THE man wonders when it was that he began swearing at the radio. He thinks it might have been that day the country split and everyone started that argument they haven’t managed to resolve yet.

Did he used to swear at the radio before this? That seems quite possible. Maybe there is just more to feel cross about nowadays. Or maybe it is the news being stuck on repeat that makes him irritable.

The man who swears at the radio wonders if other people swear at the radio, too. Perhaps men and woman around the country join him in an unheard chorus of endless disgruntlement. Perhaps all those swearing people also shout at the television and go red in the face over their social media feeds. There is certainly a lot to splutter and shout about in this spluttery, shouty age.

The man who shouts at the radio has just made toast and coffee for a guest, and he took the precaution of not turning on the radio, as shouting at the radio when a stranger is trying to have breakfast is not a good look. Instead he made pleasant Airbnb small-talk.

Perhaps, he thinks, wondering about the intemperate nature of life today, we’d all rub along better if that’s all we did, made small talk and talked small, instead of shouting big.

Perhaps the difficulty lies in all the things they are to shout at nowadays, the sheer shout-ability of life, the unending vista of shout-worthy things.

Just this morning the divisive man with the orange face and the fly-away hair, the hair that’s almost flown away, has been defending Saudi Arabia over that inconvenient journalist they had killed in their consulate in Turkey.

The orange-faced one thinks that the horribly murdered journalist was an “enemy of the state” anyway, and that’s because he thinks all journalists are the enemy of the state, or at least the enemy of him.

Because he wants to be friends with the country that killed and dismembered a journalist, because he wants to sell them lots of arms, because the country that killed and dismembered a journalist is awash with oil and money, the man of orange hue has decided there is only one answer to all this: shrug and carry on.

The man with the bad Twitter habit, and haven’t we all got one of those, ignored his experts in the CIA, who told him that there was something fishy going on, and said there was “nothing definitive” linking his friend the Saudi Crown Prince to the killing – you know, the man called “beyond toxic” by a leading member of his own Republican party.

Anyway, the man who shouts at the radio takes a deep breath and tries to calm himself. All this shouting can’t be a good thing, can it, he wonders. Perhaps one day soon that thing we can’t agree on will be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, he tells himself, while worrying that he is spinning a lie within his own skull.

JOURNALISM lecturers at Leeds Trinity University have been told not to use ‘frightening’ capital letters, according to a silly story doing the rounds yesterday.

I wasn’t aware of this during the morning sessions and the students didn’t mention anything. One of my roommates at Leeds Trinity told me about the story at lunchtime, as she dashed off to be interviewed by BBC Look North about the deal Johnston Press, owners of the Yorkshire Post, the Scotsman, The i and other newspapers, has agreed with its creditors.

At the start of a long afternoon session, the third-year students asked me what I knew. Not a lot, but I’d seen the story on the Daily Express website, under the headline “University lecturers told DON’T USE CAPS as it frightens students.”

According to the Express, we’d all been told not to write in capital letters as it might alarm the students. The paper said this was blasted by some as “more academic mollycoddling” of the snowflake generation.

No one seemed to know where this concocted story came from, but the university issued an official statement saying it wasn’t true and pointing out that it was “best practice not to write in capital letters regardless of the sector”.

Over on Twitter, where this sort of story incubates in rapid fashion, some people made despairing jokes in capital letters, while lecturers at the university mocked the nonsense. I am happy to lend my part-time shoulder to the chant: “I LECTURE AT LEEDS TRINITY UNIVERSITY AND HAVE NEVER BEEN TOLD NOT TO USE CAPITAL LETTERS.”

The key to all this, if it even needs a key, lies in that use of the ‘snowflake generation’, that mean-minded put-down for young people. When the older generation – and, heavens, you need to be getting on a bit to read the Express; and heavens times two, I’m getting on a bit and that paper seems fusty and crusty to me – uses dismissive phrases about young people, it just comes over as mean and small-minded.

I asked the afternoon students if they minded being called snowflakes. Some certainly did, while others weren’t quite sure what the insult meant. If you ask this old snowball, it’s a silly but unpleasant way to refer to young people, and it builds up a picture of that generation being wimps and complainers.

I meet many young people nowadays and all I can say is that generally they’re great.

Anyway, the journalism lecturers at Leeds Trinity are a friendly and supportive bunch. And at least they now have new material for lectures about sources and how nonsense stories can end up in the newspapers, pushed there by mysterious and sometimes malicious means, often to fit a grumpy mind-set (“Get me a story about young people being snowflake wimps – we need to keep political correctness going: it’s a good sell for us”).

One obvious thought occurs to this journalist/lecturer. The newspapers who complain about this sort of thing call on capital letters all the time, especially on their shouty front pages. And in this age of Brexit bollocks and Trump tantrums, everyone uses capital letters to bawl and bellow their opinions, shouting each other down.

Perhaps the whole weary wide world should just stop using capital letters.

