MEANINGFUL is the word of the day, but for the grain-weary life of me I have nothing new or meaningful to add this morning. Instead here are some reflections on life as inspired by one of the Saturday magazines. Two items caught my eye, one a reader’s letter, the other a popular feature that sets people up for the night. Both appear in Weekend, the supplement that comes with the Guardian.

One of these was almost comically depressing; the other was an uplifting guffaw of humanity.

First, the gloom. Dissociating with the booze and other bodily sins is a thing around time of year. A friend who treated me to lunch the other day is having a dry January; my wife has gone vegan for the month.

The letter I spotted sang the joys of living without alcohol; it was signed “name and address supplied”, so we can only guess why the writer did not wish to be identified as a born-again follower of temperance. The phrase that jumped out was: “Sober is the new vegan, get ahead of the curve.”

What a gloomed mantra: sober is the new vegan. Not wishing to be either, I will keep my toes behind that curve. It’s not that I wish to be non-sober, just to enjoy a few drinks at the weekend, before slipping into weekday sobriety (apart from a rare night of personal rule-breaking).

I don’t wish to hop on the vegan bandwagon as it rolls by on wheels made of carrots or whatever. My meaty leanings are more modest than many, but I’d struggle without the butter and the cheese. Besides, there is always the matter of the vegan lasagne my wife made the other night. It was not, as she readily proclaimed, a success, although my second-day helping was improved with a cheese topping.

Being vegan is fine if you want to eat that way, certainly easier than in the past. My wife is ticking over fine, but misses the milk in her coffee, and our daughter’s gone the whole hog, if you can say that about turning vegan.

Now to the uplift. Blind Date is a great little column in which two strangers are set up for the night, and then offer their separate reports. Sometimes there is a spark, often there is not; sometimes the temporarily hitched admit to a parting kiss, often they don’t even get that far.

This was not the case for Joanne, 24, a barista, and Morgan, also 24, a children’s social worker. These two women, pictured with grins of conspiratorial enjoyment, admitted to having had a high old time, drinking loads, having little memory of what they’d eaten, kissing a lot, then inviting themselves to a party. “I left my knickers at a house party we crashed,” says Joanne.

In these threadbare times of Theresa May droning on, and Jeremy Corbyn tearing himself away from his allotment to drone back, it was heartening to read about these two young women having a naughty night out. The reason for the lost knickers was not given, but that only added to the salty mystery of their spirited union.

Often these daters can’t wait to leave each other’s company, but this pair had a riot, each scoring the other a ‘ten’, and they are due to meet up again right about now.

I discovered this lively pair on old-fashioned paper, still the best way, but their encounter had new life online, where it instantly went viral. Good luck to them: they sound a lot more fun than the sober vegan letter writer.

That Chris Grayling – there’s a man we should always listen to. Should any American readers be popping by, this is an example of good old British sarcasm.

According to a YouGov survey being reported on this morning, the British love of sarcasm and passive-aggressive putdowns is a mystery to most Americans. If you were, perhaps, to say, “That president you elected, he’s a real humdinger”, Trump supporters might think you believe their man to be an outstanding person. Whereas you have just found a seemingly polite way to call him a fool.

According to YouGov, “half of Americans wouldn’t be able to tell that a Briton is calling them an idiot”. The example given is the phrase “With the greatest respect”, which most Americans believe stands for “I am listening to you”, while passive-aggressive Brits take it to mean “I think you are an idiot”.

Personally, I’m not sure this survey has taken account of the Trump era, in which “I think you are an idiot” risks becoming the motto of the US moment. State employees going without a wage because of Trump’s temper tantrum government shutdown in a row over his ridiculous Mexican wall could be forgiven for thinking that, and much worse.

But now let’s turn to Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary – an ironic title for a man who seems incapable of transporting anyone anywhere, other than to the shores of despair in a leaky rubber dinghy.

This morning, the transport secretary of no delight pops up on the front page of the Daily Mail, warning under a doomy headline: “Minister: wrecking Brexit will let in the far right.”

