Today should be the shortest day in what for us has been the longest year.

By tradition December 21 is dipped in darkness. The dimming of the day reaches a turning point and after that we see a slow swelling of the light.

Only this year tomorrow is the shortest day or the longest night. How very confusing. You carry a date round in your head for years, confident you have this one nailed: yes, shortest day, know the answer to that one. And then the day moves and becomes a buzzer-clang question on the TV quiz QI.

So if like me you are banking on your spirits lifting when someone turns the lights back on, you will have to wait another day.

Today should be the winter solstice with the latest dawn and the sun staying low in the sky. But this year we have been short-changed. Apparently this happens fairly often. It is because the 365 days of our year – plus an extra day every four years – does not “correspond exactly to the solar year of 365.2422 days” (today’s Daily Tory-graph: interesting article, worth a read, just stay away from the light-draining politics).

Thanks to this quirk of the calendar, the shortest day can fall between December 20 and December 23, although those two dates are rare, with a December 23 solstice last occurring in 1903 and not due around again until 2303. As an optimist I can confidently predict that my circumstances will have improved by 2303, so that is something to look forward to.

So it’s not today but tomorrow when we begin the trudge towards the summer solstice in June, when days are long and light. How cheerful the year seems as we tilt closest to the sun, the longer day lifting the spirits and opening up possibility.

That at least is the theory. This year was different as the longest days were filled with different sorts of shadows. It was around then I lost my job and shuffled on to this ledge.

Now plenty of people have had or are having a worse year, but for us 2015 has had little to recommend it. The freelance work has picked up a little lately, and that’s good, as I do love to go out and interview people. It gets me out of the house if nothing else.

Then there is the writing process, listening to the recorded conversation, making notes and then shaping a feature, giving the words a pleasing order.

It seems to be what I was born to do, but somewhere along the way other distractions occurred, enjoyable distractions such as editing and designing. But the interview is where it is at, the point of journalism for this born-again scribbler, along with blogging and writing columns.

But if the work doesn’t pick up, perhaps I shall have to do something else altogether. Last week I went into Leeds for what looked like a job interview but turned out to be merely registering for a recruitment agency. It was straightforward, not unpleasant but it was all blankly demeaning.

Maybe something will come of it, maybe it won’t. The challenge in this situation is that you want something to happen, but it needs to be the right sort of something, although sooner or later any sort of something may have to do.

There is always hope as we wave off the darkness and look towards the light. The thriller filled with politics and bullets is with my agent. My wife has read the book and enjoyed it, so I’ll say a secular prayer to that.

And we all have Christmas to enjoy or endure, or probably a stomach-popping meeting of the two. I feign grumpiness out of habit, but mostly like Christmas, one of few times we see all three of our offspring at the same time.

And you’re allowed to drink lots of wine and that has to be a plus. So I’ll raise my glass – or a mug emptied of morning tea – to a brighter day tomorrow.

“Julian – would you like to be introduced to Miriam?”

“Of course.”

And here she is, amid the mince pies and mulled wine, all mad hair, popping eyes and a cheerfully agitated manner.

“I can’t be introduced to a journalist – I’m about to go on stage.”

With that she bustled and bowled out. By the time I’d drained my mulled wine and headed back to my seat, she was already up on the stage and making her introductions to the packed audience.

Never mind Harry Potter films or an enjoyably bonkers turn on the Graham Norton Show. To really get the measure of Miriam Margolyes you have to sit back as she immerses herself in a bubbling pot of Dickensian stew.

Margolyes was a star turn as part of the Malton Dickensian Festival on Friday night in an evening billed as a Dickens of a Christmas at the Milton Rooms.

Malton is proud of its links to Charles Dickens, and Miriam Marolyes is a woman much taken with Dickens, and shaped by the author too. She has toured widely with her Dickens’ Women show, and this spin-off was richly enjoyable. Miriam did her Mrs Gamp turn, bringing the midwife from Martin Chuzzlewit to comically gruesome life, reading the close of A Christmas Carol, dipping into Dickens’ letters, and rattling the cantankerous bones of Mrs Pipchin from Dombey And Son, which Miriam rates as a favourite Dickens novel.

