There’s a Scotsman in the kitchen stirring his own porridge and the radio is saying “No” eight times over.

The Scotsman is happy to set about making his own porridge, having on another morning offered friendly oat-shaped advice to his Sassenach host. The voice on the radio is not commenting on this porridge-making coup by a passing-through farmer but is instead reading from the morning newspapers. All those noes are from the Guardian’s headline: “Parliament finally has its say: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No”.

That octet of noes makes for a striking sight. Writing headlines about Brexit night and day isn’t easy, so top marks to whoever came up with that one. Perhaps it was my long-lost Guardian-subbing pal Ev Bramble, who used to work on the South East London Mercury with me and sometimes we shared a squash court.

This preamble is partly designed to avoid thinking about Brexit for another day. The farmer talks about many things over his self-cooked porridge; but he steers clear of the immovable topic.

That resolutely non-affirmative headline refers to the eight Brexit alternatives MPs rejected last night in an indicative vote. To be honest, and we’ve been gathered round this burning car crash long enough for honesty, I don’t really understand anything much about indicative votes.

Apparently, it’s taken from an old grammar term, co-opted by Parliament to describe a vote that doesn’t mean anything – but merely indicates something. The referendum that landed us in this muddy field by a burning car-wreck was also technically indicative rather than binding, but everyone soon forgot about that.

Photographs of Theresa May looking strained as she is chauffeured away from Parliament cover today’s newspapers. Other headlines run as to be expected, with the Sun going for: “I’M OFF! Now back my deal.”

Well, May has been off since the day she was first ‘on’, if you ask me. To echo such a sentiment, the Daily Mirror runs with: “THE END OF MAY”, hopefully adding a date of May 22.

The i newspapers goes with “Back me and sack me”, while the Express cries into its milky tea – or possibly over its morning porridge – with “WHAT MORE DOES SHE HAVE TO DO?” Might I politely suggest bugger off and find someone else to do the job. Oh, on second thoughts, have you seen the usual suspects hanging around outside?

The never less than appalling Boris Johnson has spent months dissing Theresa May’s deal but says he might back it now that she’s off sometime soon – leaving him to have another crack at the leadership. That man is so transparent you can see where he’s coming from even before he’s pulled on his crumpled shirt.

There is some sympathy for Mrs Maybe this morning, with the Sun saying she has always done her duty to her country.

Ahem, no she hasn’t – she’s done her duty to the right-wing Eurosceptics in her squabbling party; she’s done blinkered duty to herself; she’s made Brexit much more protracted and difficult than it needed to be; she’s listened to no voice than other her own with its idiotic chant of: “Brexit means Brexit”.

Oh, and before all that, while on duty as Home Secretary she introduced the vile hostile environment over immigration and cooked up the disgraceful Windrush scandal.

Anyways, she’s off even while hoping to grab onto the scuffed hem of history by securing her deal as parting gift – to an ungrateful nation; to herself? God, who can say for sure.

One thing is for sure though. In the spirit of this morning’s headlines, as far as Theresa May is concerned, “Brexit means exit.”

The Scotsman is heading off now, pulling behind his estate car a trailer-load of things bought at the auction market or off eBay. He has two more stops before home to fit other eccentric purchases into that trailer.

ON the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph, the title appears to have been replaced with the words ‘Turnip Toffs’. The newspaper hasn’t been renamed or anything, as it’s an over-sized a blurb for a feature inside about “Who’s who in the Norfolk Crew.”

I’ve not read the feature because it’s behind a pay wall, and there it can stay.

You do see the oddest things on that front page. Yesterday a photo of Boris Johnson behind the wheel was superimposed with the words: “We have blinked. We have baulked. We have bottled it completely. It is time for the PM to channel the spirit of Moses in Exodus, and say to Pharaoh in Brussels – LET MY PEOPLE GO.”

Johnson is paid £275,000 a year to write his column for the Telegraph – a tidy sum for what is basically the same column every week, with the words not necessarily in the same order.

