JUST be thankful for small, sweaty mercies. As this blog comes without a video feed, you are spared the sight of me sitting here and typing in my shorts after my Sunday morning run.

It took a bit of effort to get out after a semi-restless night, awake between two and three. But worth it in the end. I did a long loop into York through Clifton, went round the city walls to Skeldergate and then along Bishopthorpe Road, before cutting through to Knavesmire and heading home, to sit here and type.

Our latest guest has just departed, off to York Races where he is working as a cameraman. He follows the man from the Crimea, the young Frenchman and the British-born Australian. Now after a full week the house will just contain the two of us. We’ve hung up the electronic ‘no vacancies’ sign for a few days, to give ourselves a rest. So no strangers for breakfast until next weekend, when a busy spell begins again.

Anxiety can be a cause of poor sleep, and sitting on this ledge does give me cause to worry. Yet in truth my sleep has been shot through with holes for years. Some nights are good, many are not, but you just get on with it.

With the world being the way it is at present, any worries you may have diminish next to the plight of those it is best to call refugees. It has been heartening to hear reports from around the country of people either offering to help or house refugees, or donating clothes, tents, blankets and food.

Here in York, the Minster has offered to take in a refugee family, with the Dean of York, the Very Rev Vivienne Faull also offering to convene a meeting to discuss a broader response. Dean Faull told my old newspaper that York had a long history of offering sanctuary to those in need, with the city giving temporary shelter to 90 Kosovan Albanians in 1999.

This is as it should be, although the response from the city’s Tory council leader was less encouraging. He said that if the Dean wanted to organise a meeting he would be happy to take part. He then added: “But we can’t just say we as a city will take X amount of people. Issues like this have to be looked at nationally.”

Not much evidence of compassionate Conservatism there, I’d say, although plenty of people may well agree with such a view. I’m not normally one for signing petitions, but I did sign the one saying that Britain should do more to help the refugees. By yesterday more than 400,000 people had signed.

An alternative petition demanding that Britain lets in no further migrants appears to be attracting much less support. At times like this, it is good to be reminded that we Britons are not always small-minded and suspicious of otherness, and that we have higher feelings too, and can consider the plight of those in need.

Not all charitable causes can hold our attention. Our doormat seems to collect four or five of those charity bags a week, each asking for donations of clothes. If we filled all of those we wouldn’t have a thing left to wear.

One such bag was stuffed with clothes and left out at the appointed hour. Two days later it was still there in the rain, and so ended up in the bin.

Anyway, it is now time to step away from the laptop and head for the shower. No blog-vision in there either, you will be glad to hear.

• It has just been pointed out to me that I missed out an American girl from the above list of visitors…

SOME images are too awful to look at, yet we should keep our eyes steady. The photograph of Aylan Kurdi comes into that sad category.

Yesterday I could not bring myself to write about the body of the three-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a beach in Turkey. Perhaps that was cowardice, who can say for sure. I looked at the headlines in the shop and for a moment took the detached view of a person long dipped in newspaper ink. The Independent front page stole the honours in terms of impact, with one deep photograph filling the page.

Many issues are stirred by these tragic images, not least the force of photography and the cold unwavering eye of those who take such pictures.

Inevitably there has been much comment about whether or not it was right to use such a photograph. The image is certainly powerful and powerfully upsetting. In terms of iconography, a big gentle man holds a small child, as if carrying him to safety. This should be about comfort and protection, but the man isn’t rescuing the boy, as the world now knows. Other pictures show Aylan lying in the sand as the waves lap his little body.

In attempting to escape his tortured homeland, Abdullah Kurdi lost his two children and his wife. The photographs of his three-year-old son being carried from the sea somehow encapsulated the long summer of troubled people trying to leave one place for another.

Whether we call these people migrants or economic migrants is surely beside the point; why not just call them refugees like we used to? There is a legal distinction in that refugees seek sanctuary from imminent danger, but what matters most is that they are people, and people who need help.

The problems are complex almost beyond belief, the solutions difficult to find, yet doing something matters. At times our own government has seemed to distance itself from becoming too directly involved. Today this position is shifting a little, as David Cameron bows to growing demands from home and abroad. Now he suggests that Britain will take more Syrian refugees.