All of this was amusing and enlightening, and it is a thrill to see a performer bringing these great characters to life – but also being brought to life by those characters, almost as if Margoyles had been plugged in a Dickens generator.

Before the interval, Professor Michael Slater gave an interesting talk on A Christmas Carol, in which he meandered to fascinating and sometimes amusing effect while setting the famous story in its historical and societal setting. He would, it seemed, have carried on all night had there been world enough and time. Professor Slater returned to the stage at the end for a lively Q&A session.

A happy evening and, as a critic with portfolio, I thought it only fair to repay the invitation with a Sunday blog.

SEVEN of us in a row, three generations for one film. I am sitting between my Stars Wars fanboy son and my father-in-law. Fanboy son number two is at the other end of the row, with his sister, newer to the films perhaps, but now a fangirl in her own right, and my wife, who did the important job of securing the tickets.

Not sure I qualify as a fanboy, but I did enjoy the films first time round. That’s where Star Wars: The Force Awakens scores heavily. Director JJ Abrams and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan bypass the prequels and rediscover the wit, adventure and romance of the originals.

As the film rolls on, simple in its storytelling but good simple, as the story sweeps along, my 27-year-old primary teacher son laughs at every joke and sighs at every reference to the other films, clearly spotting links and parallels that have gone over my head.

He is no longer the teacher who wrote “Star Wars Release Day” on his blackboard that morning; he is that small boy again, lost in the wonder of a boundless galaxy that sucked him in more than 20 years ago.

His brother is just the same, but he is sitting further away so I can’t sense his excitement. When fanboy number two was five, I took them both to see the rereleased the Empire Strikes Back and he fell asleep. No danger of that tonight, and he says afterwards that the film was even better than he’d hoped.

And it is a good film – a proper old-fashion movie, stirring and witty, yet slotted into a sensible narrative groove; full of dizzyingly smart effects, but not in thrall to the whiz-bang spaceships and gadgetry. This gives it greater emotional resonance, allowing the Force Awakens to be a human film, with even the new Dark Lord, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) possessed by flesh-and-blood weaknesses, including a rotten temper and a tortured sense of what and who he has become.

Although Harrison Ford is back as Han Solo, with hirsute buddy Chewie, and Carrie Fisher returns as Princess Leia, now a matronly general, the impetus lies with the new arrivals, notably two young Brits who are punching for the good side, fighting and scrapping with the light behind them.

Rey (Daisy Ridley) is a feisty presence as a resourceful survivor from the planet Jakku, who scrapes together a living from scrap metal until the throb and hum of destiny sweeps her forward. She is a proper heroine: a fighter, argumentative, shin-kicking and handy with a lightsabre. Her companion Finn (John Boyega) is a refugee from the dark side, a former storm trooper who takes a redemptive jump into the light by turning on his former masters.

One thing modern movie technology allows for are truly impressive lightsabre fights, the ethereal blades swishing and clashing as if cast from steel, with Kylo Ren’s weapon being shaped like a traditional sword.

And there is genuine humour, proper wit in a film that summons up the excitement of a good old-fashioned night at the cinema. We watched the 3D version which had a few wobbles but not many, and once your eyes had told your brain to calm down dear, there were real visual treats in there too.

Great stuff all round, I’d say – but you’ll have to ask my fanboy sons and their fangirl sister, complete with her Stars Wars T-shirt, for the full story, and apologies from their father if the wrong end of the lightsabre has been grasped at any point.

YOU know those annoying warnings on television before a programme starts? Here is a blog version: elderly mothers of my acquaintance may wish to skip what follows (at least the bit about Peep Show).

So two media farewells today, followed by the return of a thunderous and brooding friend.

After nine series Peep Show bowed out on Channel 4 last night. Short and far from sweet, the six episodes of Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s farewell have been a sour delight. Robert Webb and David Mitchell might not have written the characters of Jez and Mark, but they inhabited every inch of their grubby, squabbling souls.

Peep Show was on one level a flat-share sitcom. But that’s like saying The Sopranos was “about gangsters”. Nothing in Peep Show stuck to the familiar format. Instead this comedy made its own rules from the start, notably employing a neat trick in which Jez and Mark were given gloriously bad-tempered interior monologues. You heard what they were thinking and it wasn’t pretty.