Yesterday’s front page, like today’s, was a teaser for what lay inside. I didn’t read that column as it’s behind a pay wall, and there it can stay. Besides it was more than enough to absorb the excerpt and consider that Boris Johnson appears to think he is Moses.

The Twitter chorus, sometimes the only place to hear sense these days, was quick to chirrup that Moses went on to spend 40 years in the wilderness. And if Boris Johnson would like similarly to lose himself in a desert somewhere – or even in Norfolk with other members of the crew – he can be my guest.

I am not sure who Johnson considers to be his people: fellow Brexiteers, those few fellow Tory MPs he hasn’t offended or stabbed in the back or both (a diminishing band), people on that straggled UKIP-sponsored ramble from Sunderland. Or perhaps, alarmingly, he means us. No, he couldn’t mean all of us, could he? My God, does Boris Johnson think we are his people?

Then again, maybe he was talking about wizards.

You know what it’s like if you’re part of a pub quiz team and you need a name and use the first thing that pops into your head. As part of the news blizzard that passes for daily life these days, a story emerged yesterday about a group of Tory hard Brexiteers including Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Iain Duncan Smith calling themselves Grand Wizards. This story emerged in a tweet from Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, and followed on the Chequers lunch where Theresa May attempted to win over ‘her team’ (spoiler alert, it didn’t work).

This term is of course not just ridiculous, it is also sinister, as that’s what leaders of the racist Ku Klux Klan called themselves for part of the 19^th century. As far as anyone can tell, today’s Tory Brexit-baggers did not appear aware of the connotation. Perhaps they were too busy feeling smug with themselves to Google the phrase; or perhaps Jacob Rees-Mogg’s butler was on his day off.

Photographs of minister rolling up for that Brexit lunch with Mrs Maybe Gone Any Day Soon showed JRM arriving with what appeared to be his mini-me son sitting next to him in the car, BJ frowning over his steering wheel in the Moses photo used by the Telegraph, and Iain Duncan Smith wearing a baseball cap and driving his £40,000 Morgan sports car with the roof down.

These people want to be masters of our post-Brexit destiny – and there’s a thought to lift the spirts of a morning.

Maybe the Grand Wizard name was a mistake or a gruesome joke, or perhaps they really didn’t see the name for what it was. Or in a Tory party said to be riven by Islamophobia – a charge repeatedly put by that sensible Tory peer Baroness Warsi – perhaps the label is just more fitting than it should be.

Or maybe again they should just have called themselves the Turnip Toffs.

One of the biggest demos in British history and I was trapped behind a desk doing my late-life Saturday job. Earlier life Saturday employment includes the Co-op, the Daily/Sunday Mirror in Manchester and the Observer for a three-year stretch of Saturdays.

I couldn’t be there but would like to have joined friends on the Put it to the People march. At least two other people didn’t make the march. One was too busy rolling herself in the bubble-wrap of self-delusion and the other fancied a day out in Morecambe.

Theresa May had the perfect excuse not to roll up to a million-strong protest inspired in part by her tin-eared refusal to listen to anyone else about Brexit. And she was at least there in cruel cartoonish effigy and placard mockery (although my favourite two slogans were May-free – “Fromage not Farage” and the Eng Lit-powered “52% Pride And Prejudice 48% Sense And Sensibility).

But what about Jeremy Corbyn?

Corbyn devotees will tell you that there are more important issues than Brexit. The man himself would far rather talk about the harmful effects of Tory austerity – and he has a point, but only about the austerity and not about Brexit.

The country stands before a raging torrent that must be navigated somehow. While everyone discusses how to get across, Jeremy Corbyn sits on the ground and tells sad stories about austerity. Even if he’s right, his actions won’t help us to bridge that foaming river.

Yes, Theresa May can carry the can for this Brexit shitstorm, but Jeremy Corbyn can’t escape all blame or censure. Yes again, May has only framed Brexit in terms of attempting to preserve herself and her party (good luck on both counts – and she could be gone before I’m done typing this sentence, as the Brexit plotline does move quickly).

And yes once more, the biggest issue facing the country since the war has been reduced to a Tory party squabble designed to appease the most right-wing Brexit-lovers and hasn’t been aimed at all at calming a divided country. That 52/48 division was rubbed away from Mrs May’s Big Book of Brexit Fibs.

