of saying something far worse. If I was paid Boris Johnson-style for one column a month I would be a happy man – and a less worried one.

All these blogging words haven’t earned me a penny, but they have kept me sane, or as sane as anyone can be who spends hours at home alone hunched over a laptop.

As well as the blog I have written and then rewritten a political thriller cum crime story (another 100,000 words, excluding those that ended up on the floor). The book has been with my agent for three or four weeks now, and as the gap grows between delivery and verdict, so too does my sense of panic and insecurity.

Only a fool bases a post-redundancy new life on earning a living from writing, so with a shameful bow let me introduce myself. Putting words together has earned some money in an enjoyable and rewarding way, writing features for the Yorkshire Post. They like a decent-length article on the Post, with room for around 1,500 words on one of their Big Interviews. Done three of those, with another one due, possibly this weekend. So there have been patches of sunlight in the shadow valley, but not enough to sew a living together.

I like this life but it is being paid for out of redundancy. Bits of copywriting have helped, but that source has dried up for now. Jobs have been applied for without any joy. Some look good and interesting, some do not. One job here in York was good and very well paid, but I only got as far as the interview before the interview.

Occasionally people ask if I won’t just apply for any job; sometimes my wife asks me the same question with a look in her eye. I put that look there and feel it is my fault, although blame for the collapse of the newspaper industry probably lies elsewhere.

So, yes, something has to happen within the next few months. This blog could keep me entertained indefinitely. Regular readers seem to enjoy my efforts. That means a lot, so thank you. But this man wandered onto a ledge many months ago and has yet to find a way off.

Last night these words were going to be devoted to Squeeze for belittling David Cameron. Then this morning it was announced that David Bowie had died of cancer at the age of 69, shortly after releasing his latest album. Blackstar arrived amid swirls of mist and mystery, as was so often the way with Bowie, and has been receiving good reviews.

One song on the new album is called Lazarus, named after the biblical character raised from the dead. Three days ago Bowie’s YouTube channel released a video to the song. Spookily, this opens with Bowie wrapped in bandages in a hospital bed, his eyes covered, singing “Look up here, I’m in heaven.” A good song, too, sung on a slow rise and ending with a saxophone crash.

This final morbid playfulness suggests at least two things. One, that the ever-orchestrating Bowie knew he might die as the last album was released. Two, he isn’t really dead at all, and Lazarus is just another character role, his latest new chameleon self, a scenario that would somehow fit with his enigmatic persona. So many different David Bowies sat inside each other, like the coolest Russian dolls in modern cultural history.

Sadly, that seems not to be the case, with the singer’s publicity company telling Reuters: “It’s not a hoax.”

Ziggy Stardust is filling out the silence as I write, the only Bowie CD readily to hand; perhaps I should rifle through the vinyl collection when it ends.

Such news is now filled out on social media with the thoughts of the famous alongside those of anyone and everyone. Marc Almond, the 1980s singer and belter out of songs, puts it well on Twitter this morning: “It’s not often I truly cry at the loss of an artist but I’m devastated. He meant to much. Goodbye David Bowie and your youth. We loved you. X”

Ziggy Stardust has risen and fallen – man and album too, 11 songs long and over sooner than you thought.

Bowie hadn’t performed in public since 2004, when he suffered the beginnings of a heart attack while performing on stage in Germany. Following an emergency angioplasty for an acutely blocked artery, he disappeared from live performance, and behaved mysteriously to the last, releasing albums no one knew were coming, emerging from a cloud of otherness with a musical statement, before disappearing again.

Bowie never toured after that brush with mortality, although he did bow out of live shows with three songs at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom in 2006. After that he withdrew to become part of his own mystique, veiled in myths and self-creation; singer, actor, artist, sometimes sublime, occasionally madly disappointing (Dancing In The Street with Mick Jagger being a bit of a nadir), but always somehow Bowie. And a totem too for the dispossessed and the outsider, especially for the sexually ambiguous.

Now we can all argue over his greatest moments. Was it Ziggy Stardust, androgynous and rake thin; or the dance-pop of Let’s Dance? Whatever you choose, Bowie remained relevant and interesting, even when he wasn’t being relevant and interesting, so successful had be become at being David Bowie, an ever-changing creation, an enigma wrapped in whatever inspired him in the moment.