The photographs of Aylan Kurdi surely had something to do with that, along with the scale of the gathering crisis. Throughout the day, I heard Cameron on the radio saying how upset he was by the photographs – upset as a father, he kept saying. An understandable response, yet surely one doesn’t have to be a father to be upset by the death of a young boy on a beach. One simply has to be a fellow human being. And I say that as a father (just to jump up there with David).

The photographs changed the public mood and intensified the feeling that as a country we should be doing more. And here is a reason why it is right to use such unflinching images: sometimes a picture just carries more weight than anything else.

As has happened before, sensible words were delivered by a man of religion. This is not the first time I’ve pointed this out from the confines of my non-believing ledge.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said the present emergency was a “wicked crisis”, adding: “We cannot turn our backs on this crisis. We must respond with compassion, but we must also not be naïve in claiming to have the answers to end it.”

PICTURES and photographers are on my mind for a different reason too. The newspaper I worked on for so long now appears to be cutting all of its staff photographers. Consultations are said to be underway, and we all know what that means and where it leads.

It is hard to imagine how a newspaper once famed for the quality of its award-winning photographs will cope without any photographers. Such seems to be the sorry way of things nowadays.

A good photograph is so much more than something snapped on a mobile phone, but try telling that to the people who make these decisions.

Heartfelt feelings go to these men, and mostly they have been men on that newspaper, I worked with for so long. I loved working with your photographs. Most days it was an honour to put them on the page.

WELL this took me back…

“This is Jim Rockford. At the tone leave your name and message, I’ll get back to you…”

Watching television in the day is not something I do usually. But it was lunchtime, it was grey outside and I had a bowl of soup and chunks of bread to eat. I switched on to see if there was anything recorded to watch, but there wasn’t. Instead The Rockford Files was just beginning. So I had a tray lunch in front of an episode of this 1970s favourite.

Rockford was a private detective who didn’t much like trouble, although trouble seemed to like him. He preferred fishing to fighting. He looked smart in a sports jacket and slacks sort of way, but his life wasn’t what you would call comfortable. He lived in a mobile home that might once have been new.

In 122 episodes from 1974 to 1980, James Garner played the ex-con turned detective. Garner died last year but he lives on in daytime Rockford reruns, attaining that immortality peculiar to actors in TV series that never quite go out of fashion.

He found earlier TV fame in Maverick in the 1950s, and lent his amiable presence to many films, including Support Your Local Sheriff. But for those of us who grew up in the 1970s, it is Rockford that stays in the mind.

The episode I watched yesterday had a fairly barmy storyline about the FBI, gun-smuggling and a plot to send faulty weapons to the Communists. Rockford was caught up in the middle and had to prove his innocence, while saving a damsel or two. One of these women was middle-aged and rather fearsome, rather than young and comely, but Rockford helped her anyway, and even developed a soft spot too.

This lady ran the typing pool in what might have been an FBI office or not. I think perhaps I was looking soup-wards at a crucial moment. What took me back were the typewriters, big mechanical machines accompanied by all that noisy clatter of the keyboards, and the ringing bell as the carriage was returned.

Imagine a whole office full of people bashing away at typewriters like that… well, I don’t have to as my first two newspapers were just like that. The loud chatter of typewriters, smoke in the air, cigarette stubs in the ashtrays and, in one of the offices, a switchboard lady who had to connect your calls. There was something industrial about working on a typewriter, as if producing words was a properly robust activity.

It all seems a long time ago now, but I loved typewriters at the time. I had a huge Hermes machine, bulbous and solid with green keys. That heavyweight beauty got me through university, and kept me company for a few years after that.

Now I write on a silent laptop with no more than a muffled click. It’s a marvellous thing, but there was something very physical about hitting those old typewriter keys, almost as if you were battering the words into life.

The Rockford episode I watched was notable for other reasons. Everything was brown or beige for a start: the clothes, the furnishing and the office walls, probably the plot too. Also striking was the use of one of those 1970s typefaces for scene-setting titles. The action froze and the words ran across the bottom of the screen, so futuristic then and so laughable now. It was one of those faces made to suggest a computer when computers were sci-fi rare. My best guess, after looking at a few online, is that it was one called Gemini.

I’ll try not to watch Rockford again as there are jobs to be done and a job to be found. Still it was good to go back for a visit.

