IT’S gone eleven when the phone rings. I drive across the dead leaves and head into town. The wind is getting up and the leaves are restless. At the station our latest guest is sitting on a bench looking tired and frazzled.

Originally he wanted to arrive at five when I was booked to play squash (or swearing and despairing, as this game is also known). So we settled on 6.30pm.

Sometime after that our guest, a visiting doctor, phoned to explain what had happened to him. His simple journey from London to York had turned into a nightmare. And he was still in London, waiting for the next train.

But he is here now, at long last. I take him to the car, drive home and park over the dead leaves.

‘Ah, autumn,’ he says as we go inside.

I don’t usually pick guests up, but this one had had a hell of a day and had sounded flustered on the phone.

Inside the silent house I make him a cup of tea. Sitting at the dining table he tells me his story. Sometimes it is a little difficult to understand what he is saying. But then he doesn’t always catch my words either. Incidentally the guest before this one thought I sounded German, which was odd.

Halfway to York, our guest had realised that he’d lost his money-belt bag containing his passport, visas, all of his money and his credit cards. He made his plight known to the guard. A frantic phone call to the offices at King’s Cross station followed. Our guest realised he must have dropped the bag when he went to the lavatory. The bag had been found and was being kept for him at the station. But it couldn’t be forwarded and he would have to pick it up.

The guard wrote out a special ticket so that our guest could return to London for his bag. When he arrived, the bag wasn’t at the station. Due to reasons of bureaucracy it had been forwarded to the relevant consulate. Our guest chased over but the consulate had closed at 5pm.

Without money or anywhere to stay, he was in a panic. But his misfortune now ran into a good deed. Someone returned to open the consulate and retrieve the bag.

Back at the station, around the time that he phoned me, our visitor encountered another good deed. When he explained what had happened, the ticket office gave him a new hand-written ticket. So his interrupted journey hadn’t cost anything extra.

Over a late-night cup of tea, he tells me about his stressful day. The waves of anxiety are almost visible. Then he tells me about his life, tells me quite a lot about his life, private things that it wouldn’t be fair to repeat here. Nothing shocking, but some people’s lives are very different, and difficult.

Now it is 7.30am and he is sitting at the dining table again with another cup of tea.

‘Let’s hope today is simpler,’ I say.

‘Ah, yes, no, yes!’ he says.

Shortly after that I walk him round to the bus-stop. I haven’t seen him again. So the bus must have arrived. And he must have left on it, with all of his belongings. I return to the house, yawning.

Intersecting lives – that’s one of the pleasures of being an Airbnb host. Well mostly I think that. Sometimes my wife thinks we let guests intersect a little too much. When we stayed at an Airbnb in Bristol, there wasn’t much overlapping or talking. Just a pleasant room for the night and breakfast. On the Sunday morning we got our own breakfast and left without seeing our hosts again.

Maybe we should be more like that. Then again I enjoy meeting people from different places with different stories to tell. Or people from the same place but with different stories to tell. People come wrapped in so many tales.

It’s a big world out there. I may be contained in a semi in York, trying to sort out my life. But sometimes the world comes to your door. And that’s good. Even when they arrive late and in a terrible fluster.

NOT much of my life has been spent feeling sorry for the Queen. But the news footage of the state banquet for Chinese president Xi Jinping might just have changed that.

I realise this is just another day at the gilt-edged office for her Majesty. She’s lived through an eternity of these be-glittered occasions, chomping on venison and not-so-humble pie.

Sadly, my invitation seems to have been lost in the post. Either that or it’s down all those years spent grumbling about the royals. Sometimes we people of pointless principle have it coming.

So like the rest of us, I can only go on the television footage. As glimpsed on the news, the banquet looked glittery but empty, magnificent but ridiculous, a fine flourish of crawling dressed up as national pageantry.

Views of this state visit will be determined by perspective. The protestors who attempted to chant their objections in the Mall will have a different view from the mass of official Chinese supporters supplied with matching T-shirts and posters, seemingly orchestrated to drown out any chorus of dissent. China doesn’t leave these things to chance.