The Mail used to be ardently pro-Brexit, but under its new editor is a bit less ardently pro-Mrs Maybe’s dodgy Brexit deal. Grayling – a man who is never seen out and about without an attached “Failing” ­– tells the Mail that Brexit it is “too important for political game-playing”. Well, that’s a mirthless laugh for a start, as the whole thing is a political game of two bitterly squabbling halves.

Grayling adds that if MPs reject Mrs Maybe’s deal in Tuesday’s vote, “we risk a break with the British tradition of moderate, mainstream politics that goes back to the Restoration in 1660”.

The Flailing One then adds that MPs need to remember that “Britain, its people and its traditions are the mother of Parliaments”.

Although if they are waiting for a non-arriving train on a tatty northern platform or reading about the ferry companies with no ferries that Grayling has just given £13m of public money in case of a no-deal Brexit, they might wonder why they should listen to the Father of all Cock-ups.

Just last week, Grayling failed properly to organise a lorry traffic jam in Kent, even after dangling more than £500 of public money in front of the lorry drivers’ noses.

I think we can safely greet Grayling’s scaremongering words with the greatest respect.

On a closing wider point free of sarcasm or irony – that other British weakness – it is fair to that right now we seem to be a divided, intolerant, ranting country, driven to the edge of sanity by one referendum. Is that a sensible way to run a country? No more so that Mr Trump’s entirely reasonable tantrum* over building a wall.

My favourite witticism about that wall was being shared on social media yesterday. “How do Mexicans feel about Trump’s wall? Oh, they’ll get over it.”

*Brit sarcasm alert for any passing Americans

Someone long ago dropped the Brexit mirror, mirror on the wall. And now no one is the fairest of them all, and everyone and everything looks broken and jagged.

Are we nearing the conclusion of this poisoned fairy tale; and is there even the slightest possibility of a happy ending?

What we can say for sure is that no one is having a good Brexit, certainly not our leading politicians. Theresa May sticks to her robotic mantra about my way or the highway. And no one is biting that poisoned apple rolling across the palm of her shaking hand.

And Jeremy Corbyn grows ever more tired of playing Uncle Charming. His old magic spell is wearing thinner than thin, and his only answer to any passing question is a rallying croak about holding a general election to sort everything out. With a kind of magic rubbing, he’d win that election, then banish the Brexit curse in an old socialist twinkle.

The trouble is, his left-wing version of Brexit seems as much a bent pipedream as Mrs Maybe’s right-wing version.

Corbyn is in a bind, trapped by wicked barbs: if he supports a second vote and backs Remain, he risks alienating Labour Leave supporters; and yet if his hands-off shrugging lets Brexit happen, then he won’t be forgiven by Labour supporters who want him to oppose Brexit.

Another speech given this afternoon offers more of the shrugging same, with a routine call for a general election.

Would Labour even win such a contest? No certainties there, especially not with the latest YouGov poll suggesting that Corbyn’s Brexit-shrug approach could end in electoral catastrophe. As it stands, Labour is six points behind the Tories in this YouGov poll (how could such an incompetent government out-poll the opposition?). And, as Peter Kellner pointed out in the Observer, once voters were asked how they would vote if Labour failed to oppose Brexit, the Tories acquired a 17% lead over Labour.

In other words, if Labour is seen to have allowed Brexit to happen, millions of Remain voters could jump ship.

Of course, ardent Corbyn supporters will tell you that Jeremy has “played a blinder over Brexit”. This phrase usually refers to a musician or sportsperson doing something exceptionally well. But it could also, in this case at least, refer to someone who isn’t looking where he is going.

What will this cracked mirror end up showing next? Already this week Theresa May has lost two Brexit votes forced by MPs from both sides, and then yesterday suffered at the hands of Speaker John Bercow, who permitted a change in the rules for a “meaningful debate”.