Outrageous and socially gruesome, Peep Show was also at heart oddly touching, in that you glimpsed the desperation behind the swearing and the scheming. Sometimes because of this it was sad and almost moving.

But it was also scabrous and hilarious. Last night Mark – nasty, wheedling Mark, poor desperate Mark – seemed about to grasp a happy future with the lovely but unhinged April, only for everything to fall apart thanks to Jez and Super Hans executing a well-meant but sadly botched kidnap.

Meanwhile the boundlessly immature Jez faced up to being 40.

The final episode contained a sour fizzing cocktail of insults. Here was my favourite. The intermittently gay Jez is knackered from having sex with his younger boyfriend. Incidentally Jez has also been having sex with his boyfriend’s on-off girlfriend (Jez being a having sex with sort of a guy).

Mark is heading to work for a fateful meeting.

Jez: “I’m going to pull myself off and sleep for a hundred years.”

Mark: “Goodbye Rip Van Wankle.”

All that and the best f****** swearing ever in a TV comedy.

I also enjoyed devious Mark’s inner desperation as he attempted to woo April with an expensive cappuccino in a coffee shop with trendy dangling lights. “God knows how they charge so much. They’re not spending it on lampshades. Hello, Dad, are you inside me now?”

Another farewell yesterday as James Naughtie left the BBC Today programme after 21 years. I missed his touching goodbye speech as it went out, but spotted it later on Facebook. The filmed footage of his graceful exit is well worth seeking out. His voice breaks with emotion and he rubs away a tear as he tells listeners “it’s been a privilege”.

Naughtie hasn’t gone for good but he is giving up the 3am starts for the Today programme. Man On Ledge has enjoyed his company down the years,

The other comeback was Luther’s welcome return to BBC1. Neil Cross does know how to write a lurid and perfectly bonkers crime show, doesn’t he? I was going to write that you just have to swallow what’s on offer – but swallowing is perhaps not advisable in these graphically distasteful surroundings.

Only two parts to savour this time, presumably because Idris Elba is too busy to do more nowadays. It’s as tempestuously mad as always, but Elba has such stormy, physical presence, and his man-out-of-control is quite a performance.

No spoiler alert required (hopefully): but the opening moments do contain one of those teases where the viewer isn’t sure who is about to become the victim. I guessed right, but only at the last vicious moment.

Talking of comebacks, we’re off to see Stars Wars tonight, tickets bought months ago, 3D glasses ready and waiting…

YOU can’t roll a ball at the day’s headlines sometimes without hitting a royal skittle.

Today we have two strikes. Perhaps a royal reporting rule should apply: three strikes and you’re out – no more royal guff for a week.

I used to be very much against the royals, but not anymore. There hasn’t been a conversion on the road to Windsor or anything. No, my attitude now is one big shrug accompanied by that age-old incantation: “Oh, really do we have to?”

Maybe this is a sign of defeat. Perhaps the royals have won by boring me into submission with their relentless dreary shenanigans.

The problem with royal stories is that sometimes they aren’t up to much. Take the headlines today revealing that Prince Charles has been receiving confidential cabinet papers for years, making him “Britain’s best informed lobbyist”, according to an unnamed MP.

Incidentally, should newspapers even quote MPs who don’t have the balls to be named? I think not.

This information comes to us following a Freedom of Information request by Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state. The campaign’s chief executive, Graham Smith, describes the disclosure of cabinet papers to Prince Charles as “quite extraordinary”.

Well, I guess so in constitutional terms.

But here is what I imagine happened: Charles threw a bit of a wobbly decades ago.

“But Mummy it’s not fair – you get to read all the important papers and I’m kept in the dark.”

“Best place for you” – an offside interjection from Prince Philip.

“Believe me, Charles, I barely bother to glance at them. Far too dull. Give me the Daily Telegraph any day.”

“But one day I’ll be king and…”

“Yes, Charles, keep counting those chickens.”

“But I should see them: it’s not fair.”