HERE’S something I didn’t know. The young Frenchman told me about it, the one who came after the man from Ukraine and before the Australian.

Breakfast time and I have burnt the toast a little. I offer to do another slice, but our guest Gallic-shrugs off the idea. “It’s okay,” he says, before breaking the over-done toast into shards and dipping them into his black coffee.

His actions seem eccentric, but revive old memories of childhood breakfasts on holiday in France. Milky coffee in a bowl, with bread or croissants on the side, and dunking allowed.

Our Frenchman, like the others, came to us through Airbnb. What he tells me, between coffee sips and nibbles of dipped toast, is that something similar exists for sharing lifts. It’s called Bla-Bla-Car.

The set-up is similar in that you register with the internet middleman. The service plays broker between driver and new-style ‘hitcher’. The driver lists where they are going and people wanting a lift leave messages on their account. It’s then up to the driver to accept or decline their would-be passenger.

Our Frenchman says he gets lots of interest in France, less so in Britain. Someone wanted a lift to Doncaster but he wasn’t keen. Not far enough, not enough company, he says.

I tell our guest that I used to hitch-hike everywhere when I was a student thanks only to my thumb. He nods and smiles, while no doubt thinking that he could stay at home and listen to his dad telling him old stories like that.

At the age of 22, our guest was certainly enterprising. Not only was he driving from Aviemore to Vannes in Brittany after a second six-month secondment in Scotland, he was also a qualified pilot who’d been flying since he was 16. Our three, aged 21 to 27, don’t have a driving licence between them.

Bla-Bla-Car… Where will all this innovation end? Before you know it someone will come up with something called Nudg-Nudg-Fancy-A-Shag. Oh, hang on the minute, that’s happened already and has led to all sort of unpleasantness through Ashley Maddison, the “extramarital affairs site”. From newspaper reports, that site seemed to prey on foolish male fantasies, with some of the available women being prostitutes rather than, er, free-thinking real women.

Airbnb, Bla-Bla-Car and the like are part of a new-style e-economy. Such services match someone with a need to someone who has a surplus: a spare room, a seat on a journey, a sexual itch… This is all part of the many ways in which the internet has upended our lives. Sometimes the new ways harm the old. Owners of B&Bs probably don’t much like Airbnb, in the same way that traditional taxi-drivers dislike Uber, the service which allows you to book a taxi or cab from your mobile phone. I’ve never used Uber, but our daughter reckons it works well in Newcastle.

The internet has freed up or possibly devastated the old ways of providing news and entertainment. It’s a marvel that a smartphone can convey all the news you need on one small screen, but this has harmed old-style newspapers (and those who work on them), while also opening fresh news-providing opportunities, as well as blogs such as this one. Then there is Facebook – all-conquering and fun, once you accept the friendly tyranny of it all.

The internet remains a huge experiment. It can’t be undone, and some of the results are unknowable. The potential for good and bad exist alongside each other.

The Independent reports today that hundreds of small businesses and minor celebrities have been targeted by a sophisticated blackmail scam orchestrated by “rogue editors” at Wikipedia. The victims were faced with demands to “protect” their entries on Wikipedia pages, and included a wedding photographer in Dorset and an upmarket jewellers in East London. Also targeted was a former contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, so it’s not all bad.

For every democratising step forward offered by the internet, someone lurking in the wings will be dreaming up a scam. In which case life before and after the internet are in some ways not that different.

IF YOU write, you should read as well. This rule applies to authors of fiction – and to those who blog. The other day I came across a blog about writing a daily blog. The writer asked if writing so often was a good idea, and in answering her own question decided that it was.

Would-be authors are often advised to write every day. It’s not always easy to fit this round a life. But daily blogging isn’t that difficult once you begin. It’s there, it’s a job ‘needing’ to be done. So you go ahead and do it, much as you might make breakfast for similar reasons.

As regular visitors to my ledge will have noticed, these thoughts and jottings appear nearly every day, with an occasional day off at the weekend.

The advantage of doing something nearly every day is that you have to do it. There is no magic formula to reveal, nothing beyond the fact that having to do something makes you do it.

These laptop lectures address assorted matters personal or political, or sometimes just whatever pops to the surface of my mind.