What’s interesting here is Theresa May tried to bypass Parliament, and now the MPs are using their muscle against her. Next week her postponed Big Brexit Vote will be held again, and her chances of winning still look remote. As, to be fair, do Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of winning a general election.

This all reminds us that referendums rarely solve anything. Voters often go cold on the choice they made, saying in this case: yes, I wanted Brexit, but not this Brexit, you know, the other one, the one we were promised.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, will this never end?

I am telling my wife about ‘washing’ jeans in the freezer. She gives me a look that wouldn’t shame an icicle.

“You want to put your jeans in the freezer?” she repeats. I unpin myself from her gaze and say, yes, I heard it on the radio.

For some reason my mind does a skip and I recall something my grandfather once said. “Those mini-skirts they wear give girls fat legs,” he said. “Their legs get cold, so they put weight on.”

The young teenager that I was then mocked this seemingly ridiculous notion. My grandmother came to her husband’s defence – “He read it in the newspaper.”

There is a gap of perhaps 50 years between my grandfather believing what he’d read in the newspaper, and me believing what I’d heard on BBC Radio Four.

The programme was a short affair about the ecological cost of fashion. It started without me. I wandered in towards the end in time to hear that washing new jeans was an extravagant waste of water and energy. Anyway, the jeans soon look washed out. “You can put them in the freezer instead,” the presenter said.

And that’s what I do, listening to the woman on the radio rather than to my wife. I fold the jeans neatly and freeze them overnight. The next day I take the jeans out to show my wife and she gives me that look again.

“Do you think they look clean?” I say. She doesn’t reply. I hang the jeans over the back of a dining chair and leave them to warm up. Looking at them later, I decide they don’t look fully clean, but I keep that observation to myself.

Then I type “putting jeans in the freezer” into google and assorted entries pop up. People have been talking about this for years. It’s a thing, for sure. There are instructions and all: put your jeans in a carrier bag (damn, didn’t do that) and leave them in the freezer for a week. A whole week! What’s an ageing male supposed to wear if the main part of his uniform is stuck next to the frozen peas for a week? And if I put them on too soon out of the freezer, will my own peas be frozen?

In one internet posting, a fabric-care scientist says: “Never washing your jeans is like never showering from the waist down.”

Ah, that doesn’t sound so good. She then observes that our bodies produce soils, and I stop reading.

Another post sees the boss of Levi’s recommending the freezer ‘wash’ as both ecological and good for the longevity of jeans. This advice is belittled by a scientist in the Smithsonian who says the lower temperatures in your freezer won’t kill off the bacteria dwelling in your denim.

Those jeans haven’t been washed yet, but I think they may be heading for hot water rather than cold air – or cold water and hot air. One or the other.

In the name of research, I google what my grandfather said all those years ago. Or what I think he said, for who’s to know for sure what anyone said so long ago, even if some remarks snag so firmly in the mesh of our minds?

I come up with a blank. Perhaps being wrong about these things runs in the family.

Of all the chicanery surrounding Brexit, my favourite example yet is the ferry company without ferries. The Government is handing £13.8m to this company in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Hey, I don’t have any ferries either, but I am happy to accept a government grant to help import Spam or whatever we are going to be living off.

In June 2017, while grimly electioneering, Mrs Maybe told a nurse who’d not had a pay rise in ages that there was no magic money tree. Then she stumbled on a whole forest of magic money trees. She first entered that munificent wood to find a billion to bung to the stern men and women of DUP; and that deal to keep her government afloat was only the start of it. Just how much is Brexit costing us?

Now Mrs Maybe seems to have magicked up fourteen million quid to give to Seaborne Freight, a firm lacking the means to carry any freight.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling blithely brushed away a question about this largesse on the BBC Today programme the other morning, saying that it was right for the government to support small business.

Ahem, how does a ferry firm without the means to float anything help in the event of a no-deal Brexit? It pledges to hire some ships, that’s how. Another bit of magical Brexit thinking.

This story took a bizarre twist yesterday when it emerged that the freightless freight firm appeared to have copied the terms and conditions on its website from a pizza company.