At this point could be heard the angry rattle of royal brogues retreating down the hall.

“Just stop and listen for once, Charles. If you read those papers, you’ll only go and stick your meddlesome oar in.”

Now it is true that Charles is an interfering twit at times; true as well that he goes nose first into places where he doesn’t belong; true too that his tedious opinions on architecture have probably held the country back a bit.

Charles likes to muck and meddle because he has nothing better to do. Perhaps there is a darker shade of possibility here. Maybe he interferes because he feels that he is entitled to.

The Guardian spent ten years using Freedom of Information legislation to reveal the so-called black spider letters Charles wrote to ministers. An impressive battle for the right to know, which looked less impressive once you discovered that the letters were mostly tedious royal whines.

So is this latest story really a big scandal or just another example of something we probably guessed went on anyway? I suspect Prince Charles sticks the royal nose into national life because he has an ill-defined role and purpose, and has had to invent a ‘job’ for himself.

We should worry much more about the report today that government ministers meet Rupert Murdoch and senior News Corp executives around ten times a year. Now that is properly alarming.

The other royal tale appeared in the Daily Mail on Monday, but caused further comment elsewhere. The Mail had a page one teaser with a picture of the Duchess of Cambridge headlined: “Feeling the Xmas strain, are you Kate?” Turn to page three and Sarah Vine had vomited up a lot of noxious nonsense dressed up as concern…

“Two young children, THREE official functions in a week. AND the Christmas shopping… NO WONDER SHE LOOKS SHATTERED!”

All of this based on a couple of paparazzi shots of the young royal looking a bit washed out.

In his Guardian media column Roy Greenslade described this as “one of the most risible and childish pieces of journalism I’ve ever read, even by the low ‘standards’ of royal reporter. But it was also unnecessarily personal and nasty.”

Okay, Kate willingly signed up for this stuff when she elevated herself to the top tier of national life, so we can only feel so sorry for her. But Greenslade is right: most royal reporting is appalling, lickspittle crawling based on dull supposition.

God only knows why we read the stuff or watch the tedious footage on the TV.

AVAST area of landlocked space has been sitting at the heart of York for decades. Every now and then, something vaguely close to excitement mounts about what is going to happen there.

This vacuum or black hole is sometimes referred to as the “teardrop site” thanks to its shape. More prosaically it is also known as the York Central site.

Less officially, it is that bit of York no one ever gets round to doing anything with – mostly a barren wasteland of railway sidings and abandoned industrial buildings.

For those who do not know York, the area lies roughly behind York Station and covers 35 hectares – a metric measurement I can’t really get my head round. Apparently one hectare equals 2.47 acres.

This massive bit of nothing was last month given Enterprise Zone status, a measure that will allow the council to keep business rates paid by firms which set up on the site.

City of York Council is getting excited about the potential, and its leaders have dubbed the land “the King’s Cross of the North” –  a label no one would once have sought, if you recall what King’s Cross used to be like.

Where the now smart King’s Cross was once a den of drugs, prostitution and crime, York’s version has just been an abandoned and awkward bit of the city no one has known what to do with.

Now the council has said the land has the potential to bring 7,000 new jobs into York and provide up to 2,500 new homes.

Labour suggests that family housing and office space should be the top priority for the land, with the group’s planning spokesman Cllr David Levene reportedly saying: “The proposals need to be deliverable and they need to be sustainable – that means a fair balance between flats, family homes and office space.”

All of which is important and yet uninspiring. Yes, we do need family homes – decent homes with some outside space; homes that people can afford or even council homes for families.

No doubt the world needs a few more office blocks too – although some empty office blocks in the city are already being converted into housing, so maybe we should hold fire there.

Surely what this area truly deserves is to become is an exciting and interesting green space, a combination of public park and a green corridor, an approach suggested some years ago by Professor Alan Simpson’s report York New City Beautiful – Towards An Economic Vision.

That report contained much that was interesting and yet was promptly ignored. It also had what was almost a great title: they should have stuck to the York New City Beautiful part.

York is a crowded city but it does have many open spaces, from Museum Gardens in the centre to the various strays around the city, and the ings around the River Ouse.