Quite a few have concerned my summer role as an Airbnb host. As I write now, our young Frenchman is still asleep after driving yesterday from Aviemore. Today he has to drive to Portsmouth for the overnight ferry to Le Havre, and then on to his parents’ house in Brittany. For a tired man, he proved good company, as most of them do, although one or two have been eccentric, and some prefer to keep to their room.

Writing most days is good exercise for anyone who wishes to write. It has also been a sort of therapy in the months post-redundancy. To date various jobs have been applied for without luck. To compensate for this, there has been a little stream of freelance work – a start but not yet a life.

Perhaps it is today’s date, or perhaps it is that end-of-holiday feeling conjured from ancient schooldays. Whatever the reason, the first day of September casts me in gloom. The thrum of uncertainty seems louder today. This distant noise has been the soundtrack of the summer. Some days, most days, it is possible to push it away. Something good will happen; something good has to happen – that is what you tell yourself. As an optimist that is mostly what I believe, although one person’s optimist might be another’s deluded fool.

Anyway I can hear the first stirrings of a sleepy French student. He isn’t much bothered about breakfast, he says, apart from coffee to keep him awake.

I’ll use the stove-top espresso pot, the one stamped Zanzibar, which we bought, fittingly enough, in Paris more than 30 years ago. Sold to us by a man on an impromptu stall outside a department store, this unremarkable-seeming pot has done valiant service down the years. It still makes the best coffee around, and beats all those expensive coffeemakers.

Well, I say that but I’ve never yet had one of those, although I have at times suffered from pointless gadget envy. As to whether it is the envy or the gadget that is pointless, well that cuts either way.

IT IS seven in the morning and the bank holiday rain is falling. Friends are coming round for a walk later. A wet walk by the sounds of it.

The night has not been tender. Rough sleeping saw me alert until about three, waking twenty minutes ago with a thick head. The reason for my restlessness is rather ridiculous and is due in part to a young woman I only met yesterday. We are, you see, in the middle of a rush of Airbnb guests.

Saturday night saw the arrival of a young academic who was from the Crimea but had been living in Norway for a number of years. Bright, interested and interesting, he chatted away for an hour or so in the evening, and was very engaging company.

Yesterday we put up an American student from Upstate New York, who is travelling while studying at a summer school in Oxford. She arrived earlier than expected in the afternoon, with a towering rucksack on her back. I don’t know much about her, except that she likes to sing jazz and is studying international something or other, plus media studies. She also, as is usually the way, seems very pleasant and friendly.

After turning up early and over-heated, she changed and went off into York at around 2pm. She hadn’t returned by the time I went to bed at after 11.30pm, and this triggered an old insomnia response: the vague worries about daughter syndrome. Lying awake, first upstairs and then down in the other spare room, I couldn’t tell if she had returned or not. Just like I have sometimes done when our daughter has stayed out late, or perhaps even early.

A few moments ago I looked at my mobile and there was a message: “I ran into some old friends so I’m just catching up with them. All is well!”

Ah, if I’d checked my phone at 12.30am last night perhaps sleep would have come easier. It was nice of our guest to keep me informed, but I shouldn’t have been so foolish. Young women often return late, as I know from the occasional early-hours antics of our youngest. And a 24-year-old guest is free to do as they wish.

Tonight’s guest is a young Frenchman who is driving home from Scotland, and breaking his journey in York. Tomorrow a 62-year-old man is arriving from Adelaide, and will be staying until the weekend. Most guests have been young, but we have had a few older visitors. The last one, well into her sixties at a guess, was also from the same part of Australia.

After that we have a cameraman covering York Races who is here for the night, followed by a young woman who is coming to a wedding in York. Then a young man who is working in the city for five or six days. With so many guests, we’ve blocked off a few days with the electronic equivalent of a “no vacancies” sign, just to rest our conversational skills. And to give the washing machine a break.

The bank holiday rain is still falling. I wonder if our friends would have any ideological objection to paying to get into York Art Gallery (see yesterday’s ledge report).

Glancing at the news online, I see that the Chancellor, George Osborne, is warning that Labour hopeful Jeremy Corbyn is a threat to national security. Dear me, does he have an atomic bomb strapped beneath that beige jumper? Er, no. Instead Corbyn opposes the renewal of Trident, and Osborne says this would be disastrous for Britain.