Whatever his most ardent adherents will say, Jeremy Corbyn has stayed unambiguously ambiguous about Brexit, ignoring the views of many party members, and failing to take advantage of May’s many weaknesses. He allowed his deputy, Tom Watson, to make the speeches yesterday – and left his keenest supporters to do down Watson on social media, where he was dismissed as some sort of Blairite devil.

All this bellowing partisanship from both main parties doesn’t do much to inspire the less than ardently faithful. For my sins and sometimes for my foolishness, I always vote Labour. Will Jeremy Corbyn’s calculated dithering over Brexit finally change the voting habit of a lifetime? Hard to say right now, but he’s not offering much inspiration.

Still, he did find time to pose beside that cheerful statue of Eric Morecambe while not attending the big march, having quixotically concluded that forthcoming local elections were more important than Brexit.

Thanks to one Twitter wit for the new caption he put on the official photo – “All the right policies but not necessarily in the right order.”

Do I mind paying my taxes? Not too much as the country would fall apart without them.

But I do mind when Chris Grayling arranges a ferry deal with a company that had no ferries at all and is then forced to bung £33m of my tax – well, not all mine exactly – to the Channel Tunnel in compensation over his ferry deal with the ferry-less company.

I don’t mind paying tax too much, but I do mind when a huge chunk of my tax ends up going to endless outsourcing companies in Grayling-style nod-and-a-wink deals.

So much of our public realm is now privately operated, with vital services being handed over to super-sized corporations such as Interserve, Capita, Carillion and Serco (where do these corporations find such mildly sinister names?) that end up in trouble.

Interserve is the latest private company doing public work to go into administration. It is always a shock when a massive company fails; and it is even more of a shock when that company repairs motorways, tarts up bus stations, cleans out sewers, runs the so-called welfare to work programmes – and attempts to provide probation services in England and Wales (under another dodgy, and failing, privatisation deal arranged by Chris Grayling in an earlier political life).

The logic for private companies taking over our public realm was originally a Conservative idea, further embraced by New Labour, then given another spin by David Cameron’s coalition government.

I still don’t mind paying taxes but I’d rather so much of my money didn’t go to massive corporations, intent on gobbling up the public realm. The NHS seems a good place to spend my taxes, but even some of that money now goes to private companies doing public work.

In health, the coalition’s logic with its Health and Social Care Act was that it could accelerate patient choice by using competition (an abracadabra word to free-marketeers).

This wasn’t new but, as the independent health funding charity the King’s Fund observed at the time, the concern was that the NHS reforms “would result in much great involvement of for-profit companies in the NHS”.

Foolish, I know, but in some dusty corner of my mind there sits the notion that the taxes you stump up go directly to the government to pay for running important services. Somewhere along the way, private companies got their wide shoulders through the door, and now we have a public/private partnership that’s too knotty and complicated for one man sitting on a ledge to understand.

I don’t mind paying my taxes, but were they better spent in the past? Jeremy Corbyn thinks so and wants to bring nationalisation back. I wouldn’t mind paying my taxes to a Labour government either, so long as untold billions weren’t wasted in complicated state buy-back deals and compensation to private companies doing public work.

Don’t let any of this give you the impression that we should be listening to the TaxPayers’ Alliance. For all their grassroots, man-and-woman-of-the-people posturing, that group appears to be part of a worldwide right-wing network in support of free-market capitalism.

And that’s fine if you’re upfront about it, but pretending to be a people’s movement when, as the Guardian reported last November, the alliance receives funds from US-based donors suggests a lack of honesty.

Added to that, Who Funds You? – a UK campaign for transparency in think-tanks – gives its lowest rating for transparency to the alliance.

Still, I don’t mind paying taxes – especially if the alternative is keeping company with right-wing groups that want to chip away at the state; or what’s left of it.

How’s the Brexit shitstorm going for you… part, oh God, lost count; this feculent tempest has been blowing for so long, and God again, I just saw the front page of the Sun and felt another marble roll away.