Yet no new green space has been created for a long time. Just imagine if the space that may at last be freed up was turned into a mixture of housing, workspace and new parkland – just imagine if something akin to Museum Gardens sat at the heart of this space, linked by green walkways.

This isn’t so far-fetched if you consider the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London, which has 111 acres of open space including gardens, meadows and wetlands. Monty Don was traipsing round the park on TV the other day, looking as ever like a refugee from a forgotten Thomas Hardy novel. But never mind Monty’s peasant outfit. Look instead at those lovely gardens and open spaces.

All too often in this country we have an opportunity and end up wasting it – or end up killing it with dullness, smothering it in the limited ambitions of councillors and the like, sacrificing everything on the altar of commercial development.

York should free up this space and create something of lasting value. Let’s not squander it on dull housing and boring office blocks – let’s think big, let’s think green spaces and openness, and let’s give the people something worth having for once.

Just think how much of our present open space and our parks are down to the vision of the Victorians. They might have been uptight in some respects, but those Victorians knew the value of communal open spaces.

It’s time we left something for future generations rather than more uninspiring acres – or hectares, if you wish. Build squares and proper streets with gardens, modern ecological versions of what the Victorians and Edwardians did.

But please don’t go and balls it all up. That’s happened too many times in the past already.

I AM waiting for the French woman to come downstairs. Toast and black coffee is her usual breakfast, with a bit of chat on the side.

She is not a new woman smuggled into my life, but the latest in a long line of guests. Her plan is to find somewhere more permanent to live and a job, and then stay in York for a few months to improve her English.

So many people have passed through now that I have begun to lose track. Although the circumstances behind throwing open our house to overnight guests were not cheerful, having people to stay is enjoyable and enlightening. Well, there was that man who said he just felt safer with David Cameron running the country. The evening chat ran aground shortly after he lobbed that conversational hand grenade.

And there was a woman who half-jokingly complained in the write-up of her stay that there had been a spider in the bedroom. Look, lady, there are no barriers to spider immigration in this house: it was autumn and that is when spiders like to cross borders.

But most guests have been either lovely or no trouble – and often both.

People seem to enjoy my little sketches of life as an accidental B&B host. The ‘viewing’ figures for this blog usually rise when I write about Airbnb, although they don’t ascend quite so quickly as they did at the weekend when I posted about my wife having had her gardening column dropped after 24 years. More people read that than just about anything else since I wrote about my own departure from the same location.

Our guest is downstairs now so I have just broken off to make her toast and coffee. I tell her that France is in the news this morning because of the far-right Front National failing to make any ground in the last round of regional elections.

Our guest tells me that she doesn’t think that much of politicians as a rule, believing that banks and big businesses possess the real power. A decent point, even if it is always encouraging to see the extreme right get a bloody nose.

The defeat is said to be down to mass tactical voting, a rising turnout and warnings by the left that Marine Le Pen’s party was anti-Semitic and racist and would do great harm to France. This helped to stop the FN in its tracks for now, after it won nearly 28 per cent of the vote in the first round.

Le Pen and her pugnacious party complain of “calumny and defamation” – which is the Gallic equivalent of whatever sour excuse Nigel Farage of Ukip comes up with in this country after an election disappointment.

Sadly, the French nasties still secured around 6.6 million votes, so they are not going to go away.

I am less sure of many things in life nowadays. But I do remain stubbornly attached to the idea that in general right-wing views, especially extreme right-wing views, can only ever do corrosive harm. As, in fairness, can extreme left-wing views. It’s just that right-wingers are the ones who still get my blood to rise.

Our guest has finished her breakfast now and is off into York to look for temporary work. She’s already found somewhere to live. Not bad for a few damp days in the city.

THE first one was written so long ago that our 24-year-old son was a new-born baby. After all that time, today Gina writes her last ‘In The Garden’ column for The Press.

The newspaper has taken the secateurs to her, along with other contributors.

The man with the corporate clippers once said to me that “generic content” such as gardening could easily be shared between newspapers.

My response is now futile, but here it is anyway.

Gina’s column was very far from being generic.