Oh, I don’t know. I still have some doubts about how good Corbyn would be for Labour, but maybe he has a point about the untold billions and trillions we spend on nuclear deterrent. Does all that money really keep us any safer or is it an old-style solution to yesterday’s problem?

There’s a thought for a wet yawn of a bank holiday morning.

BEFORE stepping back inside York Art Gallery, I thought it was a cheek and an impertinence to charge visitors £7.50 to look at the city’s art collection. Now I’ve changed my mind slightly.

What they have achieved with the art gallery is nothing short of marvellous. But that £7.50 is still a cheek and an impertinence.

As a local, it didn’t actually cost that much. Instead I shelled out 11 Yorkshire pounds for a card lasting a year. This gives ‘free’ entry to the gallery and other York Museum Trust attractions. “YMT Card,” it says on the front. “Great value, priceless memories.”

Well, yes. One of those memories is that not long ago a York Card got you into those places for free. But I paid anyway so that I could take my mother around the ‘new’ gallery (she had to pay the standard £7.50).

That YMT Card joins all the others shoved into my wallet, only two of them bank cards. One is a My Waitrose card and that’s a laugh. It’s because they don’t issue a My Waitrose Only When Feeling A Little Bit Flush card.

Also taking up space in my otherwise barren wallet is a Picturehouse card for York City Screen. Seeing this, I did pause for a moment. If I am prepared to pay for membership of a cinema, why does paying to get into an art gallery bother me?

As I’ve asked the question, I’d better attempt an answer. I joined City Screen because I like the place. Membership includes a few free tickets, money off coffee, beer and food, and the occasional free screening for members (when they remember to tell you about them, that is). So I willingly paid much more for those privileges than I did for a year’s access to York Art Gallery, plus two museums.

I think the problem is one of idealism. Galleries and museums should be free. They belong to the people and the people shouldn’t have to pay to see their treasures and wonders. In tight times there will always be someone on hand to tell you that an art gallery or a theatre isn’t exactly the NHS. This is true so far as it goes, which isn’t all that far in my book.

The other day I came across a good quote from Bob and Roberta Smith. What a sensible pair they are. Except that they’re not: it’s just the nom-de-paintbrush of Patrick Brill.

This is the artist who stood against Michael Gove at the last election. You may have noticed that Gove is still around. Brill only secured 273 votes, but declares himself happy with the result, as his intention was to highlight the importance of art (“All schools should be art schools” is one of his slogans).

In a newspaper Q&A, Brill decried the “deep philistinism and scepticism towards art” he sees in this country. Such attitudes existed under Labour, he says, and have come back “with a vengeance under the Tories”.

Here is one of many sensible things he said: “The arts are not just important in themselves but fundamental to democracy. Kids need to think about ideas. If you teach them self-expression, you are adding to democracy. Why do you think oppressive regimes always try to censor art and lock up artists?”

As for York Art Gallery, the place is now a true wonder, especially upstairs. On the ground floor everything is similar but smarter, with a new café, shop and loos, leading to three gallery spaces.

It is not until you climb the stairs that you realise the true extent of the transformation. The old pottery gallery at the top of the stairs has gone and is now open space, while the exposure of the roof has created a fantastic galleried area, with a white ceiling, the old metal supports painted white too, and a row of dazzling skylights. Here you find the CoCA Galleries devoted to pottery.

Behind the galleries there is a wide outdoors platform overlooking the new gardens to the left and, for now, an empty space to the right.

There is much to enjoy at this top level, from Clare Twomey’s 10,000 bowls to the pottery, paintings and other artefacts collected for many years by Anthony Shaw. These are displayed as if still in his room at home, complete with his furniture, a clever and intimate bit of work.

There is more, much more, and it’s worth a look, so long as you can overcome your objections to paying.

JAMES Brokenshire MP is the Minister of State (Home Office) (Security and Immigration). I am sorry about all those brackets. He put them there, not me.

As a Tory who often laments the rise in immigration, Mr Brokenshire has a suitable surname. In his eyes, the Shires of old England probably have been Broken.

You know how you can take against someone without knowing much about them. Well, that’s James and me. Perhaps it is the way he pops up on the news, blinking like an unearthed ferret. Can one unearth a ferret? Honestly I have no idea. The image just appeared in my mind.