If you are a chancellor wanting China to stump up for a nuclear power station or two, you will think that the visit is a very good thing, and worth any amount of white-tie grovelling and turbot munching.

If you are a steel worker in Scunthorpe and Scotland, it might well stick in your gullet that on the day you learn you are to lose your job, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are fawning all over the president of the country said to have caused the collapse in world steel prices.

And if you are the Queen, you might wonder at the disparity in gifts when, in return to a hand-tooled edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, you receive two CDs of music by the Chinese president’s wife. I guess that’s just a cultural thing, and it is fair to point out that Peng Liyuan is a celebrated folk singer – celebrated in her own right, and no doubt as a patriotic duty too.

What this state visit does is confirm the inexorable rise of China. Never mind a wobble or two on the Chinese stock market, never mind what the west sees as human rights abuses, China’s might isn’t about to diminish. Rather the opposite.

The pragmatic response to this if you are George Osborne is to bury any doubt and do everything necessary to sweet talk and appease China. If that sticks in the throat, and surely it should, the Osborne response would be to say that’s the world we live in, so you might as well jump to front of the queue.

This is all down to a word I have never felt comfortable using: geopolitics. Perhaps the definition was a little hazy in my mind. The Cambridge online dictionary offers: “The study of the way a country’s size, position, etc. influence its power and its relationships with other countries.”

Well this state visit is certainly all about size, power and influence. It’s hard not to see Britain as a minnow swimming alongside a giant pike when it comes to China.

So what does China get out of all this (apart from hand-tooled Shakespeare)? Respect and kudos, propaganda beyond price at home and abroad and a chance to put a Chinese perspective on matters. In his 11-minute speech to Parliament, Xi gave a nod to the “mother of parliaments”, while also stressing that “in China, the concept of putting people first and following the rule of law emerged in ancient times”.

The protestors on the streets might have had something to say about that, but they were mostly drowned out by the Chinese state-sponsored cheerleaders.

Maybe cosying up to the second most powerful country in the world is just what has to be done. But it is possible still to worry about just how powerful our new best friend might be.

As to steel, the business secretary Sajid Javid said in an emergency debate called by Labour that: “No government can change the price of steel in the global market.” Except that some people argue that’s just what China did by dumping cheap steel on the market.

Javid wasn’t having any of that, but then he is a diehard Thatcherite. And you don’t win many arguments with them.

SOME weird shit just happened. But you don’t hang out with Ethan and Joel for all these years without getting used to that.

The Coen Brothers had me with their first film back in 1984, Blood Simple. The plot synopsis on IMDb goes like this: “A rich but jealous man hires a private investigator to kill his cheating wife and her new man. But, when blood is involved, nothing is simple.”

Not perhaps the best choice for a date movie, but never mind. We’re still watching films together and always turn out for the Coens.

I’ve not seen Blood Simple since it came out so the narrative arc is obscured by mist. But I do remember certain moments, including the startling shock when a newspaper is flung against a porch. Now that doesn’t sound much, but in the film it lifts you from your seat. Then there was that hand impaled on a shard of glass. There was a muddy field in there somewhere. And there was blood. And bloodied ineptitude. There often is with the Coens.

So many films and so many good films. Some are better than others – Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading – but there is rarely a dud moment.

Fargo is one of the greatest, a snowbound crime drama in which the pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson quietly and persistently goes about tackling a bunch of hopeless criminals. That film was made into a fine TV remake starring Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton. Now a new series takes us back with a shiver and a giggle to snowy, folksy Minnesota.

Last night’s first episode began with something I still don’t understand, but that’s the way sometimes: with the Coens and, to be fair, with me. A western was being filmed in the desert. It was February and cold instead of hot. Ronald Reagan was the (unseen) star. What we did see was a grumpy actor playing an Indian and the director trying to jolly him along during a cigarette break.

After that extended opening, it was back to Minnesota and bungling criminals. A ham-fisted shootout in a waffle bar saw a twitchy goon kill three innocent people. He then yanked the steak-knife from his back, walked out and was hit by a passing car.

In case you haven’t watched, I won’t say more.