Over all those years, and in two gardens, one tiny and the other large, she documented one woman’s discovery of gardening. Without training, but with enthusiasm, intelligence and spade-wielding effort and determination, she turned herself into a gardening expert.

She did this by sharing everything with her readers. Sometimes her readers wrote asking for tips or wanting a plant identified. St Leonard’s Hospice often asked her to attend their gardening fair. The organic fruit and vegetable show at Brunswick Nursery has long borrowed Gina as a judge – and even talked me into joining her last summer.

Not long ago BBC Radio York came round to do a feature on Gina’s garden, wondering how she managed to find something to write about every week. She told them at some length. To be honest once she starts on about gardening, you might just as well put your feet up and listen.

There are plenty of other examples, but those will do.

Gina is a real gardener who lives in this city. A real person getting real mud on her wellies in a real garden.

Of course a gardening column is only interesting to people who like gardening. But gardeners did like Gina’s column. It was full of local news and listings, and so looked beyond the one blessed plot, beyond the generic.

Years ago I suggested that she should list open gardens. That little item went onto be a great success. In those early days we went along to a mentioned event and hordes of gardeners trailed round with The Press clutched in their hands, a sight that would be rarer now.

Proper local content is important to regional newspapers, or it used to be. I have no idea what or who is replacing the non-generic Gina. The letter she received said that the paper had to “relinquish some of the editorial material we buy in from external contributors”. An odd use of the word relinquish I’d say – doesn’t it usually refer to giving up something such as a claim or a responsibility?

Anyway let’s hope they put that 40 quid a week to good use. If anyone needs a gardening writer, they know where to look.

Incidentally, today also marks the cutting of the last tie between this family and The Press. I did 27 years on the features desk and wrote a weekly column for much of that time. Gina was in her garden every week for 24 years. And our three offspring all delivered the newspaper. A lot of years all told.

The way things have been, Gina suspected she would be lopped off sooner or later. She is understandably disappointed, but sharing her gardening thoughts with readers for so long has been a pleasure and a privilege, she says. And that bit can’t be taken away.

Good people remain on board at The Press, trying to maintain standards in difficult times. I still miss many of them, but keeping that semi-abandoned ship afloat isn’t going to be easy.

As for Gina – well, she deserves better. But then don’t we all.

EXPANSION is the word for today – of waistlines and airports. One’s getting bigger while the other’s staying the same for now.

The two stories arrive together in the departure lounge of news. Let’s take the obesity story first, and if you don’t mind we could do with two of those seats.

Dame Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, says in her annual report released today that obesity is the biggest threat to women’s health and the health of future generations.

All very sober and sensible. So let’s look at the newspaper headlines. The Daily Mail offers “OBESITY IN WOMEN ‘AS DANGEROUS AS TERROR THREAT’”.

As always its front page stands proud as a tombstone that could topple at any minute and crush you to death.

The ‘terrorism’ line must be buried deep in Dame Sally’s report, as the BBC website ignores it altogether. The Sun wins the prize for cynical journalistic chutzpah with “APORKERLYPSE NOW”. In case you don’t get it, the ‘PORKER’ has been tinted to stand out. And it’s next to a picture of a very fat women seen from behind.

Incidentally those pictures are rather shaming, aren’t they?

Newspapers keep a stock of such photographs to put on the page whenever an obesity story rolls along. This means that at some point a photographer has been told to go out and snap some fat people, presumably using a long lens. And possibly carrying a bag of buns as a bribe. Or with their running shoes on for a quick getaway should offence be caused.

I always wonder what these people must feel like if they spot themselves in print. Overweight people are still people – something that seems to be forgotten at times, and by me too, as I confess to having a few kneejerk ‘fattist’ responses, as illustrated by my cheap buns gag in the last paragraph.

Aren’t people overweight because they eat the wrong sort of food or just because they eat too much? Quite probably, although saying that some people can eat what they like and stay slim, while others balloon outwards on exactly the same diet.

This is tricky territory. Personal responsibility has got to be part of the solution. Most people can lose weight if they eat more sensibly – but some people can’t. And most diets make you put on weight in the end.

I read the other day about the next big thing being individual diets that take account of each person’s metabolism and their individual reactions to different foods. That might work but it would make family mealtimes even more of a dietary minefield.