Christmas adverts come but once a year. And that’s a relief, as all that snow-dusted sentiment can bring a grouch down (even one who likes to grumble and then enjoys himself in the end).

Firstly, here is my mumbled apology for alighting on this topic: yes, it’s too early, but at least it’s not Brexit.

Although, now you mention it, sprinkle some snow on Mrs Maybe and you might have a seasonal advert. Lonely, events-tattered woman stumbles out into a deserted street, starts to say words she doesn’t seem to believe, the snow begins to fall. Lonely woman turns back to that famous front door, leaving a trail of footprints. An emotive swell of music accompanies the shutting of that door.

Then an argument ensues, someone drops the snow-dome and everything smashes into less than festive shards.

Anyway, these adverts are quite a thing. Every year there is a story about them, usually the John Lewis one. Two years ago, a student made a fake John Lewis ad for a project, put it online before the real thing, and it went viral. Some people swore they couldn’t tell the difference.

Four years ago, Sainsbury’s made a First World War advert inspired the temporary truce and football match in the trenches. That one divided people, being beautifully made and yet for all that, weirdly exploitative: a spot of teary-eyed remembrance to remind you to stock up on carrots and claret at Sainsbury’s.

This year’s story concerns the Iceland advert, featuring a cartoon orangutan that has fled the destruction of the rain forest to hide in a girl’s bedroom. The anti-palm oil message of the advert is based on research by Greenpeace.

Whether or not this advert has been banned is debatable, as the Independent online reports that the ‘ban’ was merely advice from the advertising industry’s advisory body, Clearcast.

The advert is freely available online, and I showed it to students the other day, running it alongside the Sainsbury’s wartime advert. “Why was one banned and not the other?” I asked the students. Later, I saw that someone had written an opinion piece for the Newstatesman asking just that question.

Here, I might have added, is a perfect example of why your lecturer is not much cop at being a freelance journalist; don’t just have ideas, sell them…

While that student’s fake John Lewis advert pushed all the usual buttons, this year’s offering is different, being a mini Sir Elton John movie. The singer is shown at home sitting at an old piano, playing a couple of notes from his early hit, Your Song. We then see Elton’s life told through that song. Archive footage shows him performing the song, sometimes clad in sparkles, sometimes standing on top of a piano.

Sometimes he is going bald, and yet the old Elton has a full head of hair, an expensive type of miracle. As Elton gets younger, one scene shows his mother sitting with a tear in her eye at a school concert.

The advert ends with Elton as a little boy at home in the 1950s, unwrapping his first piano, bought for him by his doting mother and grandmother. He plays a couple of notes. Then it’s back to old Elton sitting at the same piano; he plays the same two notes and closes the piano lid.

“Some gifts are more than just a gift,” runs the caption. You know, the buying stuff bit, and John Lewis, like other stores could do with a good Christmas, as times are tough, with the lowest staff bonus yet being paid, reportedly, and yet still with £7m to spent on the Elton ad.

I shall try not to mention Christmas again for a while.

“Brexit talks in endgame, says Theresa May” – that’s a headline on the BBC website this morning. “What’s Brexit?”– two of my students yesterday.

Oh, what blissful Brexit innocence. If only we all could be left in such an immaculate state.

These are not journalism students, but they do study aspects of journalism. And they are only 18 or 19. A little further probing levered out a cautious nub of knowledge about leaving the EU – but the topic still came under the headline of “oh, that’s all just politics”.

Two thoughts occurred to me in that session, which was in part about living in a post-truth world. According to that arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg-or-Moog (see past ledges), it might take 50 years to discover the benefits of Brexit. That would make these students even older than I am now. They’ll be pushing 70 by the time Britain knows if Brexit was a good idea (spoiler alert: it isn’t).

The second thought concerned the brotherly shove between the two Johnson boys. It’s not often, or indeed ever, you see that surname in a headline about Brexit and think, “Oh, he’s talking sense.”

But that was my reaction on reading Jo Johnson’s resignation letter. Unlike Boris, Jo is a low-flying Johnson. So low-flying that some people’s reaction on hearing this news was: “Ah, there’s another one – never knew that.”

This other Johnson was until the other day the Minister for Transport. But now he has transported himself out of government, declaring in his resignation letter that the handling of Brexit presents the “greatest crisis since the Second World War”.

Not-Boris also said that the emerging Brexit deal is “a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis”. That debacle occurred just as this ledge-bound pursuer of a this-and-that life was getting born, which suggests that these affairs can certainly drag on.

Some fear that Jo might even be understating matters here – not a failing associated with his grandly gobby brother. Jo and Boris stand on opposite sides in the Brexit debate; Jo has always been a Remainer, while Boris flipped a coin to decide which side he was on. He came out in favour of Brexit for what many consider to be reasons of self-interest: he reckoned it gave him a better shot at being prime minister (spoiler alert: not yet, thank God).

This fraternal divide is interesting: both brothers are against Brexit, even though they stand on different sides of the fence – or maybe it’s more of a thorny thicket, as fences are too neat an analogy.