How impossible that he could be gone.

As for Squeeze, always loved that band – and love them just a little bit more after yesterday.

On The Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, Squeeze did the musical turn. Prime minister David Cameron was forced to look on as the band performed an altered version of their new song Cradle To The Grave. Glenn Tilbrook sang a new verse: “I grew up in social housing, part of what made Britain great, there are some here who are hell-bent, on the destruction of the welfare state.”

A delightful moment and one worth seeking out.

I got to know Squeeze in my London days. Thirty years ago, Glenn Tilbrook rang me at the South East London Mercury to suggest the newspaper join him in organising an I Ran The World event on Blackheath. And so we did, adding a few Heath trotters to the estimated near 20 million runners around the world who did a sponsored jog for Sport Aid.

Strangely, that event seems to have escaped the grasp of Google. But somewhere in our dusty archives there is a photograph of me running that race.

In a long and intermittent career, Squeeze have been both a band to cherish, and our greatest overlooked band. Their new album shares the name with that Cameron-mocking song, and it is a happy return to form.

SUNDAY evening television has a pleasingly old-fashioned feel tonight as three dramas compete for attention in the middle of the evening.

This competitive clash recalls the days when programmes could only be seen at a certain time, or at best captured on video. Nowadays TV is faster and different, splintered and fractured – much like everything else in life.

Recently our middle son added us to his Netflix service. We have our own Ma and Pa logo. Click that and an endless, bottomless schedule opens up, a deep mineshaft of programmes you wouldn’t have watched before and probably shouldn’t bother watching now.

My favourite not-necessaries are Jessica Jones and Orange Is The New Black. Both are good in their way, but would I miss them – really miss them in the way I would once have missed not seeing, say, an episode of Morse? Certainly not.

On Netflix, as the more TV savvy will already be aware, when an episode ends, the next one can be watched immediately. If you don’t press ‘stop’ it will start anyway. This is a perfect invitation to binge viewing, and seems to be the way younger people watch TV, gulping down a series in a couple of sittings, TV as a friendly narcotic.

So far I have resisted, fearing the mind indigestion, when an acid mush of what’s been watched slops around the brain.

The luddite in me wants to wait, wants to sit down at the same time next week. Saying that I have been overdosing on Orange Is The New Black, watching daily at sandwich time. One day last week I told myself off and put Mozart’s Requiem on the CD player instead. Much more uplifting, I thought, then started wondering what was happening in that prison.

The three competing Sunday night dramas all began last week; two are new and one is a fixture. The returning programme is Endeavour, the only remaining Oxford crime drama in the Inspector Morse echo chamber, following the departure of Lewis. Shaun Evans is excellent as the young and already troubled Morse, although last week’s opener was a bit off-colour if you ask me. But a morsel of Morse is still worth sitting down.

In the week I caught up with the lavish and so-far excellent War And Peace on BBC1; and Channel 4’s grainy, fascinating and curiously sexy German-made cold war drama Deutschland 83. Both are well worth following, and after all those episodes unpeeling down the years, I can’t miss a Morse, of whatever variety. So all three will be watched again over the week.

This scheduling might seem daft in the era of having what you want when you want it. But the clash suggests transmission time still matters; and that the main channels are prepared to invest in good drama. Would anyone other than the BBC take Tolstoy’s weighty and difficult novel and turn it into a six-part period drama? Almost certainly not, so all praise to the Beeb for that – and for those astonishing battle scenes, too.

As for having what you want when you want it, sometimes you discover you didn’t really want it after all (here comes the slow burp of mind indigestion again). If you enjoy a drama and watch all the episodes in a rush, what do you have to look forward to? Nothing is the answer to that one. Although you can always fall down that Netflix mineshaft. All the episodes of the American take on House Of Cards still await for my attention, tempting me every time I peep into that deep pit of possibility.

