MALFUNCTIONING bank cards and pin number trouble took up part of yesterday. This left me grumping until my new phone did something surprising with US Republican hopeful Donald Trump.

The bigot’s bigot, the idiot’s idiot – he’s all over the news this morning for saying that the US should ban Muslims from entering the country. This is old news on my ledge as I addressed America’s most dangerous fool yesterday.

Later in the afternoon I was cooking tea before my wife returned from work. As she’s out and I’m in, the weekday catering falls to me. The water was on for the spaghetti, the roast pepper sauce was bubbling gently, all the burnt bits having been removed.

I’d just used my phone to find out how long to soak cannellini beans for today’s Tuscan bean soup. Yes, peasant food elevated to a middle-class table again. Heaven only knows what’s left for those peasants to eat nowadays.

I placed the phone next to the radio. Google hadn’t been switched off and the voice-activation kicked in. The phone had listened to the headlines about Donald J(erk) Trump and started seeking out stories about him.

Soon I had Trump on the radio and a list of further Trumps on my phone. This cheered me up no end. Not the presence of all those trumping Trumps spouting vile and virulent nonsense. Just the fact that my phone could do something so clever – a little pointless, but undeniably clever.

My banking skills, it has to be said, are less smart.

Yesterday my two main bank cards let me down at the local shops. One wasn’t recognised and the other delivered no money, instead offering the on-screen chastisement that I had already used the wrong pin number three times.

Visit your main branch, the machine advised with a sigh. So after trudging home that’s what I did. I then cycled into York and confessed my idiocy to the bank manager sitting at the help desk.

She said never mind, she’d done that too. A kind lie I am sure, but it made me feel mildly less incompetent.

After that I walked over to the other bank to order a replacement for my scratchy card. Connected once more to our bank accounts, I withdrew twenty quid and cycled home, now with the readies for what I laughably still think of as a haircut. In reality a number-three razor tidy up.

In that un-carded moment yesterday, I glimpsed what it must feel like to have no access to money. All right it didn’t last long, and a bit of cycling sorted out the problem. But still – it induced a rash of panic, not helped by the fact that the money we have will only last so long.

This freelancing lark seems mostly to entail pushing at shut doors, and then eagerly hanging around any door that does open.

As for that pin number, somehow I’d forgotten one that I’d been using for years, and mixed it up with the pin for a credit card.

Without wishing to let any snooping card thieves into my secrets, I am prepared to give a little something away. My main bank code relates to my height – so that’s 6003 as a handy shorthand for six foot three. And the other card is my IQ plus one. So that’s 1601.

Although if you try either of those, you may have to go and visit that nice bank manager at the Halifax in York.

REPUBLICAN presidential hopeful Donald Trump says America should ban all Muslims from entering the country – and former Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says we should eat less meat.

It certainly takes all sorts in American politics.

In a campaign statement to his lap-it-all-up, no-brain, dimwit followers – and if that sounds rude, just imagine all the swearwords I have just removed – Trump said a “total and complete” shutdown on allowing Muslims into the country should remain until the US authorities “can figure out” Muslim attitudes to the US.

This statement was so extreme that fellow Republican Jeb Bush, also running for president, said Trump was “unhinged”.

There has been no sign of a Trump hinge for a long time now.

The New York businessman has turned being a political maverick into a scary art.

Trump’s latest bit of idiocy was delivered as the US comes to terms with the attack last week in which a Muslim couple opened fire and killed 14 people at a health centre in San Bernardino.

That was a terrible and tragic incident. Sadly, such outrages occur relatively often in the US thanks in large part to a complete lack of sense about guns.

This incident may have had different roots, but the template was similar. Someone with too easy access to weapons has a grudge, an ideological hatred or a mental illness – so they go and kill a bunch of people.

You notice that Trump didn’t say anything about banning guns. Just allowing no Muslims into the country.

Well, Donald, aren’t very many of those Muslims already in the States, where they live as honest everyday citizens? So they might be difficult to ban.

I know it is their politics are not ours, but sometimes sitting here you can’t believe what you hear coming from over there.

Trump has been spouting virulent nonsense throughout his campaign. He even claimed at one point that thousands of Arab-Americans in New Jersey were celebrating after two planes flew into the Twin Towers. There are, according to the BBC website, “no media reports to back up the claim”.

That’s because it didn’t happen outside of Trump’s fuzz-filled head. Many of his statements are urban myths at best, and virulent untruths at worst.

