I see that Geoff from Dunnington isn’t happy but in my experience he rarely ever was.

Until five years ago, one of my jobs on the old newspaper was editing the letters. Frequent correspondent Geoff wasn’t happy then; and he still isn’t happy.

Thanks to David Dunning at Minster FM for pointing this out in a tweet. Otherwise that hardly surprising continuation of unhappiness might have passed me by.

City of York Council’s new anti-litter campaign has a catchy slogan. It asks: “Why are you tossing litter around here?” The placard gives three possible answers: I’m lazy; I don’t think about this community; I think other people should pay to clean up after me.

The plea for tidiness then tidies up with: “Don’t be a tosser, please take your rubbish home with you.”

Geoff says the placards “might cause a titter among the council bright-sparks who dreamt this slogan up, but its puerile nature speaks a lot about the mentality of those supposedly running things at council HQ”.

We need, he adds, “more and bigger waste bins around the city”.

With respect, no we don’t. We need people to stop being tossers. There are far too many tossers in my neighbourhood. They toss rubbish on the road up to the bypass; sometimes they toss old furniture along that pleasant way; occasionally they leave bags of garden rubbish strew across the path on the stray besides the often litter-strewn road.

That tosser slogan made me smile and set my head nodding. The writer earned their fee and good on them. And if it’s puerile, I am happy to be childish and immature too. It isn’t easy coming up with catchy campaigns and a striking slogan helps.

David Dunning said in his tweet: “I think it’s the coolest thing a Council has ever done – agree?”

Well, that’s a big statement but the slogan is certainly a good one. Litter doesn’t often concern me on this ledge, but it bothers me out on the street or in the city centre.

People are such slobs – just ask Bournemouth. The sunshine and the sort of ending of the lockdown brought the masses onto the sands, and they left behind 12 tons of litter. That mound of litter wasn’t caused by lack of bins; it was caused by lack of manners and respect. It was caused by people being lazy-arsed slobs.

And it doesn’t say much for what Boris Johnson likes to call “good British common sense”. Oh yeah? Good British common sense scatters litter everywhere while we are still in a pandemic.

Good British common sense caused people to phone the police when KFC ran out of chicken for a week in 2018. Good British common sense caused the pointless agonies of Brexit and landed us with this shower of a government.

As for litter, if we all had good British common sense, there wouldn’t be any. Don’t blame the bins; blame those lazy-arsed spreaders of rubbish who scatter their shit everywhere and think nothing of it.

Don’t blame the bins; blame the bin-brained.

According to Boris Johnson, “our great national hibernation is coming to an end”. Well, it all depends.

It all depends on how confident you are in the convenient assumption that the worst of Covid-19 is over.

It all depends how much you trust a loosening of lockdown that comes crusted with caveats. The two metre rule is gone and will be replaced – hurrah! – by “one metre plus”. Pardon, you what? You’ll have to step closer as I didn’t quite catch that. One metre plus another equals two, one plus something equals one metre plus. Does that subtract from sense?

It all depends on how much you trust Mr Johnson; none of that Boris this and Boris that bollocks around here, thank you very much. Mr Johnson is known to tell lies. I know, you could have knocked me down with a copy of the Daily Mail when I learned that. Actually, make that the Daily Express (aka the Boris Bugle) as at least the Mail does criticise Johnson occasionally. Here is today’s Express proclamation in Johnson servitude – “Cheers Boris! Here’s to a brighter Britain”. That’s not a newspaper, it’s a town crier made hoarse by shouting propaganda.

It all depends how much you want to believe the words of an unreliable man heading a chaotic, U-turning government comprised of Brexit-blinkered spin merchants. Not forgetting that being urged to come out of hibernation by a prime minister who very much favours hibernating away from the public eye himself is a bit rich; as is he.

It all depends how much you believe health secretary Matt Hancock saying: “Our plan is working.” If 43,000 deaths and counting (some estimates reach as high as 66,000) is a workable plan, just imagine if we were living through a gigantic cock-up.

And in the end it all depends on how you are feeling. Do you feel confident enough to skip out of hibernation and spend money to revive the economy; or have you stuck your nose out of the door, taken a sniff and concluded that it is better to withdraw?