What I will say is that Fargo started full of weird, off-kilter promise. Once again, as in the first series, people are pulled into a dumb vortex by their own actions. A nervous young wife (Kirsten Dunst) and her solid butcher husband (Jesse Plemons) are ejected from timid domesticity after bizarre fate twists into murder.

Cleverly, this new series is a remake of the remake: it heads back to 1979 and the only familiar character from that first series is gruff café owner Lou Solverson, here seen back in the days when he was a young policeman. Lou has to investigate the triple waffle-house murder and work out why there’s a shoe high in a tree next to the skid marks on the icy road.

As you might expect, the explanation involves strangeness and much black comedy – and quite the most hilariously gruesome hit-and-run imaginable.

That’s the thing about the Coens, whether in their films or this TV spin-off. They haven’t lost their love of the quietly weird or the mutedly outrageous. They are still excited by what they do, still sprinkle their films with the dust of strange mischief.

The trailer for their next movie – Hail, Caesar! – looks as promising as ever. It’s about a 1950s Hollywood fixer who has to keep the stars in line. Well that’s the brief synopsis. But there will be more layers in there than in a lasagne, you can be sure of that.

But until then we have the new series of Fargo. Incidentally, in my old job I was a television critic for a while among many other roles. I loved that job. Anyone need a second-hand TV critic?

HERE is a story to lift the spirits although some readers may have to suppress long-held antipathies. For in this tale two former Manchester United stars display humanity in an unexpected way.

As reported yesterday by the Manchester Evening News, and then picked up by other papers and websites, Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs have allowed squatters to move into the hotel they are developing in the centre of Manchester.

The pair have planning permission to turn an historic building that once housed the Manchester Stock Exchange into a boutique hotel with all the refinements one expects of these places (well, not this one, having never set roughshod foot inside a boutique hotel).

The first guests at the hotel turn out to be a group of homeless people who have invited themselves in under the banner of a housing protest group called the Manchester Angels. They arrived carrying banners proclaiming: “We just want somewhere to live.”

The normal response in this situation is for the property owners to obtain a court order to expel the uninvited visitors. Instead the property-developing ex-footballers have told the squatters they can stay in the historic building throughout the winter.

The housing and human rights activist behind the protest is reported to have broken down in tears when Neville, quite a name in property development these days, told him the squatters could stay. Wesley Hall has promised to do everything properly, having already drawn up rotas for running the place.

The squatters intend to use the former stock exchange as a base for helping and housing homeless people during the winter. They will also be handing out clothing for new residents, and have rechristened the historic building as the Sock Exchange, proving that even in extremis it is possible to have a sense of humour.

What’s encouraging about this tale is that two wealthy and famous men have showed compassion to those much less fortunate – so much less fortunate that they are scurrying around a great northern city desperately looking for somewhere to stay warm and dry.

So good on Neville and Giggs. This display of humanity shouldn’t cost them much as the squatters have pledged to look after the building and leave at an arranged time. If that all goes to plan, the ex-footballers will have earned moral brownie points at little cost. Evicting the squatters would have generated unflattering headlines, so this is also a canny bit of public relations too.

Former Man U defender Neville has not always been seen in such a flattering light when it comes to property. Some years ago he controversially won a planning battle over his futuristic £8m house on moorland outside Bolton – a home dubbed by locals as the Teletubbies house. This eco house looks from a glimpse online like the grandest Grand Designs ever, with its underground petal-shaped pods and all. An online skim reveals conflicting reports about whether or not Neville has yet managed to build his eco mansion.

This tale of two ex-footballers displaying humanity to those much less fortunate broke at the same time as a less flattering story. Low-paid cleaners working in the Foreign Office are reported to have been disciplined after writing to foreign secretary Philip Hammond asking for a pay rise. As is often the way, the foreign office and the private contractors employing the cleaners deny any wrongdoing in a way that does not convince.

A case today of ex-footballers two; foreign office hard-hearts nil.

SO that’s what writing with a hangover feels like. It’s been a while. Nothing dramatic, just a rolling fuzz in my head.