And yet his dunderhead supporters lap up every idiotic lie or vile exaggeration.

Let’s turn to Arnie instead. The man’s a beacon of good sense compared to Trump.

Speaking to the BBC’s Roger Harrabin at the COP21 climate summit in Paris, the Hollywood star and former California Governor urges politicians not to defer action on global warming.

An American Republican who believes in climate change – gosh, that’s as rare as a sensible word rolling out of Donald Trump’s mad mouth.

Schwarzenegger makes many cogent points in an interview in which he comes across rather charmingly. He also says at one point that we should all eat less meat.

And this from the man who in one of his films said the immortal line: “You hit like a vegetarian.”

Arnie doesn’t say we should stop eating meat, but suggests cutting down and having one or two meat-free days.

That’s all very sensible but I have another suggestion: marry a vegetarian. You’ll soon find meat disappearing from your diet then.

I didn’t actually marry a vegetarian: my wife became one part-way through.

The meathead side of my brain thinks: well that wasn’t in the contract. But the sane side of my brain is happy with eating less meat.

Some weeks I have one or two meaty days, eating vegetarian food the rest of the time.

I don’t mind this at all, especially if spinach dahl or lentils are in the mix. Or a good veg soup. Maybe ratatouille – and I do make a mean ratatouille.

But sometimes I crave beef roasted or in a stew, a bit of bacon, a sausage or two. Salmon is often on the menu, because it’s easy to smuggle onto an otherwise vegetarian plate.

So I’m with there with Arnie on this one. As for Donald Trump, I keep hoping his hair might slide off his head and choke him.

What a happy day that would be.

IS SOMEONE who films an incident on their mobile phone a ghoul or a citizen witness? Maybe they can be both at the same time, their ghoulish first instinct turning later into a potential source of information for the police.

This question arises today following the incident at Leytonstone tube station in London on Saturday night, in which two men were reportedly attacked by a knife-wielding man who is said to have declared: “This is for Syria.”

The alleged attacker has been named as Muhaydin Mire, 27, from Leytonstone. He has been charged with attempted murder after a 56-year-old man received injuries described as “serious”, and another person was injured too.

Those people who filmed the incident on their phones earn a telling off from today’s Daily Mail, which condemns them for being “ghouls”.  In the same breath, the Metropolitan Police is asking for people to hand over any such footage to help with their investigation.

Here we have a modern paradox. The desire to film or photograph anything and everything is perhaps morally unhealthy – and useful at the same time.

My theory is that human beings haven’t changed, it’s just that modern life has equipped them differently. In the past people would have stood by and watched as an incident unfolded, with one or two attempting to intervene in some way.

Now the ratio of watchers and doers is about the same. But because the watchers all have mobile phones, they can film or photograph what is happening.

Is this a new human instinct or an old one changed by technology? People have always been inquisitive, nosey or ghoulish: what’s changed is that they are now equipped to exercise those qualities in a new way.

If mobiles had been around in the days of public hangings, people would have been there with their phones, recording the death from the first drop to the last spittle wriggle at the end of the rope.

A generation is now growing up that feels the need to record everything it sees: almost as if their own eyes aren’t reliable enough – and perhaps they aren’t, as police often say that witnesses all report having seen different things.

A more workaday aspect of this is that as the police deal with ever-mounting cuts, they will have to ask more often for help from these citizen witnesses/ghouls.

News today is often refracted through social media, in good ways and bad. The bad side is the passing on of information that is unreliable or plain wrong. And the good side is the way a few words can be turned into a moral slogan.

During the incident at that London tube station, a witness is said to have shouted at the alleged attacker: “You ain’t no Muslim Bruv.” His words soon began trending on Twitter, becoming an anthem for the moment: five words that seem to say an awful lot.

SYRIA FOOTNOTE: I was driving round yesterday with the radio on. A Syrian woman exiled in London appeared on the World This Weekend on BBC Radio Four. She made an impassioned, clear and intelligent case for saying that Britain and the West were wrong in their approach to her country.

Her main point was that Assad’s regime had killed seven times as many people in Syria as Isis had – and that our bombing efforts now would only strengthen Assad. She also claimed that Assad had in a sense created Isis as a useful distraction to deflect attention from his regime.

In short: our intervention could only make things worse in her country. I wonder if David Cameron was listening. Not that he ever does – listen, that is.