Part of the text on the website read: “It is the responsibility of the customer to thoroughly check the supplied goods before agreeing to pay for any meal/order.”

Perhaps Failing Grayling – for variety’s sake, let’s call him Flailing Grayling instead – was ordering a pizza when he came across the company. And maybe he didn’t notice that £13.4m was on the steep side for a margarita. Or maybe that’s just London prices for you.

Joking aside, and maybe humour is all we will have left by April, Theresa May’s approach to Brexit is to bore everyone to submission or death, or whichever comes first. She is aided in this joyless journey by an opposition that doesn’t do much opposing when it comes to Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn has his own complications. He has always claimed to be beholden to his party members. Now that those self-same members appear to be favouring a second referendum, Corbyn is doing the deaf ear trick.

And here’s another grumble. Before Christmas Corbyn demanded a no confidence vote in Theresa May; and where did that get him? Nowhere, but it did stiffen Tory sinews.

All of which leads to this thought: is politics the right way to untangle ourselves from the Brexit thicket? Party politics got us into this mess; mostly Tory party politics, although plenty of Labour-supporting areas voted Leave.

Just imagine if we could all agree to look for the best non-partisan escape from a no-deal Brexit. It won’t happen now, but the two-and-half years spent squabbling without getting anywhere could have been devoted to setting up a citizen’s assembly, like the one assembled in Ireland before the abortion vote.

That way we may have found a non-political solution to what is very much a political problem.

Bit of this, bit of that, not quite enough of the other. That’s my working life in a skittering nutshell.

I am sitting in the car driving to one of the bits. A young woman pops up on the radio to elucidate my post-redundancy life. She is called Emma Rosen and she is a guest on Saturday Live, the BBC Radio 4 magazine programme that occasionally uplifts but more often infuriates.

As I spin along the A64, Emma explains that she didn’t much like a job she was doing, so she decided to do 25 jobs before she hit 25. Many of these ‘jobs’ were more in the way of work experience, but she did manage to hit her target.

Emma says on her website that what I shall call her “try-before-you-buy” job scheme ranged from “archaeology in Transylvania, tour guiding amid violent protests in Venezuela and investigative journalism with a national newspaper”.

She also had a go at alpaca farming in Cornwall. And, yes, the alpaca spits, apparently; as does life sometimes.

Emma is a smart woman and won a book deal out of her experiment. Having passed that birthday, she is now a published author and a sort of millennial motivational speaker. She is also an expert in people who do a bit of this and a bit of that. As I have a bitty life, my ears pricked up.

Many young people, Emma says, will have four or five careers in their working lifetime. That’s careers and not jobs. The portfolio career will become the norm.

And not only young people. That mix-and-match approach arose for me after redundancy hit at the age of 58. Nowadays when I tell people about my part-time package sellotaped into a sort of whole – the journalism lecturing, the freelance writing, and working for the Press Association – they think that sounds like a fine arrangement. And perhaps it is, although one lacking the security of one regular job with a regular wage.

Last term I had three-and-half jobs: two lecturing gigs, plus the freelance work and two days editing on the Irish newspaper. Today is the first of the non-Christmas days; first day of the diet; first non-drinking day in a week or so.

My wife has gone back to work, leaving me home alone to arrange next Monday’s lectures and organise an interview for a feature. Oh, and to prevaricate yet again about sending off the latest novel to an agent suggested by a writer friend (one who is still being published).

Writing more novels was my first post-redundancy money-creation scheme. This worked so well that the other week I received a payment from the US for £30 or something. Still, a hopeful fool with a laptop and a half-baked idea or two never gives up. Perhaps today I’ll write the synopsis to go with the excerpt printed out before Christmas.

Emma Rosen shows that a bit of lateral thinking can go a long way. I admire her neat solution to not having a job she liked. Sadly, I have neither time nor energy to write a book called something like Three-and-half Things To Do Before You Finally Manage to Retire (Whenever The Bloody Hell That Is).