The radio is on and my wife is vacuuming. I usually sit in the study but for some reason I have taken my bit of a headache downstairs to the dining table. Ah, the vacuum cleaner is off now and making that coming-into-land noise. And the Today programme has stopped shouting at me. So the laptop lament can continue.

There was another leaving do last night, for the photographers this time. The way things are going brings to mind that old front page of the Sun newspaper. You may remember it as Neil Kinnock’s head was contained in a light bulb. It dates from the days when that newspaper was brilliant in a cruel way. The headline ran: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain turn out the lights.” The date was April 9, 1992 and Kinnock didn’t win and the lights stayed on. They are still on now, including the standard lamp next to me with the homemade lampshade.

The British Library website says the following about that page: “This is a classic example of the use of ‘personality politics’ started by Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. It is a striking front page, bringing a lot of humour into the serious business of politics and a general election. But it caused a lot of anger among Labour party supporters.”

It is easy to see why. More than 20 years later, many of the national newspapers have their bias, although this is usually displayed in a less wittily confrontational manner. But you only have to see the sort of coverage that new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn gets to realise that the bias still exists.

The interesting thing here is that Corbyn is a dream for the editors and headline writers: a rampant leftie running the Labour Party is like Christmas Day every day for these people. The danger in this approach is that they portray Corbyn as more extreme than Satan in a baggy beige jumper, and then he turns out to appear fairly approachable and ordinary, even a little dull in a comforting sort of way.

The gap between the tabloid sketch and the humdrum reality may be enough to make people think: ‘Well, he’s not that bad.’

For me it’s still a head and heart thing: my head says Jeremy Corbyn will never win an election; my heart likes some of what he says, especially about not spending untold billions on the dodgy nuclear insurance policy that is Trident.

It’s a funny thing to be a lifelong newspaper person who sometimes feels infuriated by the press. For all that there is still ink in my veins. And the inky smudge on my fingers never quite goes away. Yet it’s in danger of becoming a one-sided affair: newspapers don’t perhaps love me as much as I love them. Until now I have only ever done newspaper work. That’s why I am trying with the freelancing still, even if the once busy highway of my old life has become a thin and bumpy track.

Anyway it was good to see my old colleagues, although it was another sad occasion, a bit like getting together for a drink after a family funeral. The do was branded as a photographers’ funeral, fittingly so as a newspaper once proudly known for its photographers now has only the one.

For Man On Ledge, last night was also a reminder of what is lost when your job goes, the work and the money of course, but the everyday companionship too.

That old Sun headline turned on a bulb in my mind for a reason. I’m beginning to worry that one day someone will say: “Will the last person to leave The Press newspaper please turn out the lights.”

THERE’S nothing like a new report on insomnia to wake me up in the morning. But first here is a helpful quotation from the comedian and actor W.C. Fields: “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.”

Ah, sleep. I have duvet-wrestling form on this. But is it insomnia or restlessness or a sheet-tangle of both? A question to ponder as you lie awake at odd hours. This week 1.30am has been my wake-up time. The pattern goes like this: fall asleep easily, wake up, thrash about a bit, fill the mind with worms of gloomy doubt, decamp to a different bed, read for a while, and then sleep again.

And so it goes, night after night. I am more or less used to this tired template. Sometimes the night is tender, mostly it is not, but the day comes around again. And sometimes the day contains a sofa nap.

New research reported on this morning takes an interesting angle on insomnia. It has long been suggested that modern life is to blame, what with its new-fangled light bulbs and the like. This theory has it that we should sleep when it is dark and be awake when it is light. But this new research suggests that those pesky lightbulbs, TV, the internet and smartphones have not harmed our sleeping patterns.

According to a report in the journal Current Biology, US scientists wanted to study how well our ancient ancestors slept. This task presented the obvious problem of not being able to go back and interview ancient insomniacs (maybe I’ll be one of those one day).

The researchers got round this by instead studying three hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticulturalist societies in Africa and Bolivia. Incidentally, I suspect I may have married one of those hunter-horticulturalists.

Far from going to bed at dusk and rising with dawn’s first fart, the people in the study stayed up for hours after sunset and had no more sleep than those in the industrialised world. None of the subjects had access to electricity and a fire provided their only source of light.