It’s easy to be happy about certain aspects of the relaxation, especially being able to see family and friends again. It’ll be great to enter a bar again, too, but those early visits will be trepidatious: is this really safe? Cinemas can open under new rules but not yet theatres; music venues can open – a chorus of a hallelujahs – but they can’t stage live music. Pardon, you what? You’ll have to step closer as I didn’t quite catch that either. If that makes sense, I’ll eat a copy of the Daily Express for breakfast.

It all depends on confidence; it all depends on how much you believe Boris Johnson; it all depends on whether you think opening pubs before opening schools is right; and it all depends on whether you wish to heed all those scientists urging caution about too many changes being introduced at once.

Do you remember the dim and distant past of a few weeks ago when the government was following the science? Well one theory for the canning of the daily press briefings after yesterday’s farewell tour is that the scientists were less and less willing to stand there and spout the government line. Ending the briefings was a way of putting them back in their labs. Incidentally, the chief nursing officer, Ruth May, suddenly disappeared from those briefings, reportedly after declining to back Dominic Cummings when he broke the social distancing rules.

Was her disappearance suspicious? It all depends. Is the world back to normal; are we all feeling confident?

It all depends.

THERE is a short but timely book published next month by Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles, entitled “Outraged: Why Everyone is Shouting and No One is Talking”.

Charles hosts The 1Extra Breakfast Show with Dotty. Two years ago, she wrote in an opinion piece for the Guardian, “As a black, gay woman I have to be selective in my outrage. So should you.”

Her book grew from that article, and her thesis is a useful one in these opinion-dented days.

Here how it runs: outrage was once reserved for the truly unjust, for civil rights activists and suffragettes; it fought against police brutality, racism, unequal pay, it abolished slavery and conquered slavery.

Then social media came along and outrage became a cheapened currency, all shouting and no thinking, as so horribly represented by Donald Trump’s empty-vessel bellowing on Twitter.

Dotty includes in her book a cautious but revealing interview with Katie Hopkins, the disgraced queen of right-wing outrage. A timely exchange as Hopkins has just been booted off Twitter for promoting hate. This led to her supporters – yes, strangely, they do exist – to bleat on about free speech, forgetting that free speech comes with responsibilities.

Dotty began thinking about outrage after a social media scrap when the retailer H&M had revealed a jungle-themed collection featuring a black child wearing a monkey-printed hoodie. She felt under pressure to be outraged, to join in the shouting, but was bothered that collective outrage had gathered in such a small but noisy cul-de-sac. Was this now the only purpose of outrage, she wondered?

If you spend too much time on Twitter – guilty as charged – you will be exposed to endless outrage. Oddly, quite a lot of the bleating comes from right-wing commentators who consider themselves a persecuted minority, a grievance that hardly stands up in a country where the right is nearly always in power.

What you will also see is hateful abuse of high-profile women. An unpleasant example occurred over the weekend when something silly accidentally collided with something truly horrendous.

Ash Sarkar is a journalist and lecturer who often gets under the skin of those on the right. Older white men seem particularly outraged by her brand of left-wing, anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics. The opinions of a furiously eloquent young Asian woman seem too much for them to bear.

Sarkar tweeted a picture of herself siting in a park in Hackney, East London, eating an orange ice lolly. For reasons that initially escaped this ledge-bound old dinosaur, she included an emoji of three oranges with her post. She did so, she later said, because there were three orange objects in the picture.

This silly little photo – fun, pleasant and, well, young – was pounced on by haters who mistakenly believed that Sarkar was sitting in the same park in Reading where three men had just been killed. They also imbued those three oranges with a dark political significance, insisting they symbolised terrorism.

Down in the Twitter basement, the hate started to boil. “What an absolute vile piece of filth…” began one tweet that became far nastier after that.

Ask Sarkar expresses strong opinions all the time, it’s her stock in trade, her selling point. Those who dislike what she has to say should argue back reasonably without descending to misogyny and the hateful babble of outrage. And without, for heaven’s sake, issuing anonymous death threats because she posts a photo of herself eating an orange ice lolly.

I am not sure why she thought that photo was for general consumption, as it looked like the sort of thing you might send a friend. That’s probably just an age thing. I’d never post a photo of myself eating an orange ice lolly as it would almost certainly be dripping down my T-shirt.