Then there is Mad Men. I still haven’t seen the last two series – and that’s my just about my favourite TV drama ever. Sadly, it’s not on Netflix so I’ll just have to buy the DVDs. And try to limit myself one episode a week…

SORRY – won’t be signing that one. A change.org petition is demanding the resignation of the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, along with the producer of The Daily Politics Show, Andrew Alexander, and presenter Andrew Neil.

At the time of writing 6,712 people have supported this petition, sparked by Labour Party annoyance at supposed political bias.

There are a number of reasons why this petition won’t win my support. One is to be found in a link on the petition form itself. This takes you to a Daily Mail story about the BBC’s decision to allow shadow foreign office minister Stephen Doughty to resign live on the Daily Politics Show.

Now that will be the same Daily Mail that habitually besmirches and belittles the BBC; the same Daily Mail that is, by general belief, a newspaper of the right. Nothing wrong with that, but it does suggest the aggrieved supporters of Jeremy Corbyn behind this petition are choosing strange bedfellows in their scrap with the BBC.

The party itself complained that the resignation had been stage-managed in pursuit of a “particular political narrative”, and accused the BBC of “orchestration of political controversy”.

Part of the complaint concerns a now-deleted blog in which Andrew Alexander explained how the programme “sealed the deal” over the on-air resignation. That probably wasn’t wise, but anyone who has worked in a newsroom will see that for what it is: journalistic braggadocio rather than evil scheming; silly boastfulness rather than evidence of an evil plot.

This is how journalism and politics engage. Sometimes the results aren’t pretty. But it’s a mistake to see conspiracy theories everywhere, and Corbyn’s grassroots supporters should grow a thicker skin. They’re probably going to need it.

Politicians on all sides occasionally believe the BBC is biased and “working for the other side”. Those on the right insist the Corporation is riddled with left-wingers; those on the left accuse the BBC of doing the Tories’ bidding.

This sort of endless complaining happened under New Labour; and now Corbyn’s Labour seems to be reviving the bad old habit. His team and supporters should concentrate on opposing the Tories rather than endlessly complaining about the BBC. And I say this as a long-standing bit of an old leftie.

Tellingly, today’s newspapers also report a different accusation of political manipulation – this time against the Conservative Party. And a more serious one, I’d suggest.

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has been accused of politicising the Paris attacks in his dispute with junior doctors.  Hunt’s officials are said to have helped orchestra a letter from the NHS chief medic, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, questioning whether striking junior doctors would be available to help in the event of a major Paris-style incident in the UK.

That’s pretty despicable spinning, isn’t it? And surely as worthy of outrage as the BBC’s political coverage.

Incidentally, I don’t think Jeremy Hunt should be health secretary. His mere presence on the TV screen must send blood pressure rising alarmingly. That man is bad for the nation’s health in so many ways.

As for that petition, here’s a final reason for not signing . If you ask me the BBC needs all the friends it can get, especially under a government doing its damndest to attack and diminish the Corporation.

ABOUT about 22 years ago I was interfered with genitally. This wasn’t shaming in a sexual way, but neither was it much fun.

Three was a full house and it was time for a display of male responsibility. So off to the hospital I went with my tallywags between my legs . That, by the way, was Victorian slang for testicles, or so I discovered the other day.

I don’t recall much about the small operation but the underwear has stayed in my mind. Green striped boxer shorts from Next. I was given a surgical gown and told to undress to pants and socks. Then I sat with other gowned men awaiting the same snip. My socks had a paisley pattern and the repeating shapes looked oddly like sperm, I thought, as I bowed my head and nervously awaited my turn.

When I reached the top of the quick-fix queue, a local anaesthetic was applied very locally to my scrotum. Then I lay back while the surgeon, body-bits mechanic or whatever, tugged, pulled and got out his scissors (other implements may actually have been involved; I didn’t look too closely).

After tea and biscuits, I walked the short way home. No problem. Manned up. Did what was required. Took it like a true male hero. Then the expansion began. Well, we won’t dwell on that swell. More than sufficient detail has been provided already. Let’s just say that the enlargement was enough to warrant a day off work.