Brokenshire was on the BBC News yesterday looking all ferrety while saying that reducing net migration to 100,000 was still an “ambition” – even though the figure had reached 330,000, easily rising above  David Cameron’s pile of no ifs and no buts. You may recall that the prime minister used that figure of speech while promising that net migration would fall to 100,000. Now those ‘iffy buts’ lie scattered around his feet like cigarette butts dropped by a worried chain smoker.

The figure of 330,000 represents the difference between the number of people entering the country and those leaving. It is more than three times higher than the government’s (fairly pointless) target.

Yesterday it was left to Brokenshire to put the government’s increasingly feeble case. So there he was, twitching indignantly for the TV cameras. This was followed by the now obligatory appearance of Nigel Farage (MP for Nowhere-shire, ho-hum) doing his impression of an angry salmon flapping its angry mouth.

Now perhaps it wasn’t Brokenshire’s fault. Maybe it was just unfortunate timing. But as he was on television being all ferrety and twitchy, news was breaking that in Austria the bodies of migrants had been found packed into the back of a parked lorry. This morning as I write the latest headlines suggest that as many as 70 bodies may have been in that lorry. Is it possible to imagine a worst way to die than suffocating in the back of a lorry crammed with desperate humanity? The thought of how those poor people suffered is too awful to contemplate.

At the same time, it is reported that up to 200 bodies have been discovered floating off the coast of Libya. If confirmed, this incident will bring the number of deaths in the Mediterranean this year to 2,500.

It is easy to see why this summer’s migrant crisis is being referred to as Europe’s worst refugee emergency since 1945.

The tide of human misery seems unstoppable, unsolvable.

Yet in the face of such suffering, the response from our government has been insular and xenophobic. Among some Tories and some newspapers, the whole crisis has mostly been reduced to a spot of old-school France-bashing: it’s all the fault of those Frogs.

It’s as if the situation in Calais concerning a relatively small number of migrants, said to be around 3,000, has become the sole focus of their concern. The cry goes up that something has to be done. So David Cameron orders a higher fence – which perfectly encapsulates just how small-minded and insular the whole debate has become.

Apparently our inward-glancing ministers look no further than the end of their front gardens. Raise their eyes and they would see that this is a global crisis, and one in which Britain isn’t exactly showing itself in a flattering light.

Other countries in Europe, in particular Germany and Sweden, face much greater migrant difficulties than Britain does. Germany expects 800,000 asylum seekers and migrants to arrive this year. In humanitarian terms, we should be doing more than building higher fences and moaning about the French.

None of this is easy. Unless you are Nigel Farage doing the salmon mouth flap on the evening news. Or James Brokenshire impersonating a ferret.

YOU know what it’s like. Not a sniff and then two opportunities arise at once.

First up is a chance to work on Not Top Gear, the new car-themed petrol-head show which Clarkson, Hammond and May are making for the Amazon subscription service, Prime.

Here are some words from the advert (real words, not made up by me with satirical mischief in mind): “You will be the unsung heroes who help this middle-aged trio make superbly entertaining TV. Wit, intelligence, top-drawer work ethic, good in a brainstorm – all of these qualities are required in spades.”

Here are my qualifications for this role: middle-aged, driven a car or two, owner of an aging Volvo estate with nearly 140,000 miles on the clock (MoT and service due next month); not adverse to wearing James May-style flowery shirts, although will definitely draw the line at those bloody rugby shirts.

As for brainstorms, well I have a brain and sometimes it blows up a storm and sometimes it does not.

I have driven round the ring-road in York in that old car and navigated the traffic assault course known as the M62. So pelting a powerful new car round an otherwise empty racetrack would surely be a doddle. As for being an unsung hero, some might say I was one of those for years. And look where it got me.

Sadly, I don’t think I’ll apply for that role. The job description featured in an Observer report about how young people looking to climb onto the lowest rung in the TV industry are having to pay some internet job agencies simply for the ‘right’ to look at such adverts.

The young hopefuls who do these jobs are known as “runners” – presumably because they have to run away from Jeremy Clarkson if he’s in a bad mood and hasn’t been fed a steak dinner in a while.