We should be able to discuss and disagree without turning into demented loons addicted to outrage.

Here, with that in mind, is an encouraging letter from today’s edition of The Times…

Sir, There were several articles in Saturday’s comment section (Jun 20) with which I profoundly disagreed. Keep up the good work….

Johnson with the ringed sleeve of his puppet-master, as shared on Twitter by Otto English

Here are a few scraps torn from the Big Book of Stupid News. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will be excited to learn that he warrants a double mention.

First up here he is chatting to Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk Radio. Now there’s a right-wing rom-com no one wants to see.

Sultry old Hartley-Brewer, baiter of the left on Twitter, yesterday asked square-jawed leading man Raab about taking the knee as used for the Black Lives Matter protests.

Raab was dismissive of the gesture, preferring one of his own called Taking The Foot And Putting It In The Mouth.

Here’s what he said – as in formed into actual words that actually fell from his mouth: “On this taking the knee thing, I don’t know maybe it’s got a broader history, it seems to be taken from the Game of Thrones, feels to me like a symbol of subjugation and subordination.”

Game of Thrones – did he just say that? Yup. Raab appeared to have no idea that the American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick popularised the gesture after taking the knee during the national anthem as a protest against police brutality and racism. Or that Martin Luther King knelt too in the 1960s when possibly not auditioning for Game of Thrones.

And yet, his studied vagueness – “I don’t know maybe it’s got a broader history…” – suggests either pure ignorance or just not having the slightest interest in the matter.

Over on Sky News, Raab blathered to Kay Burley about why the government wants to spend a million quid on a Union Jack paint-job for the plane Boris Johnson occasionally uses. His reasons were nearly as convincing as his grasp of cultural history; or anything really.

Theresa May once conducted a fatal experiment. She came up with the brilliant wheeze of making Boris Johnson foreign secretary so the world could see him for an incompetent bumbler. That worked so well that she departed and left us with the incompetent bumbler.

During his chaotic spell as secretary for abroad, Johnson reportedly used to moan about having to use a boring old grey plane. That’s why we’re pimping up an official jet in another Johnson vanity project (will it be called the Boris jet? almost certainly).

The next torn scrap features Johnson, but it’s Dominic Cummings we are trying to spot here. Downing Street released footage of Johnson having a Zoom call with staff at Charing Cross Hospital. Almost out of shot behind the big TV screen you can see the rolled-up white shirt sleeve clearly belonging to Cummings, within string-pulling distance even for a Zoom.

This photo was spotted by Otto English and shared on Twitter. English is a must-follow if you like Twitter. His bio may surprise you: “Semi-professional irritant. Born Andrew Scott. Definitely not Moriarty. Freelance writer…”

Here to end is Alan Sugar with a page all to himself after his appearance on the Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5. Sorry – Lord Alan Sugar, as these things matter; to Alan Sugar.

Sugar explained to Vine why it’s safe for the UK to follow the US in coming out of lockdown.

“Who’s dead? I’m not. I’m still alive. So’s everybody else I know.”

Who’s dead? The latest figures suggest that 42,288 people are dead but that’s all right because none of them are Lord Alan Sugar or any of his pals.

Just take a step back and admire the brass in those tonsils.

Footnote added July 4: Otto English is called Andrew Scott but is not Andrew Scott the actor. I don’t say here that he is, but it is left dangling there…

Marcus Rashford photo from his Twitter page

AN impressive young man has forced a far less impressive middle-aged man to make a screeching U-turn. The impressive young man is Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United and England forward; the less impressive older man needs no introduction to the home crowd.

On learning that Boris Johnson had at the last minute reversed his refusal to provide food vouchers over the summer for some of the poorest families in England, Rashford tweeted:

I don’t even know what to say.

Just look at what we can do when we come together, THIS is England in 2020.

Before forcing this embarrassing switcheroo on Johnson’s government, Rashford gave a number of interviews that were deeply impressive – and I’m afraid that word is going to be kicked around here even more than Boris Johnson’s reputation.

The young Mancunian spoke with calm personal authority beyond his 22 years about growing up in one of his city’s poorest districts. He explained how his family of five children had been sustained by the kindness of neighbours and the community.