They’ve only gone and mocked up Theresa May as Citizen Smith, fist in the air next to the headline “Power To The People”. This is their bonkers take on the prime minister’s statement last night when she blamed Parliament, MPs, the way the wind was blowing, Jacob Rees-Mogg not climbing back into his tomb in time at night – oh frankly just about anyone and anything but herself.

Never mind that 1970s sit-com hero Citizen Smith, who by the way is surely closer in spirit to Jeremy Corbyn, Mrs Maybe’s latest bizarre speech was more Bart Simpson than anything else: “I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove anything.”

Except that we can. We can point a finger at the flip-flopping prime minister for triggering article 50 before her government had given a thought to strategy or what might happen. Then nothing much happened for months as senior Tories set about scrapping rather than talking to the EU.

Boxing herself in by drawing pointless red lines all over the place didn’t help. Then she called an unnecessary election which she almost lost, clinging to power thanks to an unsavoury deal with the DUP devil (cost £1bn and probably mounting) – and, post electoral bruising, carried on as if she’d won a massive majority, rather than a pipsqueak one.

Anything else? Oh, she spurned any cross-party consensus – or any consensus at all – in favour of robotically muttering “It’s my way or the high way”, only to find herself locked in a Downing Street cupboard with the DUP and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Brexit ultras. And you wouldn’t like the smell in that cupboard after they’ve been arguing in there.

After that, yes, Parliament hasn’t helped her – but this is a Conservative mess, created and caused by her party, and her predecessor, and one she has made worse. And besides why should MPs help Theresa May? All she has done is stolidly stick to the same message, delivered so boringly in the hope everyone will nod off and give in.

Speaker John Bercow this week decreed that Mrs Maybe couldn’t keep bringing back the same withdrawal deal unless it was noticeably different. This caught her out as that was her only tactic.

As for last night’s statement to the nation, it was grandiose, delusional and infuriating. Blaming MPs for the mess she is making of Brexit sticks in the gullet – but not as much as Theresa May pretending to be on our side. Now that really is a stretch too far.

The Financial Times quotes a senior EU diplomat as saying the Brexit impasse is “a circus that is beyond comprehension”. Yup, and Theresa May is running that circus. The clowns have already turned against her. And the tigers will be next.

THERE are two Brexit-themed marches this week, and one seems more shaped by satire than the other. One is a pro-Brexit trudge from Sunderland to London, the other is a People’s Vote march.

The first is already in moaning motion; the second takes place in London on Saturday. Friends of mine are taking part in one of the marches. Should you be wondering, they haven’t set off yet.

Nigel Farage organised the Sunderland march to protect the will of the people and because, clearly, he likes a good long walk. He was there on the first day, wearing a flat cap while sitting upstairs on an open-topped bus. In the rain. He didn’t look especially happy, but perhaps it was the thought of the long miles ahead.

Yet sitting in a roofless bus in the pissing rain does seem like the perfect image for Brexit, especially the way things have been shaping up. All that sunny optimism; all that rain.

Farage joined the marchers as they set off and trundled out a few of his greatest hits, like a cynical old pop star singing the same old song. Yesterday the pro-Brexit ramble reached Yorkshire and he was nowhere to be seen. This was good news for Yorkshire but suggests the former Ukip leader is less keen on walking than he’d let on.

Perhaps he nipped across a field for a fag and never came back, inspired by that dodge he had for cross country when he was a boy at public school (that infamous training ground for would-be men of the people).

The pro-Brexit marchers were shown on BBC Look North, making their way through Knaresborough to a rousing chorus of support from the crowds thronging the street. Oh, sorry, something went wrong there: the march was shown going along a dull suburban road that looked to be empty. A married couple, one pro and one anti, chatted to the reporter over their garden fence.

Over in nearby Wetherby, pensioners from both sides of the Brexit divide were shouting at each other. Their argument was caused by the march that never arrived. Maybe grumpy old people of both persuasions were the only ones with times on their hands in Wetherby yesterday.