A RELAXED Sunday sort of blog today. Cerys Matthews on the radio, laptop resting on post-run legs as I sit on the sofa in the conservatory.

One of my running friends passed on a magazine dedicated to putting one foot in front of the other at some speed. My eyes skated over the glossy pages and the advice. One feature asked if you were fit enough to run. The writer suggested doing all sorts of exercises and then scoring yourself.

I didn’t bother, just put on the running shoes instead. What appeals to me about running is its simplicity. My own rules are straightforward: if it’s Sunday I need to get out there for an hour or so. That’s about it. I always listen to music. The iPod is on shuffle. Some days my feet are on shuffle too. But I always do the pavement rounds.

As I ran I thought about the new Steven Spielberg film, Bridge Of Spies, which has much to recommend it, not least great storytelling, smart un-cynical filmmaking and a couple of superb performances. This is a Cold War story based on true events from 1962, and it is mostly uplifting, lacking the sort of John le Carré weary cynicism often associated with the genre.

Tom Hanks plays a homey, everyman lawyer called James Donovan who is first hired to defend the Russian spy Rudolf Abel, a job that leads to widespread hate from the general public, even to the point of his house being sprayed with bullets.

Donovan is later asked to do a one-man mission to the newly divided Berlin, passing over to the eastern side to arrange a prisoner exchange between Abel and Gary Powers, the U2 spy-plane pilot captured by the Soviets. While he is there, Donovan takes it on himself to include in the exchange an American student named Frederic Pryor who had been wrongfully imprisoned in East Berlin, after darting through the almost finished wall to reach his girlfriend.

After the trial in the US, much of the film is taken up with Donovan’s miserable adventures in East Berlin as he attempts to carry off the torturous negotiations, while struggling with a cold, homesickness and having his coat stolen.

This all builds up to the prison exchange in a snowy dawn on Glienecke Bridge from East to West Berlin, the bridge of the film’s title, and a last-minute wrangle over the exchange.

Spielberg heightens the tension in a series of negotiations undertaken in bad faith in dull rooms and fuelled by whisky or brandy. Almost everything about the film works tremendously well: the tension builds slowly yet remorselessly, and the film looks fantastic.

At the heart of it all are two wonderful performances. Tom Hanks plays Donovan, a man guided by a stubborn sense of good that will not be deflected by last-minute hitches or the devious ways of sour Soviet bureaucracy – or indeed gung-ho American narrow-mindedness.

Hanks is beautifully matched against Mark Rylance as Abel, the spy who goes back into the cold. Rylance holds the eye and touches the heart, even though he isn’t given much to say and his character remains an enigma. In a nice running joke, at various stages Donovan asks Abel if he isn’t worried about the possibility of a death penalty, the exchange going wrong or some other calamity. Each time he says “Would it help?” in a wonderful bit of deadpanning. The Coen Brothers, heroes on this ledge of mine, have a writing credit which perhaps explain the humorous moments (and Abel’s pretend East Berlin family surely).

I could have done without the last ten minutes when the sentimentality is spread too thickly, but then it is a Spielberg film. And a very good one too.

I JUST went into the kitchen and found Nigel Farage having a right old moan. Thankfully, he was on the radio and not standing there in spittle-flecked person.

Labour won yesterday’s byelection in Oldham West and Royton because of postal voting and multiculturalism. That’s what the Ukip leader was saying. Without those two twists of electoral fate, he would clearly be in Downing Street himself.

Farage says that Ukip will be making an official complaint about the rise in postal voting, and the way this affected the result. Well, we shall wait and see on that one. But Ukip always have a ready-made excuse for an election going wrong.

For some reason when I look at Ukip I think of the Flat Earth Society and its views about our planet being a flat disc rather than a globe.

“So, Mr Farage, you have now walked all the way round the Earth and come back to where you started. So the Earth can’t be flat, can it? If it was you’d have fallen off the edge.”

“Ah, well, you see the Earth is naturally biased against Ukip. That edge is out there somewhere. And we shall keep looking until we find it. Multiculturalism is to blame, of course.”

“What all those people who arrive here from around the very round globe?”

“Ah, yes precisely. If it wasn’t for multiculturalism the Earth would indeed be flat.”

And so on until Nigel Farage’s face becomes as purple as his party’s lurid branding.