Jerome Siegel, professor psychiatry at the University of California in Los Angeles, says the findings suggest we don’t really sleep all that differently to our ancient ancestors. Siegel found that none of his subjects went to sleep when the sun went down (perhaps they wanted to see if they was anything good on the fire that night). Instead they stayed up for up to three hours longer.

“They are up for a good two hours after it is as dark as it ever gets,” Siegel says.

What’s more his subjects slept for an average of nearly six and a half hours. A workaday modern night’s sleep then.

Siegel’s research has led him to suspect that we might have unrealistic expectations of sleep – something which could be harmful. “If you go to your GP and say, ‘Doctor I really think I should sleep more’, they’ll give you whatever the last sleeping pill rep who was in their office was handing out.” So what might be a natural problem ends up being controlled by unnatural and potentially addictive pills.

In all my sleepless years, I have kept away from pills and their ills. I tried whisky once or twice – a lot more pleasant, but a slippery answer. Whisky should be an occasional treat, not a prop to a good night’s sleep. Anyway the whisky didn’t work so the stopper now stays in the bottle.

A professor of sleep was on hand in one of today’s reports, suggesting caution about Professor Siegel’s findings. But they make sense to this member of the inconveniently wide-awake club.

Another interesting theory was that the sleep patterns of those in Siegel’s groups were connected to natural cycles. The subjects fell asleep as temperatures began to fall and woke in the chill before sunrise. Siegel next wants to test whether sleeping in a room that gets steadily cooler would help people who struggle to get to sleep.

Sounds good to me, although it might involve too much clambering in and out of bed, opening and shutting of windows, and bumping into things.

And then there’s the traffic noise…

DEAR me but don’t the Tories excited about grammar schools. It’s as if some Conservatives have a hidden grammar school button. Press that sweet spot and they spin round in a whirl of gleeful agitation.

The mere mention of grammar schools sets these people off, and the prospect of a new one excites them more than the news that someone has just done a macabre twist on Jurassic Park and found a way to resurrect Margaret Thatcher (sorry, that was just a bad dream I had).

The Times reports today that the government has given the green light to the first selective school in half a century. David Cameron is said to have personally approved the new school in Kent.

A law passed under Tony Blair in 1998 bans new grammar or selective schools. This new school gets round the law by being an expansion of an existing school, Weald of Kent girls’ grammar school.

This story is making headlines today but it’s been rumbling away for a long time. When Michael Gove was education secretary he rejected an earlier bid for expansion, but now his successor, Nicky Morgan, has said that the new school can open in Sevenoaks.

Funnily enough, it was Thatcher who, as education secretary, closed many grammar schools in the Seventies. At the time all-ability comprehensive schools were thought to be the way ahead. And isn’t at the thing with education in this country? Each fresh tranche of endlessly interfering politicians believe they have the answer.

Firstly it’s grammar schools, as mostly created by the 1944 Education Act; then, no, comprehensives are the modern solution; then they’re not and academies are the thing. Despite all the tinkering, there is always another answer round the next corner.

The myth about grammar schools is that they aid social mobility and allow bright kids from poor background to succeed. This is mostly a delusion: grammar schools do produce good results, but only by selecting the brightest pupils at the age of 11: often the brightest middle-class kids. Do we really want to label children as successes and failures at such a young age? It’s seems a cruel way to sift our young people.

As a grammar school boy myself, I’ve never been able to see what all the fuss is about: just what is so great about grammar schools? But let’s turn to someone who really knows.

Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has said: “Grammar schools are stuffed full of middle-class kids. A tiny percentage are on free school meals: three per cent. This is nonsense. Anyone who thinks grammar schools are going to increase social mobility needs to look at those figures.”

There are a couple of ironies blowing around the feet of this matter. One: plenty of the people who think grammar schools are the answer went themselves to private schools. Two: David Cameron said in his conference speech that all schools would eventually be free from local authority control, yet here he is allowing a local education authority to open a new grammar school. Isn’t that having it both ways?