It’s a fair bet that Farage won’t be seen again on that march, or at least until it reaches London, when he will nip back across that field in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Thinking of Nigel Farage in this knockabout way is always tempting, partly because taking the mick seems to cut the awful man down to size. The trouble is, it doesn’t – and that’s because he’s far worse, and far more dangerous, than the crusted caricature suggests.

Farage will have written himself a sick note for his march because he will be too busy propagandising on his LBC talk show. Or too busy fomenting Brexit trouble in Europe.

For the sad truth is that Farage is only a failure in the sense that he never managed to become an MP. Other than that, he is a leading figure in right-wing European politics, cosying up to other right-wing forces – and getting pally with US president Donald Trump. That clubby old caricature casts a long dark shadow.

And talking of Trump, if there is one thing more cheering than the Prez shoving his nose into our politics, it’s when his no-nothing son picks up the family baton.

In an article for the Brexit-bonkers Daily Telegraph, Donald Trump Jr writes that Theresa May should have listened to his dad on Brexit. “A process that should have taken only a few short months has become a years-long stalemate, leaving the British people in limbo,” the mini-me Trump writes.

Oh, I’m sure the British people would love to hear what all the Trumps think: his glitzy daughter, the dodgy son-in-law, wife number three or maybe some of the nine grandchildren. Perhaps they’d like to arrange a chlorinated chicken supper to trash it out.

Before what happened in Christchurch, Jacinda Adern was a name we knew for various small reasons. She seemed young at 38 to be running New Zealand’s government; she gave birth when new to the job and then took her three-month-old daughter to the United Nations General Assembly; and she talked liberal good sense with a smile.

Since last week’s carnage when a gunman killed 50 people, and injured many more, Adern has excelled at a role no leader wants, that of taking her country by the hand after a national tragedy.

Her manner and her words have been what is required, and sorrow has been etched on her face in place of that easy smile.

Words are important at such moments, and Adern has spoken well. This was first apparent when she said that Muslim immigrants had “chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us. The person who perpetrated this violence is against us, is not us…”

Simple words are the strongest words and three stood out: “They are us.”

We should repeat those words when they no longer seem so important; we should recite them alongside those now famous words the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox said in her maiden speech – “We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”

“They are us” and “far more in common” – sensible and compassionate words from woman politicians, one who paid with her life, thanks to another right-wing extremist.

I am not going to name the man who killed Jo Cox, and this is in part thanks to a sensible proclamation this morning from Jacinda Adern.

The way extremists become grubby gods in memory has always troubled me; the way that their names with repetition acquire a sort of soiled sainthood. It’s as if we are in too much of a rush to install them in the world’s house of horrors, where Jack the Ripper always holds court – something the author Hallie Rubenhold is attempting to put right in her new book The Five, which records “the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper”.

All books need an angle and Rubenhold’s is a good one: remember the victims not the killer.

And that’s what Jacinda Adern has just said, vowing to never again say the name of the Christchurch mosque gunman. “He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety – that is why you will never hear me mention his name,” Ardern said in an emotional address at New Zealand’s parliament.

This seems exactly right to me, even if the report on the BBC website quoted her wise words – and then repeated the killer’s name again, undoing the point she was trying to make.

Actions count too, of course. Adern has already said that New Zealand’s gun laws will be changed, suggesting that semi-automatic weapons will be banned, as they already are in Australia.

In my simplistic world view, there is no reason for anyone anywhere to have any sort of gun; and there is absolutely no reason for the public sale of military-style semi-automatics – weapon of choice for cowards everywhere. Ban the lot of them; mash them up; melt them down.

And don’t name the white supremacist moron who inflicted such death and misery on the innocent Muslims of Christchurch. And, if Netflix happens to be reading, don’t start planning a gruesome documentary about the man behind the mass murders. He deserves only long obscurity behind a locked door.

And, yes, not naming people is tricky for journalists. But some names don’t deserve to be spoken.

I see that Piers Morgan – sorry if you’ve not have had breakfast yet – is compounding his role as national irritant in chief by tweeting that Donald Trump is the man to sort out the Brexit shitstorm.

His tweet was accompanied by a smarmy photo of Piers and Donald grinning up to each other like salesmen of doom at a messing with your head conference.