My new life is rackety, but now I do things that would have seemed unimaginable in the past, including standing in front of a roomful of students. Which is what I will be doing at 9am on Monday. I’d better look over my notes.

“This migrant crisis, it’s a terrible thing, all those foreigners choking up the English Channel – our channel – in an attempt to get here and live the life of riley at our expense…”

“Look to your conscience – that’s me speaking, by the way – and ask yourself this: why are those refugees trying to get here? It’s because they are fleeing crisis and misery in their own countries, and sometimes we’ve helped to generate that crisis and misery…”

“But it’s a crisis, a migrant crisis – I saw it on the TV news and read it in the newspaper.”

“Well, ask yourself who’s calling it a crisis and why. Look, I admit it’s a crisis, but only if you’re the poor sod who’s probably paid a fortune to dodgy characters to be chucked in a rubber dingy in the hope of reaching Dover. It’s a crisis for the exposed few in those little boats, not for us sitting at home in the warm and dry.”

“But the Home Secretary has cut short his holiday to sort it out…”

“Ah, yes – have you never heard of the rule that you should always be suspicious of politicians who end their holidays early to sort something out? There’s usually nothing they can do: it’s all just politicking, either to make themselves or their party look good. Usually they’d do far less harm if they stayed on holiday and annoyed their family, instead of coming home in a bluster of pomp and suspicious circumstance.”

“But that fellow, what’s he called, Savvy something or other, he’s appointed himself a gold commander or appointed someone a gold commander, so it must be important.”

“Think you mean Sajid Javid, the Home From Holidays Secretary. And, yes, he did appoint a gold commander or appoint himself as gold commander. But that’s not the point…”

“What is the point?”

“Oh, this so-called crisis is being knocked up for political reasons to stiffen Tory sinews before the vote on Mrs Maybe’s Brexit deal, you know, the one everyone on all sides hates.”

“What we need is a proper Brexit…”

“Oh, look, it’s New Year’s Eve and I don’t have the energy for that argument. But we’ve just had Christmas, you know, that time of hope and goodwill. We should show compassion to anyone trying to cross the channel, not vilify the poor people and stir up an artificial crisis.”

“But I just read Nigel Farage in the Daily Telegraph. Here, let me check. Yes, he says ‘The latest migrant crisis comes as no surprise to me…’”

“Oh, don’t go paying any attention to Nigel Farage. This would be a better country if no one ever again listened to a word that man says.”

“I still think there’s a crisis and…”

“Oh, do show a bit of compassion for a change. And see this ‘crisis’ for what it is: a put-up job to suit the moment. It’s all of a kind with that stupid wall Trump wants to build.”

“But walls keep people out…”

“Not if most of them fly into the States and then later outstay their visas or whatever. That wall is a symbol, and so is this unpleasant fuss about migrants. Anyway, we should probably be calling them refugees instead: migrant suggests they are taking those risks purely by choice. This is your conscience speaking – yes, that small but insistence voice you’ve not been listening to lately. Remember to show a bit of compassion. Happy new year to everyone, including refugees/migrants/immigrants and people from Europe who have happily made Britain their home for years, and now find themselves be asked to pay to stay…”

I’M loving John Malkovich as Poirot in The ABC Murders on BBC1, but not everyone is so entranced.  The Mail on Sunday got its M&S undies in a twist over this adaptation by Sarah Phelps, accusing the supposedly pro-Remain writer of weaving anti-Brexit propaganda into her adaptation.

Phelps has form in fiddling around with Agatha Christie, having already taken murderous liberties with Ordeal By Innocence and Witness For The Prosecution, all after tinkering (superbly, as it happens) with And Then There Were None.

What Phelps does in her three-part Poirot that ends tonight is to introduce an early echo of the hostile environment towards immigration that we live with today. She does this by referencing British fascism in the 1930s and using that hostile insularity to introduce racism towards Poirot. Quite why this is anti-Brexit remains a mystery to me, if not to the Mail on Sunday.