Ukip failed to live up to their loud-mouthed promise and Labour won the byelection with an increased share of the vote, racing ahead of Ukip with a 10,000 majority. This is good news for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who has just passed his first electoral test – and good news for his party too.

It is hardly an unexpected result, hardly big news in ordinary times, but it does allow Corbyn to keep the political plates spinning.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from this result isn’t  connected to party politics at all. Yes, Jim McMahon, the 35-year-old leader of Oldham council, is a strong Labour man – but more importantly he is a solidly local man. People in the constituency know and respect him, and see that he has striven to improve life in the area. So much better than parachuting in a candidate favoured by London – and this point applies to all parties, not only Labour.

Ukip’s candidate John Bickley is described as a Cheshire-based businessman: and so is only local up to a point some comfortable miles away. Mr Bickley has now come second in four contests in Greater Manchester – three byelections and in May’s general election.

That many second places suggests he will win eventually, like those drivers who have multiple goes at their test.

Jim McMahon has a good personal story, having pulled himself up from a disadvantaged start in life. He also seems to be good at politics, at least locally. That is something Corbyn’s Labour Party could use.

Being good at politics isn’t perhaps a praiseworthy quality, but it is a necessary one in terms of survival. In the early days, Tony Blair’s New Labour was very good at politics, and now the Conservatives are the ones who best understand the game. You only have to look at George Osborne’s mini-budget last month to realise that; and to be reminded that Corbyn’s Labour Party is very bad at politics, or at least as conducted in the Westminster bear-pit.

Many forceful points could have been made in the post-statement debate about what Osborne and Cameron are doing to the country. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell flunked that task. Instead he let the Tories off the hook with a self-defeating joke involving Mao’s Little Red Book.

Being good at politics might be a cheap art, but Labour needs to hone those skills. Or else we will be stuck with either one or both of Cameron and Osborne for a depressingly long time.

SO the Commons voted for Syria airstrikes by a large majority and the first missiles have been dispatched by RAF crews.

Whether this is the start of the solution against the evil men of Isis, or the first move towards another disastrous intervention, cannot yet be said. Only time will tell and time is not always kind in these matters. Often time is a bitch.

Ten hours is a lot of debating, and few people can have listened all the way through unless they were in the Chamber – or professional observers in the media.

So any summary will be based on picking the bits that suit the person doing the summing up. And any conclusions will be based on the beliefs of the person doing the concluding.

This is what I saw from my wind-blown ledge.

Prime Minister David Cameron may have won the vote, but his speech was perfunctory, even the perfectly reasonable anger he directed against Isis was delivered without much impact. He sounded like a man who had calculated that the vote would be won, and therefore he wasn’t going to put himself out too much.

Cameron also pointedly refused to apologise for his squalid remarks the previous night about “Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers”. That displayed poor judgement and the weakness of a man who wasn’t prepared to give an inch to his opponents.

A greater statesman would have found a gracious way out of that sorry situation. But grace has never been Cameron’s thing – and the outrageous slight on Corbyn suggested a glimpse of the real Cameron beneath the smooth PR mask.

As for the Labour leader, his performance was equally what one would have expected: polite, good mannered, head-masterly dull – and lacking in the intellectual spark you might have anticipated from someone who has been saying these things for 30 years. He was against the airstrikes, as are many people, but he didn’t exactly spell out an alternative.

By consensus this morning, the star turn of the debate fell to Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, who showed a touch of his father’s oratory in a speech supporting the airstrikes. His speech was certainly an elegant and powerful piece of oratory, and delivered at the last minute, like the dramatic denouement in a very long play.

Everyone sat up and paid attention for two reasons: Benn made his case forcefully and well; and that well-put case was totally against the views of his leader, adding to the dramatic tension.

Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter who wrote the US political drama The West Wing, said something notable about the art of giving a speech: “Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.”

So it was telling that Benn should have been the one blowing the doors off the place. Cameron merely held a flaming match to the door. Corbyn tried to talk the door open. But Benn blew the door off its hinges.

Oratory is a great skill and a tricky art. There is tremendous force in the well-delivered word, yet just because a speech is delivered well doesn’t mean the message is right.

This whole debate has been framed in terms of certainty – from those who believe that missiles are the only answer; and from those who insist that bombs will kill innocent people and make a bad situation worse.