When he wrote an open letter to all MPs to oppose ending the school meal vouchers for 1.3 million pupils in England, he knew what he was talking about; he could remember the hunger and the struggle.

He had already acted on that personal experience by donating time and money to FairShare, a charity that helps feed vulnerable children.

Marcus Rashford might not “even know what to say”, but the rest of us should have no such hesitation. His calm personal authority combined with his power as a famous footballer made the government look shabby and shifty; or shabby and shitty; oh, hell, let’s have both.

It was a mystery why the government chose this hill to fight on. A day before the U-turn, the government had rejected the footballer’s plea for the £15-a-week vouchers to continue, and the usual luckless fall-guy ministers had been trundled out to defend the government’s shameful position.

As late as yesterday morning, the government refused to bow to Rashford’s campaign. By the evening, Johnson announced the U-turn while pretending that he’d not really known anything at all about the whole thing. And if you think that sounds like a spot of post-truth political match-fixing, you’re not wrong.

Premier League footballers clearly have clout and it’s fantastic to see them use their influence for the general good. Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling, for instance, has often suffered press coverage that veers towards racism. So it has been powerful to see him speaking out about racism following the death of the American George Floyd.

As for Rashford tackling Johnson, it’s easy for a smart young athlete to look impressive against an overweight middle-aged man with fly-away hair. The inhabitant of this ledge would look like a right old wimp next to that fine young man.

But that’s not really the point here.

Marcus Rashford has gone from kicking a football about on the grass in Wythenshawe to playing at Old Trafford; both a short distance and an unimaginably long one.

When Boris Johnson was around the age of 22, he was at Oxford where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club – “notorious for champagne-swilling, restaurant-trashing ‘pleb’-taunting elitism”, according to an Observer report from last year.

According to various contemporary reports, at Oxford the careless young Johnson was pointed out to fellow students as a future prime minister. To which the disbelieving cry of “What, him? You must be kidding” has turned into a joke at everyone’s expense.

Johnson has walked along, or swerved around, a gilded path laid out for him by privilege. Rashford has risen to the top in football through talent – and has mature personal skills that the 56-year-old prime minister couldn’t muster in a penalty shoot-out to save his life.

As many of the papers are predictably putting in this morning:

Rashford 1

Johnson 0

THE war of the statues is a gift for Boris Johnson and that’s a shame. Culture wars favour the right rather than the left as it’s more their saloon-bar habitat.

Johnson stirring up division over statues and Black Lives Matter demos provides a perfect distraction from the wider issue of racism in our society – and from the ‘world-beating’ pig’s ear his government seems to be making of the Covid-19 crisis.

In a series of Trump-like tweets, the prime minister boomed that the protests “had been hijacked by extremists intent on violence”.

He also tweet-blathered: “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations. They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.”

The dunking of Edward Colston into the Bristol docks clearly rankled – along with the voluntary removal of other such statues. Yet these statues themselves lie about history. The statue of Colston was – as mentioned here before – erected in 1895, more than 170 years after Colston’s death and more than 60 years after slavery was abolished in Britain.

That statue was put up by Victorian businessmen who wanted Colston to be remember as a philanthropist rather than as a slaver: it was quite literally a bit of whitewash to cover up the embarrassing truth.

Johnson is at it again this morning, back in his old pontificating ground of the Daily Telegraph, writing that: “We can’t Photoshop our history.” A typical Johnsonian image that means little: history has always been told through filters, the facts moved in and out of focus to suit the teller.

You will have enjoyed hearing Johnson robustly defend his views in that head-to-head interview with Andrew Neil; or you might have done if he wasn’t such a cowardly politician, pumping stuff out on Twitter or in print but never agreeing to an interview.

Yesterday the Mail on Sunday entered the culture wars with a photos of a marchers linked to the headline: “What HAS become of the country we love?”

A lack of self-awareness so staggering that Twitter almost collapsed under the weight of people sharing montages of hateful Mail front pages demonising migrants.

Elsewhere in yesterday’s edition, the Mail on Sunday launched a ludicrous campaign under the headline: “Save Sir Winston, Boris.”