A decision about the expansion of Heathrow Airport has now been put on hold by David Cameron. Before he became prime minister Cameron had one of his “no ifs, no buts” moments, promising that a third runway would never be built. Those ifs and buts now trail behind him like a smoker’s tarry detritus.

Cameron promised a decision before Christmas on Heathrow versus Gatwick, but has now wheedled out of that one – in order, the conspiracy theorists say, to appease Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who is Conservative candidate for next year’s London Mayoral elections and has said he will resign if Heathrow gets the go-ahead.

Business leaders have called Cameron “gutless” – which is true enough, even if in literal terms he appears to be amply gutted.

Should we take everything business leaders say at face value? I guess that depends on whether we think the world is purely an economic playground, a survival of the fittest grab-fest in which anything that can be sold should be sold, and as quickly as possible.

Is constant expansion of the economy necessarily a virtue or do we ever reach a point where we have enough of everything? Probably not, sadly – but sometimes you wonder where constantly having more of everything gets us. Apart from tipping us into obesity.

YESTERDAY I mentioned in passing something smart my phone did: listening to the headlines on the radio and then Googling a list of stories about Donald Trump.

Now I discover that’s only the techno half of it.

Never mind your smart phone, smart homes are on the way. And never mind the internet being somewhere you go to browse headlines and order goods you are too lazy-arsed to go out and actually buy in person.

No, soon the internet is changing and wants a bigger say in our lives, starting with our homes. And even our beds, according to the Tech Monthly supplement in The Observer – a, well, smart publication that induces in this reader a paradoxical mix of gadget envy and mounting panic.

What’s coming is down to something apparently known as the Internet of Things. Now you might assume that there were already many things on the internet. And so there are: more things than you could shake a memory stick at.

But this isn’t to do with things you find on the internet: it is to do with the internet controlling the domestic details of your life.

Apparently you can now buy a smart mattress that can keep track of your biological processes during the night, tracking sleep patterns, breathing rate, heart beat and “anything else you might get up to under the covers”.  Yes, your bed will record your sexual activity and even give you a nudge – or possible a nudge-nudge – if you’ve been a little lax under the covers for a while.

Just what the world needs now: a libido-tracking mattress.

Now these activities follow patterns related in part to length of relationship, age and so on. So you don’t need a smart mattress to tell you that young people who’ve just met probably have more sex than middle-aged or older people who’ve been together for years.

Any old mattress and its rusty springs could tell you that.

And those of us who sometimes haunt the red-eyed corridors of the night don’t need a high-tech bit of nagging to tell us what sort of a night we’ve just had. We usually know that already.

But bed action or otherwise is only the start of it.

The Internet of Things is approaching already. A mildly irritating advert on TV already extols the techy virtues of being able to talk to your boiler on your mobile phone, telling it went to switch on and off.

How wonderfully pointless.

I talk to our old boiler sometimes, especially if it’s been making strange noises. “Please don’t break down,” I say. “And if you’re going to, don’t wait until the coldest day of winter like you did last year.”

The Internet of Things will control all aspects of our homes, apparently. Telling us when to order milk. Switching our lights on and off, regulating how much gas or electricity we are using, and running our washing machines in the middle of the night when electricity costs less.

Smart lavatories will apparently monitor your bodily extrusions and check that everything is at it should be. And smart scales – well they really take the biscuit. And yes, that’s what they do: weigh you as your walk in the bathroom, check your BMI, body fat and heart rate – and talk to your phone throughout the day.

Which is where the biscuit comes into to it. Or doesn’t if you listen to your nagging phone.

I think I like my home the way it is. Do we really want to live in places smarter than we are? Isn’t home the place you go to escape all the nagging worries of life and not to be wrapped up in techno-anxiety?

There is a bigger question, too. If everything in our homes is controlled externally by the internet, that must surely leave our daily lives open to hackers. Malign forces could mess with your daily life for the hell of it – turning things on or off at random, priming your bathroom body monitor to tell you you’re about to have a heart attack – or they could just shut everything down, couldn’t they?

That’s where things start to get worrying.