Phelps tells the Radio Times online that she isn’t upset by the fuss, saying: “I just think people have got columns inches to fill.”

Writers often look at the past through a modern lens, and much historical fiction is written that way. Phelps could choose to write straight adaptations of Christie, but instead indulges in what you might all creative mischief. Good on her, too. The true Christie disciples might spill their cups of poisoned tea at such outrageous tinkering, but there’s no reason why these stories should be frozen in time, with every twist and notch preserved.

Anyway, John Malkovich is fantastic in the role, a growling revelation. The casting is itself a sort of joke or riff on immigration: an immigrant American is playing ‘our’ favourite immigrant Belgian detective: what a nerve.

Malkovich is much darker than David Suchet, who played Poirot for nearly 25 years over on ITV. You might have thought that Suchet had Poirot all sewn up, with his penguin-waddle and his funny little twirl of a moustache. Malkovich is darker, nastier and hemmed in by hostility, an unloved foreigner rather than a cherished one, and a man down on his luck and no longer respected for his clever ways with spotting a murderer.

The direction is dark, too: atmospheric, creepy and at times downright weird (no plot spoilers, but those shoes walking on that back, dear me). Everything looks fantastic in a gloom-drenched sort of way, and there is a winning cameo from Shirley Henderson as Rose Marbury, the world’s least appealing landlady.

Rupert Grint is rewarding too as Inspector Crome, a scowling young policeman who is initially hostile towards Poirot. The railway-timetable murders committed by the ABC killer are painted from a Grand Guignol palette that would surely have delighted Christie with its darkness, theatricality and horrifying detail.

And your views on Brexit should not colour your enjoyment of this dark delight. Not unless you are Nigel Farage; anyone know if this murderous alphabet goes as far as the letter ‘F’?

If you want a perfect image for the stupidity of our politics, it’s captured in a photograph from the House of Commons. In this action shot, Tory MPs bustle around Speaker John Bercow armed with angry gestures and their best outraged expressions. Bercow sets his own face in shouty-trying-to-control-the-class mode.

The story, if that’s what it is, concerns whether Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called Theresa May a “stupid woman” while muttering in the Commons yesterday.

Various people peered at his lips and concluded that he did indeed say “stupid woman”. Some of those staring at Mr Corbyn’s whiskered lips were the usual low-lying lip-readers who suddenly find their services in demand. This happens whenever someone in the public eye says something they might regret.

One of them was the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf. Shown the Corbyn clip by a BBC radio producer, Glennie concluded that the Labour leader had used those words. Others read his lips differently, while the man himself owned up to “stupid people”.

This argument is remarkably stupid. If Corbyn did use those words, he was being stupid and a liability; but the Tory outrage was stupidly confected – “Please, Sir, Jeremy said a bad word!” – at a time when our Brexit-buggered land is grinding to a halt.

People will take whatever they want from what is, with dreary inevitability, being called “stupid-gate”. The ardent Corbyn crew will parade it as proof of an establishment conspiracy put about by the crooked BBC and the mainstream media; Tories desperate for a distraction from the chaos quagmire of their own making will pathetically jab fingers at Corbyn by way of light relief.

The story, again if that’s what it is, is all over today’s newspapers. The usual Mail and Telegraph-shaped suspects denigrate Corbyn, while others report the “stupid people” line. Some of the papers drag out the obvious pantomime metaphor; and if Parliament is a panto, you have to say that Theresa May isn’t much fun as a dame.

It’s not so much Parliament that’s the panto, as Prime Minister’s Question Time. Is there any further use or point to this gruesome game of political charades? The May/Corbyn double act is mostly all repeats and muffed gags anyway.

I’ll tell you what’s stupid: a country that can’t do anything because it’s spent two-and-half years arguing about something without getting a step closer to a solution.

I’ll tell you what’s stupid: a once mostly respected country parading itself around Europe like a drunk in a slanging match with indifferent strangers who look the other way.