I have been a runner for many years, although pavement plodding is not what they have in mind here. So that car-bound trio will have to make their programme without the benefit of my brain or anything else I may have in spades.

Some job adverts have a mystifyingly detailed breakdown of requirements. The long list, the very long list, for this next job has many elements. You have to organise all the client’s personal needs, such as drycleaners, gardeners, house refurbishments, finding interior designers, checking the home when the client is away, making sure it is clean, the plants are watered and the fridge is well stocked. You also have to select and organise his wardrobe with regards to his favourite designers such as Oswald Boateng, Harrods and Zap.

Yes, this is that advert placed by the footballer Jermain Defoe for a “24/7 personal assistant”. Now in the ordinary world the money is very good – up to £60,000 pa. This, by neat coincidence, is what the 32-year-old Sunderland striker earns in a week.

Other tasks include producing iPhone aps and helping to “create a global brand for the Jermain Defoe name, growing his online database on his website, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms”. Oh and looking after five family members and their pets.

What this job entails is being a footballer’s go-to person. I suppose that’s how the extremely wealth organise their lives, hiring a skivvy to do everything for them so their life contains nothing more troubling than kicking a football around once or twice a week.

We are all shaped by our circumstances, good and bad, and I suspect that what this illustrates is that if you dip a sportsman in golden pools of extreme wealth, the chances are that he will shimmer when he looks in the mirror – and at the same time become totally out of touch with ordinary life. Maybe we don’t want our famous footballers to touch ordinary life. Perhaps that’s the point of their absurdly over-remunerated lives.

Either way, I shall have to keep scanning those adverts.

WHEN a man loses at squash, he is not always in the best of spirits. But when he has lost as often as I have, the humiliation is mostly sluiced away by the post-game shower. Although a whiff of failure remains, like an un-washable patch of sweat.

My partner for last night delivered a comprehensive drubbing, and then asked a pert little question. Why hadn’t I written about the Labour leadership contest?

Ah, yes. I made a poor excuse about how my newspaper column used to be fairly political, and the blog was meant to be different. My squash vanquisher has politics that differ from mine. He pointed out, reasonably enough, that this didn’t stop me having a go at David Cameron quite often.

Ah, yes again, there is that. I can’t help but wriggle on that pin. Cameron is criticised or sometimes mocked because he causes such annoyance on my windy little ledge. And it is easy to lob rotten fruit or mouldy adjectives at those one dislikes. Much simpler than addressing those who might be considered to be on your side.

So here goes then. As a non-joining sort, I am not a member of Labour or any other party. So no ballot paper has come my way. No Labour official has attempted to have me removed from the ballot after suspecting a potentially hostile presence. Whereas if I ever tried to vote for a Tory leader, such an unmasking would be on the sharp side of likely.

So I don’t have a vote, but as a lifelong member of the bit-of-a-lefty club, the outcome does interest me.

The Labour contest would be nothing without the unexpected rise of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. The electricity of his presence has certainly energised the debate. The enthusiasm he has managed to stir up among his supporters is nothing short of remarkable. The last time anyone got this excited about a Labour leader was when Tony Blair was dazzling everyone in his headlights.

Does this mean that Corbyn is the best choice for leader? The standard anti-argument is that he is good at animating a loyal crowd, but that his policies would be guaranteed to lose Labour the next election. Sadly, there is something in that.

Many of his supporters are too young to remember the old days of Labour, when Michael Foot, good man though he was, shuffled left to no good effect. So they don’t know where that journey usually ends.

Yet at least Corbyn seems to believe his own sermon, which he delivers with honesty and integrity. Would he appeal to the unconverted masses rather than just his supporters? Well, that seems unlikely.

But then would Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendall win wider support? Among this straw poll of one that question can be answered as follows: maybe, perhaps and certainly not.

Burnham is solid but dull, Cooper is smart but dull and Kendall seems to have an annoying but unwarranted degree of self-belief. So not a lot of choice there.

As I said to the man who thrashed me – and we are still talking squash here – it seems likely that his lot will be in power for the next 15 years. To which he retorted that he would like to see a good opposition. And I think he was talking politics and not squash.

So there you have it, sweaty sport and politics, victory and defeat. Still there is always hope for the next contest. And I am talking squash this time. The politics can wait.