I wrote a newspaper column afterwards about having a vasectomy, and only return to the matter now thanks to a new development. According to reports this week, a German engineer has invented a device that could make the male snip an operation of the past. It is a miniature switch that stops sperm from reaching the penis. This tiny on-off device is surgically implanted in a procedure said to last about half an hour, not much longer than a vasectomy.

With this modification, a man will be able to have the valve set to off, giving him the same level of infertility as a vasectomy. If he later decides he wants to become a father, he “simply locates the implant in his scrotum and flicks the switch back, allowing sperm to be ejaculated” according to the Daily Mail.

There are, it has to be said, potential problems. To date the only user of the device is its inventor, a German joiner called Clemons Bimek, who had the idea when watching a documentary on contraception.

He reportedly hopes to fund his invention through crowdfunding and aims to set up a trial involving 25 men early this year.

Another difficulty lies in the trust factor. As with all forms of male contraception, would women put their faith in a man who said his switch was off? No, according to the woman who directed me in a V-wards direction all those years ago.

Doctors are said to be divided over the valve, although there is one certain benefit: it avoids men later asking to have the operation undone. About a third of men want their plumbing put back to normal, and the reversal doesn’t always work.

Apparently a man fitted with the device could turn the switch on and off with a quick fumble. The proper name for this invention is a spermatic duct valve, although it has already earned the crude tag online of a “dick switch” – a term also in use to describe poor male behaviour towards women in American frat movies.

All this does raise the curious scenario of a couple having in an intimate moment, and the women suddenly deciding that yes, she does want a baby. And the man saying: “Well I shall just turn myself on then.”

Here’s another thought. After the VW emissions scandal, are people going to trust a German invention that is said to control a more personal sort of emission?

Here are some notes on how to shuffle. That bearded and decent-seeming chap attempting to run the Labour Party may wish to take note.

The first thing to remember is that the reshuffle is a curious political card trick. Pull it off and a deft replacement of roles makes a party look stronger and on the ball. Get it wrong and half the cards end up on the floor and the shuffler in chief looks incompetent.

Remember that a reshuffle is a “look at us moment” – an attempt to draw attention away from the other side and remind people of your superior competence.

So make it quick and brutal. Make it efficient and cruel. Let the long knives draw blood if necessary. Don’t just fumble with the butter knife. Don’t bumble and blather. Don’t elevate indecision into an art form. And don’t drag the whole affair out for a wearying 34 hours and 13 minutes. That’s not a reshuffle. It’s a slow-motion shambles.

Remember you have brought this on yourself. You thought it would make you look stronger and more in control. If the trick leaves you with a fumbled pack in one hand and a smeared butter knife in the other, it hasn’t worked.

This is especially so if your party is the one most newspapers love to punch. Make a mess of your reshuffle and they will have you for breakfast. Turn this people-moving sprint into knee-busting marathon and even your friends will turn on you.

If members of your team who haven’t been moved decide to resign in protest over those who have been shuffled off, then you have probably ruined your card trick.

If your chief ally dismisses those who’ve walked away in a political huff as “part of a small right-wing clique”, the outside world – you know, those voting people – will sigh and wonder again about politicians and the ridiculous things they say.

And mostly importantly, get your trick right. Learn how to deal. Or deal with the consequences.

Dealing with the consequences is what the Labour Party is having to do right now. That reshuffle was a disaster, and a pointless, self-inflicted disaster at that.

It has left the party looking divided and inward-facing, trapped in a circle like cowboys in an old western. But instead of pointing the guns outwards at the enemy, they are shooting each other, while the bearded, decent-seeming sheriff is raising his voice to little effect, and could even end up being hit in the fratricidal crossfire.

When you’ve messed up it is often wise to heed the words of your enemies rather than your friends. So perhaps Jeremy Corbyn should read what the Daily Telegraph has to say today.

The newspaper says it is tempting to regard Labour as a sideshow, but adds “the government only has a narrow Commons majority, and who knows what circumstances might arise that could conceivably put Mr Corbyn in Downing Street. Fortunately, the events of the past few days have made that prospect more remote.”

Some of us might wish to drop an “unfortunately” into that extract from the Tory-graph. But the point surely stands. Nothing that has happened this week makes Labour seem like a viable governing party. More’s the pity.