I am one of three brothers. Two of us went to the grammar school, the other had to cross town to the secondary modern. We all survived in the end, but that initial split set up difficulties.

What the grammar groupies tend to do is look at the children who succeed and scatter the confetti of selection over their young heads, while conveniently overlooking the long queue of children heading in a less desirable direction.

Grammar schools are a win-win thing to these people. What they forget is that you can’t have winners without creating losers too.

It is true that I went to school a very long time ago. True, too, that too often we take distant personal experience as a ruler to measure today’s situation.

But isn’t that just what the grammar groupies are doing? It seems to be a case of find your favourite myth, flog it half to death and hopscotch back into the past.

Sadly this won’t be the last of it. The few remaining scraps of grammar school DNA are being examined right now. Expect further resurrections.

PAUL O’Grady, the chat show host and sometime drag queen, gave a lively and entertaining interview to the Guardian yesterday. In promoting the latest instalment of his autobiography, O’Grady discussed friends he had lost. The recent departures included Cilla Black and Jackie Collins.

The no-nonsense ITV host spoke entertainingly at Cilla’s funeral – entertainingly and movingly, as the two moods often hold hands at a funeral.

“What a rotten year it’s been!” O’Grady says in the interview. “Cilla, and then, while I was in Borneo, I saw it on the telly – Jackie Collins. I only spoke to her before I left. We were going to have lunch, and I said ‘I can’t, I’m going away…’”

What O’Grady touches on here is something none of us escape in the end, the opportunity missed for a last meeting with a friend, the lost chance to say goodbye.

For me this story concerns John Sheridan. This is not the John Sheridan who once played for Leeds United and now manages Newport County. This is the John Sheridan I met in 1975 on the English Literature BA at Goldsmiths’ College in New Cross, south east London.

I was straight out of school, John was a year or two older. He’d started a university course somewhere else, I can’t remember where now, Leeds perhaps, but had jumped horses.

That was the way with John. He moved from one thing to another. He gave the impression of never quite being settled, and in the end he had less time than most to find his place.

John was very tall, six foot four, of Irish extraction, amusing in a sometimes scathing manner, looked a little like Clark Kent, and he was my favourite university friend. He always seemed smarter than me, but then other people often do. We went for drinks, went to concerts, sat through seminars together, keen and mostly attentive (me), questioning and still doubtful (John).

A year or two after university we went to America on a three-week holiday linked in part to John’s family roots and routes. We flew to New York where we spent a week with one of his cousins in Queens. Then we picked up a car that needed delivering to Los Angeles. The deal with the car was that we had one week to drive 3,000 miles. We put down a returnable deposit of $100 and only had pay for the petrol. I had just passed my test, so John did the cities and we shared the long dusty stretches between.

Stopping in Boston (more of John’s cousins, including a girl cousin I liked), we then followed Route 66 across the States, clocking up 600 or 700 miles a day. We slept in tatty motels and ate at truck-stop diners.

One day in a somewhere-nowhere sort of place we stopped for a coffee. The young woman who served us was what about our age. She said something about our accents, and said in passing that she’d never been more than 100 miles from where she now was. And here we were driving all the way across her country. A picture that has stayed with me, although the details are hazed with time. And I can’t seek corroboration.

We spent a week in Los Angeles, near the beach (another cousin, this one was away in the Marines) and drove along the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco. At the end of the three weeks, we flew back from LA.

When I met my wife she found John difficult, then grew to love him. Just as well as he was best man at our wedding. The way I asked John for this favour was a little clumsy, and he told me, in a John sort of way, that yes he’d love to but I should have taken him out for a meal before asking. Even lovely friends can sometimes prickle, but he rose to the occasion and was a good best man.

After we moved to York, John came to stay a few times. He moved jobs, jumping ship from the Greater London Council to work for a charity in an accounting role of some sort (I think). Later he left that job to do VSO in Bhutan, sending me long and interesting air-mail letters which I have still somewhere in the tin of lost letters.

One day, back in London again, John rang to say that he’d been diagnosed with a brain tumour. We had a long conversation and he suggested I might want to pop down to see him sometime. We had young children, life was busy and, anyway, a good friend of mine wasn’t going to die, so I didn’t get round to that visit.