And it beggars belief that the next line read: “It beggars belief but Left-wingers are now demanding Churchill’s statue be torn down.”

No they’re not – all that’s happening is a debate about how and in what context statues should be displayed.

Debating how we address the past is interesting and productive but should not distract us from the present.

Let’s end with a positive image, one that appeared over the weekend and is featured on the front of some newspapers this morning.

Used most prominently by Metro, this shows Black Lives Matter activist Patrick Hutchinson carrying an injured protester from the opposing side.

Hutchinson is a picture of strength, arms bulging as he lifts the protester to safety. The man he rescued, said to be a far-right protester, lifts a hand to his injured head as rests across Hutchinson’s broad shoulder.

Interviewed on Channel 4 News, Hutchinson said he “didn’t think twice” about what he did. “I just scooped him up and put him on my shoulders and started marching towards the police… I could actually feel strikes and hits as I was carrying him.”

Who needs statues to the past when you have a monument to the moment such as Patrick Hutchinson?

The photo was taken by Dylan Martinez of Reuters – always important to mention the photographer.

I just read Sarah Vine so you don’t have to. The viperish columnist was splashed across yesterday’s Daily Mail with a headshot and the quote: “To erase our history, good or bad, makes me fear for our future.”

The main story below had the headline “TOPPLING THE PAST” and was a follow-up based on the statue of slave trader Edward Colston being dunked in the Bristol docks last Sunday.

Sarah Vine’s column was the usual anguished hand-wringing over the state of the nation. As is often the case, it wasn’t quite as hard-hitting as that quote made it appear – or as focused and coherent. It was far from my taste, but it was the way that quote was highlighted that ignited over in Twitterland.

Anyway, take a deep breath, Sarah, and calm down. None of what you complain about is erasing history. You are intentionally muddling history and the past. You can’t erase the past because it’s dead and gone: history is a living art that attempts to interpret the past – and let me say that as one non-historian to another.

Over in the Guardian, Charlotte Lydia Riley, a proper historian, makes the point well today, saying that historians are not worried about the threat posed by rewriting history. “This is because rewriting history is our occupation, our professional endeavour. We are constantly engaged in a process of re-evaluating the past and reinterpreting stories that we thought we knew.”

If you only tell one side of those stories, you end up with a one-sided version of history. If the history of the British empire is told only as a glorious progress that made this country great, you miss all the mess of misery, suffering and indeed lasting geo-political chaos we left strew across the globe’s carpet.

And if the history of slavery is told only through those who benefited from it, then the suffering and inhumanity remain unknown.

As for your worries, Sarah, about rubbing out history, that phrase “history good or bad” is a convenient get-out clause – as mostly we just like to hear the good: how we were saints for abolishing slavery rather than devils for ruthlessly pursuing it; how we point to countries we ‘made better’ by the Empire rather than the great cruelty wrapped up in Empire, and so on.

Over again to Charlotte Lydia Riley – people “want it both ways: to be free of guilt for historical sins, but to be proud of what they see as historical achievements”.

It’s not fair for others to always bring up Michael Gove whenever you erupt into print, Sarah, but there you go. Lots of things in life aren’t fair, including me having to read one of your columns by way of research.

As a leading Tory politician, your husband has been keen to reshape the teaching of our history as he sees fit.

At one time he wanted to imposed a curriculum for English schools based on the achievements of British national heroes – “history as celebration” in a shared national past, forgetting that many students in modern Britain come from different and often excluded cultures.

Tories like your husband love the notion of teaching our history by using imperial role models as national heroes: it fits their image of Britain, whereas the dragging down of statues does not.

That’s why we have statues to slave traders but not in general of slaves. Since 2007, however, the Museum of Slavery in Liverpool has tried to redresses the balance. It’s an excellent museum, but a tough visitor experience – as it should be.

Perhaps Mrs and Mrs Gove should arrange a family outing one day.

DUNKING slave trader Edward Colston into the Bristol docks certainly stirred up opinion. The longer I pondered this lawless act, so flagrantly recorded on the TV news, the more I came down hard and thought: well, good for them.

That statue caused an impressive splash. The ripples spread so far that the noted slavery expert Nigel Bloody Farage (it’s his official name, you know) inserted his dirt-twitching nose into the debate. Gloriously, he ended up looking like a tit, more of which incidental happiness in a moment.