For a second or two yesterday, Trump declined to answer reporters’ questions about how Brexit was going, then launched into a blistering account of why it was all because Theresa May hadn’t heeded his advice.

And in an aside, he trundle-Trumped out an old lie about how he predicted the Brexit result the day before the referendum. Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America editor, has tweeted often about this, and he was forced on to Twitter again yesterday.

Here’s what Sopel tweeted about Trump’s ‘prediction’: “I can’t believe I’m hearing this again. DONALD TRUMP DID NOT PREDICT BREXIT THE DAY BEFORE VOTE AT TURNBERRY. HE ARRIVED IN SCOTLAND THE DAY AFTER, ON JUNE 24. HIS TWEETS CONFIRM THIS. I WAS THERE Did someone say #FakeNews?”

Trump punting on Brexit is just another lie in a roomful of lies, but that’s hardly surprising, as that man has lies for breakfast. Incidentally, Trump and food, it’s quite a thing, as you will discover if you go on YouTube and seek out a short film in which two reporters for BuzzFeed in the US eat like their president for a day.

It’s mostly Diet Coke, burgers without the buns (he throws those away) and, bizarrely, the cheesy topping from pizzas, scraped off from the bread base (he throws that away, too). And biscuits to go with the sugar-free Coke.

Sorry, I digress. And I am doing it again right now. Here is a sweary tweet from the comedian Tim Minchin: “Trump’s a lying imbecile, Brexit is a fucking dumb idea, nationalism is retrogressive, guns are for cowards, Jesus wasn’t magic, there is no God, knowledge is power, art is freedom, free will is an illusion, music is love, apes are awesome, cheese > chocolate. I can prove it all.”

Ah, that feels better. Anyway, Trump’s thoughts on Brexit are as toxically unhelpful as his thoughts on just about anything else. The Sun reported last summer that during his visit to the UK, Trump told Mrs Mayhem “how to do” Brexit”, adding that “she didn’t listen to me”. His advice included suing the EU and not going into negotiations.

His latest intervention runs like this: “I’m surprised at how badly it’s all gone from the standpoint of a negotiation. I gave the prime minister my ideas on how to negotiate it and I think you would have been successful.”

Two points to close here.

ONE: Suing people, refusing to negotiate and generally being a bull-headed bully is how Trump runs his property business. And his reputation for being the king of the deal is all down to a book he got someone else to write.

TWO: Trump, like the American right in general, hates the EU as it forms a strong bloc against American dominance, and because it imposes higher standards of animal welfare than does the US, where factory farming is destroying rural communities across the Midwest (“How the US food giants swallowed the family farm”, The Observer, March 10).

No thanks, Piers – we should leave Trump to ruin his own country with mounting mega-debts, stupid unnecessary walls and rising inequality.

Do you incline your head towards the wall with some velocity or are you hiding in the cupboard and swearing never again to turn on the news? Or do you love every bloodied plot twist (unlikely, but all tastes must be catered for)?

Theresa May’s latest meaningful vote turned out to be another meaningless mess. And as usual she is swearing to plough on, her internal idiot satnav stuck on the only destination she acknowledges.

Sadly, that satnav has been on the blink for ages. It’s been sending her round in endless circles. And every time she gets back to where she started, she croaks out the same speech, the one she’s been giving since the crack of Brexit’s dawn. Then she’s off again in another circle.

Some still see admirable doggedness in Mrs Maybe’s determination to plough on, and this morning’s Daily Mail front page blames not her but the House of Commons. “The House of fools,” the headline booms. “They vowed to deliver the Brexit Britain voted for…” says a sub-heading…” best read out in one of those Hollywood movie trailer voices. Or possibly in an Alan Carr voice, to capture the full fancy fury.

The Daily Express, its brain long since rotted by Brexit, rises from its afternoon chair to ask not unreasonably: “How much more of this can Britain take?” Less reasonable is an old Leaver line – “Nearly 1,000 days after the nation voted to quit the EU…”

Oh, yeah, that one again. The nation didn’t vote to leave the EU: a badly run referendum – possibly corruptly run – came out with a 4% margin for Leave. Translating that into the “voice of the nation” is one of the Brexit lies that have helped to compound this unyielding mess.