In the event that was okay, or so it seemed. John got better and went on holiday abroad by himself. Plans were made but I didn’t hear from John for a while. One day I left a message on his answer-phone.

John didn’t phone me back, but his brother Jim did eventually, telling me that John had died. Years later I can still feel the shock and the guilt; still hate myself for that last dereliction.

I went to the funeral. This seemed both the right thing to do, and the wrong thing. Right because you just do. Wrong because I should have visited John when I could have done.

It rained all day and the funeral seemed to be for someone other than my friend. This John Sheridan was a good Catholic boy who represented his faith well, which was news to me.

There are other stories about John. Such as the Audi car he spray painted so badly that the paint set in thick drips. Or the sweltering day when he route-marched the three of us across stubble fields in Kent, walking 12 hot miles so that we could get to the pub on time. When we arrived the bar was closing, but we did manage a pint.

John was 42 when he died, or maybe 43. He never married or had a partner that I met. He was just John. I still miss him and that’s why you should always say goodbye to a good friend.

I SEE that western civilisation truly is about to collapse. Never mind votes on Europe and multifarious other matters. Beer is getting sweeter to take account of the tastes of young people raised on sugary drinks.

A generation of cavity-mining young people is said to be so used to sweet drinks that alcohol is being sweetened to ease their entry into more adult pleasures.

On one level this upsets the old rites of passage. Alcohol isn’t meant to be easy. Beer should taste pretty revolting on that first sip. I can still recall being offered a taste of my father’s beer at a young age, maybe ten or so. And it was horrible, bitter and sour and just weird, and leaving that young taster to wonder why anyone drank the revolting stuff.

Thankfully, down the years, and through dedication and determination, I persevered and was rewarded with a liking for beer. Proper beer, hand-pumped real ale in a pub or decent beer from the bottle when at home.

Beer is a small but important pleasure in life. If it becomes a big but important pleasure in life, then your gut may have to expand to accommodate all those ale-slopping calories. If like me you are too vain to carry about a big stomach, then a degree of exercise may be required, a little running or cycling perhaps. Or a good walk, which is to say one further than to the nearest pub.

Making alcohol sweeter is a nasty business, a sneaky way to infantilise adult pleasures. It’s also going at things from the wrong way round. Once the young drinker took time to acquire a taste for beer or wine. Now they are supping the sweet blandishments of a food and drinks industry that wants to keep them addicted to sugar.

They are being led straight from the sweetshop to the bar, without having to change their habits much at all. From fruit gums to gummy sweet drinks, from sucking sweets to drinking them; and from guzzling sugar-drenched pop to guzzling sugar-drenched alcohol.

Just how depressing is all this? The market share of sweeter alcoholic drinks has risen by 50 per cent, according to research carried out by Grocer magazine, reports today suggest. And if you want to push a wine lover over the edge, tell them that the most popular new alcohol last year was Echo Falls Fruit Fusion.

Yesterday when I put out the recycling, I had to include a bottle of just such a fake wine, as drunk by one of our guests. My wife saw me walk past the kitchen window with the empty bottle and guessed what I was muttering about. Well, really – I don’t want the rubbish collectors to think that I would drink such sweet slop. Being a booze connoisseur/snob takes time and effort. You don’t want all these young upstarts spoiling everything with their sweetshop swill that passes for alcohol.

Sadly, I am standing against a tide of sugar-infused horrors. Today’s young drinker is likely to drink a vodka and red bull, a fruit wine or one of those expensive beers with added spirit that are then sweetened with sugar and glucose syrup.

Craig Clarkson, a director of Heineken, says in today’s Daily Telegraph: “We are growing up in a time when people do not drink the drink their dad drank.”

That quotation contains both a sad truth and an impressive degree of alliteration. As it happens, I am a dad who still drinks the drink his dad drank. My father could not say the same, as his father was teetotal. Funnily enough, on special occasions my Methodist grandparents would bring out the ‘wine’ – non-alcoholic cordial that was, if memory serves, terribly sweet.