It’s not that I favour toppling statues as such, although a statue is a curious tribute, so often put up in praise of the undeserving rich and powerful. It’s more that this was the wrong statue in the wrong place.

The statue was contentious because Colston was a slave trader who transported into slavery some 84,000 Africans, around 19,000 of whom died, their bodies thrown to the sharks that followed slave ships.

Oddly, the statue was erected in 1895, more than 170 years after Colston’s death and more than 60 years after slavery was abolished in Britain.

Allowing the statue to remain prominently on show in a multi-racial city was asking for trouble. People in Bristol had been calling for years for the statue to be removed, but there it stayed until last Sunday’s Black Lives Matter march held in protest at the death in the US of George Floyd.

If he’d been tucked away somewhere less prominent, Colston would never have ended up sleeping with the fishes, as the historian David Olusoga puts in the Guardian today.

Olusoga also writes: “…this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were”.

Fine upstanding words. But what now to do with that sunken statue? A ragbag of right-wing protesters on the TV news said they were going to haul it out, but they didn’t.

Perhaps the bronze statue could be rescued and put on display in an installation about slavery, the scars and damage left on shown as part of the story. There must be an imaginative way of restoring the statue but not its dignity.

As to the wide matter of Black Lives Matter, far too many ageing white males like to put their oar in on that topic, so I shall withdraw. Sadly, Nigel Farage is never reticent about where he shoves his oar. Up he popped on GMB this morning with Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, ranting about “violent anarchic mob rule”. He also said Black Lives Matter was like the Taliban and that Edward Colston had just been a philanthropist.

Thankfully, two smart women, the historian Dr Kate Williams and the activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, were on hand to deliver a slap of diminishment.

Dr Mos-Shogbamimu chipped in with the words every sensible person wants to hear: “You are full of such nonsense…”

Dr Williams, a TV natural, took Farage down with: “Saying that Colston was a philanthropist is very disturbing. Jimmy Savile was seen as a philanthropist. Jeffrey Epstein was seen as a philanthropist.”

Oh, can this please be a new TV format – pitching Nigel Farage against pin-smart women who know so much more than he does. It has great potential.

Incidentally, not all statues of historical figures are bad. The one outside Huddersfield station honouring Harold Wilson is sturdily fine.

Doubt ate my words so the first version of this went in the bin. I was worried about the self-pity, you see. Here’s a second try. Hope it’s better.

Five years ago the newspaper where I’d worked for 27 years made me redundant; many tiles have been blown off that roof. My first dislodged year was spent freelancing. Although I was paid for writing features, you couldn’t call it a living. So I started two part-time jobs, one in newspaper production and the other as a journalism lecturer.

With the freelancing, occasional lecturing at another university, bits of copywriting and editing, life was thinner but OK. Now my two main jobs are going, bringing back memories of that first redundancy.

I’ve known about the editing job for a while, as the contract I work on isn’t being renewed. The possibility of other work has been mentioned, but everything has been pushed back by Covid-19.

It is the loss of the main university job that stings. That’s because I never thought I could stand in front of a roomful of students and do that job, but I did and loved it.

I did half-worry that Chief Inspector Course might interrupt a lecture one day and ask what I was doing in there.

I am from the proper lecturing police and would like you to accompany me to the academic station…

Here are some snatched images from four years of teaching…

One creative writing student on a feature writing module wants to jump ship to English. The course she is on isn’t for her, she says, but mine is the only module where she’d learned anything useful all year. I go home with a glow that day.

I like your class best because you get to write a lot, is a common line from students across those four years.

It is good when students grow in confidence. Some write great pieces because they are smart and work hard; some write great pieces because you’ve shown them how to.

It isn’t all encouraging. Some students sit and natter to their friends during lectures; or they don’t turn up half the time and then throw a massive hissy fit about their portfolio deadline, shouting, crying and shoving a wheeled chair across the room at speed.

Well, that only happened the once but it was quite the scene.

Universities are struggling and I half-suspected it might be over. The end was still a shock . It came in a brief phone call: nothing personal, it’s not about your work, everybody likes you, the other lecturers like you, the students like you.