Other front pages today run their bloodshot eyes over May’s catastrophic defeat, her humiliation and another crushing, pointing out that there are only 16 days before we are supposed to leave.

Another vote in the Commons today is expected to reject a no-deal departure. And that leaves us where? God alone knows, certainly not the vicar’s daughter, with her stubborn refusal to adapt or see which way the wind blows.

It is hard to imagine a prime minister less suited to the task at hand. Where adroitness might have been an advantage, Theresa May has ploughed on regardless, digging herself deeper into that rut. Where people skills might have helped, she met no other eye; where deeper thought might have got her somewhere, she has narrowed her mind.

We should have spotted all this when she promised to deliver a great Brexit for Britain – something that mainly seemed to involve muttering “Brexit means Brexit”, that gnomic incantation of a busted spell, while setting off on another of her robotic rambles.

Here we all are, up Brexit-shit creek without a paddle and possibly minus a canoe, too. All political parties have contributed to this mess, but it’s not fair to blame the “House of fools”, as the Mail does. Let’s just point the finger at Theresa May and the Conservative Party.

For while there are cross-party tensions over Brexit, and while Jeremy Corbyn’s position has been vacillating and infuriating, this Brexit balls-up is a Tory Party production: a big budget blow-out set in motion by one Tory prime minister, then properly cocked-up by another.

MUSIC lessons are on my mind for two reasons. Those guitar pieces need to be practised before Thursday; and a report suggests music lessons are being “stripped out” of schools in England, with the only rise in access to music being in independent schools.

A guitar is never far away on this ledge: a steel-strung acoustic and an electric guitar bought in a fond moment. The electric guitar gives loud birth to a run of riffs occasionally, but the unplugged guitar is played most days.

Classical guitar lessons were a big part of my teenage years, recitals were given once or twice in the school hall. My fingers can still form the shapes for one piece, although most of the notes are misted now.

After the lessons stopped another long one was learned: a lifetime of strumming arrhythmically makes you good for strumming arrhythmically, if not much else.

The new lessons were a present from my wife, who has heard more of my ‘music’ than anyone else, although Airbnb guests have been kind enough to say in passing “you’re good”.

Oh, let me take you by the hand and lead you through a rendition of Streets of London, and I’ll show you something to make you change your mind.

There are also blues pieces, scales, a jazzy number (Fly Me To The Moon), some finger-picking and a Radiohead song to practise, all more varied than the old classical lessons given up in a muddleheaded teenage moment.

Music lessons should be a cornerstone of our state education system, but according to a report by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), state schools have suffered a 21% fall in music provision over the past five years.

Independent schools have seen a 7% rise in music provision, suggesting that music risks being a subject studied only by those whose parents can afford a private education. This is so many shades of wrong, so many discordant life notes, that you wonder how we let such things happen. Is this a plan, the result of austerity or just the careless ways things have been allowed to roll?

It is true that at a time when schools in England are reporting widespread chaos due to years of cuts, when schools are begging parents for funds, and when one headteacher reports that she is scrubbing the school toilets to save money on a cleaner, music lessons might seem a low priority. But music should never be a low priority, and an instrument taught in childhood can lead to a lifetime of music.

On a day when the word ‘meaningful’ is being dragged out again for another Brexit vote, we should stop and think how meaningful a music education can be.

Not that there’s really a problem of course, at least according to the Department for Education spokesperson/peddler of government porkie pies who gave a quote to the BBC: “Arts education receives more money blah-de-blah…” before waltzing off in 3/4 time to find another ‘fact’ from the drawer where they keep the dodgy statistics.

Saxophonist Jess Gillam (seen above in a Getty photograph) responded to the report by saying: “It’s about so much more than learning an instrument. It’s scientifically proven it helps academic results and it helps children socially. We need to do everything we can to make sure children have that.”

As they say nowadays on social media – what she said. Now it is guitar time and the chords for High And Dry need another play.