My heart was against the bombs, partly because it usually is, and partly because David Cameron’s case seemed poorly put. My head said “don’t know” – and the ‘don’t knows’ have moral logic on their side in a sense. How can anyone know for sure that the right decision has been made? They just can’t know that. The trouble is that not knowing doesn’t get you anywhere either.

THE men in the house are talking about bombs. This is not that other house, the House where the politicians go to preen and to argue. This is a house in Raqqa, Syria and the missiles they are discussing are those that fall around them, shuddering like an earthquake and sending bricks crashing into the street.

“So here’s a question for you. What is the difference between a bomb sent by Russia and a bomb sent by Britain?”

“Ah, this is no time for jokes.”

“I am not joking. The difference, my old friend, is that the Russian bomb sends all the body bits in one direction, and the bomb sent by the Mother of all Parliaments sends the body bits flying in the opposite direction.”

“So there is no difference, is that what you are saying?”

“There is no difference, my old friend. They want to bomb those hellish terrorists and they end up bombing us instead. And why don’t they remove the cause of our problems which is Assad instead of the symptom which is Isis?”*

“The last time Britain wanted to drop bombs to finish of Assad and…”

“And now they want to drop bombs to protect Assad and they seem to have forgotten all those terrible things he has done to this once beautiful country of ours.”

“And those bombs – they don’t always know where they are going. Did you hear about the women near the border? They were farmers heading to harvest and their vehicle was wiped out by a missile. They’d covered their faces and people in their village say they were killed because they were mistaken for jihadis in disguise.”

“What sort of a world is this that we live in?”

“One that can only get worse, my old friend, one that can only get worse.”

MEANWHILE the men and women in big house by the river are preparing to talk for ten hours today about the Syria airstrikes.

Prime Minister David Cameron has set the mood nicely by reportedly telling Conservative MPs that Jeremy Corbyn and his allies were “terrorist sympathisers”. **

Labour, meanwhile, do not escape with their morals unsullied either. According to the Daily Telegraph this morning, “numerous Labour MPs have been left in tears after being warned by hard-left activists that they will be ‘murdering women and babies’ by backing military action.”

That report does of course come with the important qualification “according to the Daily Telegraph”. But if it’s true, neither side seems to be covering themselves in glory.

David Cameron has yet to make a fully convincing case for airstrikes against Isis in Syria – other than as an act of revenge for the appalling Paris outrage (understandable, yet in danger of matching the terrorists’ atrocity with one of our own).

The claims being made for what the airstrikes might achieve are fairly spurious. The safety of Britain comes into this argument, again understandably enough. The Daily Express says this morning that Britain must not “sit on the sidelines and rely on others to keep us safe”.  Against this it is fair to ask how adding a few British missiles to all the American and French missiles already being dropped on Isis in Syria will make a difference.

Isn’t this more about saving face and looking good, the usual macho politics of war – and couldn’t it do the opposite of keeping us safe by make Britain a more likely target? That isn’t a reason in itself to stop the bombs, but it is a dangerous illusion to say that the missiles will make us safer.

Sometimes from the way David Cameron talks it is almost as if he imagines a place on the map that says “here be Isis terrorists”, a neat location that can be bombed to bits, a one-missile-fits all solution to our problems.

And will this be the start of another Afghanistan and Iraq war – a new and never-ending conflict that attempts to solve one problem and creates many more in the process? And these 70,000 Syrian fighters David Cameron has summoned up as potential ground troops Britain could employ, do they actually exist and, if so, where are they? Perhaps it’s that bit of the map that says “here be cavalry to come to the rescue”.

THE day will be long in the House by the river, but it will be longer still in the house in Raqqa.

“We sit and we wait, that is all we can do, isn’t it?”

“Yes, old friend, we sit and wait. We smoke cigarettes and drink the horrible coffee.”

“Ah, yes, do you remember the good coffee?”

“Every day, old friend, every day.”

The men sit out the day, waiting for the missiles, knowing that the chances of staying in one piece are faint. They think of the life they used to lead and they think of their countrymen who have died. One of the men has heard that 250,000 Syrians have been killed so far. The figure seems so large it is hard to comprehend.

He drains his coffee and spits out the bitter grounds.

* While this is an actual quote from a report in The Observer, most of the dialogue is made up

** This is an actual quote. Yes, David Cameron really did say that, according to widespread reports this morning. This isn’t made up – well, you couldn’t make it up, could you?

SELFIES, eh? Why do this this self-regarding thing? It’s bad enough looking in a mirror without snapping a picture of your own face.