Overly sweetened alcohol is horrible stuff, and must be doubly bad for you, but no one will listen to such a bitter cry of complaint. It is true that beer needs malted sugars for the brewing process to work. What it doesn’t need are extra sugars and syrups to ease the swallowing.

Never mind the old saying that life is not all beer and skittles. Nowadays you beer might well have Skittles in it. And if that sounds far-fetched, a quick skim of the internet produces the drink-mixing tip that Skittles vodka is the drink to be making right now.

No thanks. I want clear, bright and bitter beer. Or wine that doesn’t taste like boiled sweets. And malt whisky that tastes of all the complicated things malt whisky should taste of. But only on a Friday night. Friday night is whisky night, you see.

Man On Ledge does not normally look to the Daily Express for sustenance. There are only so many times one can read about the forthcoming icy Armageddon. Dear rain-blasted me, that newspaper does like a madly hyperbolic story about the weather.

But a skim of this morning’s newspaper headlines brings a quirky story to raise the spirits. “It’s a clincher… a hug is all we need to be happy” says a report in the Express.

As anyone who has worked on a newspaper will recognise, this is one of those stories based on a bit of mildly spurious research commissioned by a company in search of a headline. “Here, knock some shit out about this, would you,” as the news editor might say.

According to this story, “nine out of ten of us say it only takes a small thing, such as a clinch or hearing a favourite song on the radio, to improve a bad day”. A spontaneous hug made 40 per cent of those polled feel happy. Hugs are tricky things and not everyone is happy with a hug. Not me. I like a good hug from male or female friends or family members. A hug is a warming act of human contact.

Of course such polls have what might be termed the awkward obverse element: every stated statistic has its flipside. If 40 per cent of people are cheered by a hug, then 60 per cent presumably are not. Could that be the real story here? A significant majority of people don’t like hugs. Perhaps they are affection averse. Or maybe we are a hands-off nation, suspicious denizens of a touch-free land.

Other findings in this research, which is surely a shoo-in for a Noble Prize, are that 11.17am on a Monday is the most miserable time of the week. The battery in my watch has given up the ghost this morning, so with luck I will escape that miserable minute.

Optimists among you will be pleased to learn that 2.35pm is in contrast the happiest time of the day. Personally I find that to be the doziest time of the day, a little hillock of sleepiness to be surmounted or surrendered to. The research doesn’t mention horizontal time-out as being one of life’s small and cheering pleasures, but in my book it should have done.

A psychologist was on hand to interpret the research to readers – “No it doesn’t have anything to do with the bloody weather” – explaining that it is often the small things that cheer us up: never mind a “flashy new car”, a hug will make you happier.

This is true, although those of us who drive unflashy old cars sometimes need a hug as well after whatever mechanical calamity has just arisen.

Mostly I like this story. But then these days I am often in need of a hug. Many people who are kind enough to read these jottings offer words of encouragement. Such support is truly welcome. As I told the friend who took me out to lunch last week, writing this blog is a lifesaver (if not an earner).

Yet this blog was born in a desperate moment, and it’s fair to say that not enough has changed in the interim. A fair few job applications have fallen by the wayside, while others are still in the pipeline. The freelance work is rewarding but there needs to be more of it. The thriller is being rewritten again. And so on.

Beneath the rising thrum of anxiety, a tremble of optimism does remain: something good will come of all this, won’t it?

Another story today, on this occasion in The Times, tells us how to pronounce Don Quixote. Apparently 43 per cent of Britons can’t get their tongues round the title of the title of Cervantes’ novel. The correct pronunciation is “Don-Key-Hoh-The.” The more spittle the better, I guess.

These, well, quixotic stories are often the ones that lift me when the weight of serious headlines threatens to bring the roof down.

Incidentally, this summer we put up a Spanish man for two weeks. He came from Don Quixote country and his pronunciation was a challenge– but his English was a lot better than our non-existent Spanish.

Anyway, let me just say that you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a Spaniard trying to pronounce Exeter. It took us a while but we got there in the end. Our guest was called Cesar, which was pronounced “Thesser”. At least I think so. My stubborn English tongue struggled with that one.