“I’ve worked with you and I like you,” the man making the call said. Two minutes later he rang off, and that was that. Apart from an email from the HR department – “Hi Julian, please find attached a letter about your contract not being renewed.”

On Twitter you will often find a thread from academics, usually but not always young, about the casual nature of their work, the lack of security, strung along on annual contracts, promised this and promised that.

My experience of teaching for a university was positive and enjoyable, until it ended in the blink of an accountant’s eye, without a thought for where that leaves me. Even small cogs have feelings, you know.

I do not remotely claim to be an academic, just someone who likes to teach; someone who writes often and enjoys showing others how to improve their writing; just a man who bats words around and has a life’s worth of wordy tips and tricks up what threatens soon to be his frayed sleeve.

If you hear of any work suitable for an ageing man of words, a page-designing, article-writing, blog-pushing lecturing man, do let me know.

At the moment I am feeling fairly useless, to be honest. Drifting towards the end of next month and wondering what happens when we go over that waterfall. I always think something will turn up, fate will provide, but sometimes even a foolish optimist can see the limits of cheerful buoyancy.

WHAT the scales show when Donald Trump steps on them isn’t necessarily the same as what the world sees.

Trump’s weight, along with that of Boris Johnson, is a political as well as a personal matter; what you or I weigh is purely personal, although dear family members might notice or pass comment.

According to the delayed release of his medical report, Trump pushes the needle to 244 pounds.

The report was due out in April but has only just been released. You do wonder if Trump, ranting about lamestream doctors and fake medical news, sent it back until his doctor came up with something less embarrassing.

According to the report, the 73-year-old president weighs one pound more than a year ago; and if you believe that, you’ll swallow anything, including that hydroxychloroquine Trump took to ward off Covid-19.

According to his slick-note, Trump took the anti-malaria drug “safely and without side effects”. Unless, that is, one of the side effects is the spouting of inflammatory nonsense and hijacking bibles.

Trump’s weight and health are political in that they frame his literal fitness for office; his mental fitness for office cannot really be measured, although we can gauge that for ourselves.

One side effect of this delayed medical report can be found on Twitter, where people are having  fun mocking the medical. Some tweets show Trump, who claims to be six-ft-three, standing next to Barack Obama, who happily owns up to six-ft-one, and they appear to be the same height. That suggests Trump’s height/weight ratio isn’t correct – even if you accept the given weight.

Other tweeters put pictures of muscled baseball players and the like who are the “same” height and weight next to photos of Humpty-Dumpty Trump on the links, golfing trousers pulled up tight over his round belly.

We should try to steer clear of anything close to fat-shaming, as plenty of people are unhappy about their weight; but at least they tell self-deceiving fibs about what they’ve eaten that week, rather than get a White House doctor to tell weighty fibs on their behalf.

If we accept that Trump is the height he pretends to be, his numbers suggest a BMI of 30.5, “which is technically obese”, according to the Daily Mail.

Those 244 pounds convert to nearly 17-and-a-half stone, and here’s a funny thing. According to a report in the Sun on May 15, Trump and Boris Johnson weigh the same, but Johnson is only 5ft 9inches tall.

Pulling myself to the full to 5ft 8inches, I’ll happily swear that just looking at Trump and Johnson tells you they can’t possibly weigh the same. One of them is telling whoppers and on this occasion it isn’t Johnson.

The prime minister is said to worry about his weight, believing that he was more badly hit by Covid-19 than “thinnies” like Matt Hancock, according to the Times of May 14.

Johnson is said to have lost a stone since being ill, but that would still leave him with a BMI of around 34 – with anything above 30 being regarded as obese.

According again to the Sun, the “NHS says that a man his age and height should be aiming to weigh between 8st 13lb and 12st 1lb”. As someone one inch shorter and a few years older, I weigh a little under 12 stone – which is too much, but that stomach has a mind of its own (is it lunchtime yet?).

Johnson decided to launch a ‘war’ on obesity after returning to work, perhaps to distract us from his government’s failings over Covid-19. Whatever, it was a typical bit of solipsism, in that he only sees the problem because he’s suffering from it.

But the one good thing you can say about Boris Johnson is that at least he isn’t Donald Trump.