I did this the other day by mistake on my new smartphone. My features were turned into those of a weirdo you’d cross a busy road to avoid rather than an ordinary middle-aged man with glasses and a pronounced lack of noticeable hair.

A story this morning reports that people who take selfies in London appear glummer than those snapping themselves in other world cities.

Now you have to say that modern life is wonderful if someone can go to all the trouble of making such a comparison. The research to uncover this finding used facial-recognition software to compare the expressions of people who publicly loaded pictures onto Instagram in September.

I can let you into a secret here. I just typed that sentence without having much idea of what Instagram is – as in almost no idea at all. Apparently people use it to share photographs and video clips on social media, so there you go.

It must be another of those modern ways to sieve the minutes and turn them into gone hours. I do haunt the time-frittering corridors of Facebook and often glance at the ever-moving conveyor belt of nothing much that is Twitter. The other day I put a picture of a loaf of bread fresh from the oven on Facebook and a surprising amount of people ‘liked’ it, but for all that I shall keep away from Instagram.

The research discovered that self-captured faces in London were less happy than those on display from Berlin, New York, Sao Paulo and Bangkok. These findings will form part of an exhibition at Somerset House in London later this month. Called Big Data, the show explores “the explosion of social media and asks what it reveals about modern society”, according to The Guardian.

Data scientists, designers and researches are said to have collected 152,462 pictures tagged close to Somerset House over one week, 640 of which were deemed to be selfies. A data designer who helped sift the selfies said the analysis revealed much about different cultures in different cities, and also showed how much people were now obsessed with documenting everything.

This is bewildering but true. Of all the inventions that say something about modern life, the smartphone is surely the most influential. This is partly down to their remarkable computing capabilities, but also the way in which they allow people to depict and direct the story of their own life in the public domain.

You can do almost anything on a smartphone, or so I am given to understand. I have discovered a failing in my phone: it’s only as smart as I am. There are many things I haven’t worked out how to do yet. But worryingly for lovely old ink and newsprint, the crisp screen is a perfectly acceptable way to read the news.

The analysis for the Somerset House exhibition recorded twice as many women as men taking selfies, and also that the average head tilt in a London selfie was 15 degrees compared with 20 degrees elsewhere – and if you can find any use at all for that piece of knowledge, you’re more smartly inclined that I am.

Claire Catterall, director of exhibitions at Somerset House, suggests that Londoners are not miserable but “too cool to smile”. Or maybe someone just told them about house prices in London – or perhaps they look miserable because they are in London and not one of those other cities.

Catterall does make a wider point about the amount of data we willingly put into the public domain online – to the point that we are defined by this data in a way we never were before.

Thanks to our phones, much more is known about us and our habits than was possible in the past. Is that at all worrying? Selfie-evidently so, I’d say. And in confirmation of that concern, I just went down into the kitchen to put my porridge on, and there was an item on the BBC Today programme about how the tax authorities can use information gathered from social media to check if people are paying the right tax.

So if you’re smiling in New York when you should be looking glum in London, best keep it to yourself.

IT IS wet and windy, we are soaked and muddied. My two friends are waiting for me up ahead. They’ve been waiting quite often on the trot round. I did warn them about inviting Puffer Cole along for the run.

We are somewhere in the Studley Royal Estate and a final diversion has been suggested, just as the tearooms were beginning to form in my mind, a lovely mirage of cosiness and cake.

My friends are fitter than me and I have been at the back all the way round. As they chat at the gate, waiting to for me to catch my breath, one friend says to the other that he will have to work when he gets home, putting in a spot of Sunday afternoon toil.

‘So this is the fun part of the day?’ I say. ‘Yes, it is,’ he says, laughing. ‘It really is.’

The wind drops as we set off on the diversion, running along the seven bridges in the valley, although we only find five or maybe six. At the gate we turn round and head back towards the car. One friend puts on a final spurt and disappears into the blowing sheets of rain. The other waits on the bridge by the lake, then we run the last short stretch together.

This run has been a recce for the Jolly Holly Jog, an annual post-Christmas run organised by Ripon Runners. I applied too late to get in but was invited along for this try-out anyway.

Normally I run once or twice a week in York, mostly flat, famously flat, apart from the hill towards home, quite a rise in a city that doesn’t do much in the way of undulating.