I’ll tell you what’s stupid: a country that lets itself be led down this twisting path by a prime minister who, even though she lacks a majority, acts as if she were some sort of head-mistress dictator, insisting that her way is the only way.

I’ll tell you what’s stupid: me trying to think up any more of those. By way of distraction, it’s worth remembering Colin Dexter, the creator of Morse. It’s always worth remembering Dexter, a great crime writer.

In his third Morse novel, The Silent World Of Nicholas Quinn, Dexter cleverly spins his plot around a character who is deaf, and the solution lies in something spotted by a lip-reader. And the words being spoken were not “stupid woman”.

Incidentally, the chancellor Philip Hammond muttered that arch Brexit nut Andrea Jenkyns was a “stupid woman” in the Commons last July. The Tory MP for Morley and Outwood was defended by the never knowingly less than prickly Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said: “I cannot believe that the chancellor would say something so rude – not only to Andrea but effectively to all Brexit voters.”

Jenkyns herself brushed this off as part of the “cut and thrust” of politics, and the controversy went away. As will this one.

AN email update from The Washington Post has the headline: “A reminder of Trump’s needless cruelty to migrants.”

This arrives on the same morning that our own purveyors of needless cruelty set out their post-Brexit immigration plans in a much-delayed white paper.

And it pings into Outlook a couple of days after headlines about Hungary, where Viktor Orban’s right-wing government is facing rising protests about the state of politics. The trigger for this latest bout of street marches was a so-called slave law that allows employers to force workers to do extra overtime, without necessarily being paid for up to three years.

Why does Hungary need this enforced overtime? A casual glance at the country’s tough anti-immigration rules suggests a likely answer: immigrants who would have been able to do the extra work are being kept out of the country.

Being ‘tough’ on immigration plays well in world politics right now, even if the realities rarely match the rhetoric. That email from the Washington Post puts Trump’s anti-migrant politics into a harsh spotlight by telling two tragic stories about children, one dead, the other dying.

The Post first reported news last week of the death of a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl called Jakelin Caal. She died of dehydration and shock in the custody of US border enforcement officials and her death dominated US headlines for a few days.

Many people in America were horrified, but no one will be surprised to learn that the Trump administration said the fault lay with her father: why accept blame when you can wag your finger at a grieving man who tried to reach the US out of desperation?

The other tragic story concerns two-year-old Abdullah Hassan, a Yemini American boy on life support in a California hospital. He suffers from a rare genetic brain condition and is dying. His mother, Shaima Swileh, is a Yemeni citizen living in Egypt. She has been caught up in Trump’s block on nationals from several Muslim-majority countries. She and her American-based husband spent months trying to get a waiver so that she can enter the US to see her dying son. After a public outcry, her wish was finally granted yesterday.

We have no reason to feel complacent in this country; unless, that is, we believe all that barbed guff about “taking control of our borders”. Theresa May is a woman much obsessed with controlling immigration – to the extent that her hostile environment policy gave us, among other grisly delights, the Windrush scandal.

This, in case it has slipped your mind, saw immigrants from the Caribbean, who had lived most of their lives in Britain after being invited to live here, suddenly faced with deportation.

Last week, Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian won Journalist of the year in the British Journalism Awards for her work exposing the Windrush scandal. Her reporting led to the resignation of then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd. It’s fair to say that Rudd carried the can for her boss Theresa May, who as Home Secretary introduced the contentious policy that got her sacked.

Theresa May is behind a £30,000-a-year salary threshold for all migrants and has reportedly resisted pressure to reduce that level so that necessary migrants can enter the country. This is because she believes that the Brexit referendum – you know, the one won by a squeak – translates into a demand that migration be controlled.

This chimes with the often-spouted call to end free movement of people. And if you are foolish enough to believe that people moving freely between cooperating countries, going in and out as suits their lives and their situation, sounds like an admirable notion, and one that makes countries stronger economically and culturally, then you clearly haven’t been keeping up do date with all the present madness.