So running around muddy hills is not my usual thing. Back at the car, one of us changes beneath the raised boot of his vehicle, while two of us head to the loos to peel off layers of mud-splattered clothing. My running shoes seem now to be made of mud, with worms for laces. Every layer is wet or muddy or both.

From the next cubicle my friend says that he loves the muddy runs because it reminds him of being a child, getting as dirty as you like. My mother told me once recently that I didn’t like getting dirty as a child. I’m not that keen now, although there is something invigorating about becoming so wet and muddy that you no longer care.

Changed, dry and halfway decent, we head to the tearooms next to the small lake. Tea with scones and cream for my friends, a chocolate brownie and a cappuccino for me. Outside the wind is throwing fistfuls of rain at the windows.

We chat about running, life, politics – all the usual stuff. In the car on the way back the gale finds its lungs and blows nastily. Back home I go upstairs for clean clothes and the attic bedroom seems to be setting off on the high seas. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a mast out of the windows – but no, just the trees, straining and flexing in the wind.

It was good to run with friends instead of pounding along by myself – good and sociable. And since I became a man who sits inside too often, tapping away at this sometimes lonely laptop, the company was warm and welcome. Even if the weather wasn’t.

I wonder about telling my friends this, about the importance of friendship, but being a man I don’t get round to saying anything. On the way back one of them says I should write a blog about the run. So I do and here it is.

And thanks to Matt and Erich for the slip-sliding run in the wind and the rain, for giving me a soaking, for the company.

Sometimes a man has to come down from his ledge and go out for miserable run that turns out to be surprisingly uplifting.

ALL weekend government ministers having been ringing Labour MPs asking for their support in the vote on airstrikes in Syria against Isis strongholds, or so the BBC has been reporting.

If this is true it makes Tory ministers sound like Mafia bosses – “Vote for David or you’ll be waking up next to a horse’s head.” I know that Westminster politicians have always been admirers of the American TV show The West Wing. Now it transpires that they love the Sopranos too.

David Cameron is determined to win the forthcoming vote because, as he keeps indicating, a second loss on a vote to bomb Syria would be a propaganda coup for Isis – as well as an embarrassment to the prime minister, of course. Shouldn’t something as serious as this be above the red face or otherwise of a prime minister?

Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times, wrote the other day that Cameron’s drive to bomb Syria was “macho, foolish and must be stopped”.

Yet the one leading politician who is determined to do this has been open to the deepest bile and the most vicious attacks – many of them from MPs in his own party.

The reason government ministers are said to have been doing a Tony Soprano is that Jeremy Corbyn has challenged David Cameron’s bombastic call to arms. As with Afghanistan and Iraq, the pre-bombing talk is all so stirring while being vague – so determined in what it will achieve, yet uncertain exactly what will be achieved, besides blowing up benighted Syrian villages where Isis are said to hide out.

It is possible to have your own doubts – is this right or wrong, shouldn’t we be doing at least something after the horrors of Paris? – while still being alarmed that once again jingoism and stained national pride are being dusted off before another call to war.

MPs as a group seem to be like sardines under the sea at such times, massing together in a sort of unthinking cloud, swimming and swerving together, and not allowed to break away from the pack.

Sardines do that to protect themselves; MPs do it to protect their sense of worth and importance. And you can’t help worrying that being macho makes them feel more important.

Not all MPs think that way. And that’s why there should be a free vote on whether or not to bomb Syria: a vote free of party influence, and a vote free from a voice at the other end of the phone making threatening noises.

As for David Cameron, he now wants to bomb Syria for a completely different reason than the last time round. Then it was to help remove Assad – now it’s to bomb Isis and help keep Assad in power.

Smooth assurances are what you always get from Mr Cameron, and the same is true here. But stirring words from a smooth operator are hardly what you need when considering whether or not to join the French and the Americans in dropping bombs on Isis.

And how much of this latest foreign adventure is actually about the prime minister wanting to look good?

No one can have been unmoved by what happened in Paris – no one can avoid feeling that something must be done. But isn’t there a danger here that bombing Isis strongholds in Syria is the real ‘publicity coup’ for these terrorists? By treating this as a war, we are accepting at face value that Isis are worthy of a war. We are in a colloquial sense ‘bigging them up’ – aren’t we?

None of this is easy, but amid the growing bellicose rumble we should still be able to ask if the case for dropping bombs has been truly made. And that’s why MPs should be free to vote as they wish.