Jo Johnson supports a second referendum and said after his resignation that Britain needed to “pause and reflect” before doing “something irrevocably” stupid over Brexit.

He said this second vote was necessary because what is being offered fell “spectacularly short” of what we were promised. What we were promised, if you can remember that far back, was a quick and simple exit, followed by years of sunshine in a British Empire Mark II.

It’s always struck me as odd that this shoddy scenario both celebrates the shedding of one foreign influence (Europe), while requiring us to chase around after foreigners who live further away. At least one of whom is an unstable, self-declared pussy-grabber with morals so low they struggle to fill the worn-out toe of one sock.

To close with an ‘incidentally’, the non-bullshit, Not-Boris is married to the Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman, who ran her newspaper’s coverage on the Windrush scandal. And to bring things full circle, I am in contact with Amelia for a session next term on the theme of “when journalism does good”.

HERE I sit, filling with tea and thoughts while waiting for the man from Wolverhampton by way of Nigeria and Venice. Possible topics bob on the morning tide.

Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab floats into view with his announcement that he’d never realised how important the Dover-Calais crossing was to Britain. How charming these arch-Brexiteers are, swearing everything will be hunky-dory Empire Mark II, then stopping to notice the sea and all those ships.

Poor man, no one ever told him he lives on an island.

Raab raises undesired memories of that woman who is Northern Ireland secretary. What’s she called? A quick Google offers the subject title: ‘Northern Ireland Secretary ignorance.’ This nudges my Google-shot brain towards a name: Karen Brady, that’s her. Brady hit the headlines – or kind of walked into them, as you might when banging your head on a low-beam – when she cheerfully admitted that she’d never realised just how sectarian Northern Ireland was.

There’s Raab suddenly spotting water, water everywhere and Brady coming over all “well blow me down” for discovering that the most sectarian part of Britain is, you know, a bit divided.

Where do we find these people?

Also bobbing in the tidal scum is the latest row in the US between Donald Trump and the press. At a post mid-term election press conference, CNN reporter Jim Acosta had a fiery stand-off with the president. This ended with a now-notorious moment in which an intern attempted to grab the mic from Acosta and he tried to hold onto it.

That’s what appears to have happened, although team Trump declared that Acosta had tried to assault the young woman – and then revoked his pass. The White House shared a video on social media in support of its case, only to stir accusations that the shared video had been edited to make Acosta’s actions appear more aggressive than they were.

And the madness goes on.

Here’s a thought. As Trump hates the media so much, apart from Fox News saying how great he is, why don’t all the other reporters walk away and refuse to attend his so-called press conferences, where all he does is spout lies and lash out at the media (the “enemies of the people” in tarnished Trump-speak)?

Go on, leave the room. Better that than standing idly by as Trump thuggishly insults you – and, in a hostile symbiosis, you convey his appalling behaviour to the word. But if you plan on staying, stick up for your braver colleague rather than sitting on your hands and your digital recorders.

Anyway, the mug is drained, the tide of news is still scummy and the man from Wolverhampton by way of Nigeria and Venice has just come down for breakfast. I was up at six because he’d said he wanted an early breakfast. It’s coming up seven by the time he emerges.

I make coffee and toast, and he makes himself a toast and jam sandwich. And in an accent that is  part-Nigerian and part-Italian, he tells me about moving to Venice as a child and growing up Italian, only to fall on hard times after the financial crash. Then he moved to Britain with his Italian partner and set up his business here instead.

We’ve been doing Airbnb for a while now. Sometimes it’s a pain, and sometimes it’s interesting. This guest booked at super-short notice (a pain) but has a good story to tell (interesting).

“All these books,” he says, looking at the shelves opposite the breakfast table. “I don’t read so much,” he adds.

He speaks English, Italian and at least one of Nigeria’s many dialects. Yesterday he told me that sometimes he works in Sweden. That’s a long way to go, I say over toast and coffee.

“Not Sweden,” he booms. “Swindon.”

Ah, a different geographical prospect. I consider asking for his views on Brexit but decide against this. No need to spoil his day. He has an industrial floor to lay before he can point his van towards Wolverhampton, if not towards Venice or Nigeria.

What connects President Trump and Spencer Stokes, business and transport correspondent on BBC Look North? Oh, go on then.

The answer, you won’t be surprised to learn, lies in Twitter. The US president loves to tweet, often at furious corners of the night, when he spills out the bile instead of sleeping.

It is not recorded when or how often Spencer Stokes tweets. But one of his Twitter forays is reported to have been viewed more than a million times, according to the BBC News – and  has just brought about the resignation of the Persimmon boss who was paid a bonus of £75m.

The reporter asked Jeff Fairburn to comment on his bonus on air last month. Fairburn walked away, mumbling that he hadn’t been expecting that question. He appeared to consider it a low blow and an ambush.

The rumbling discontent about that ludicrous bonus has finally led to Fairburn announcing that he is to step down (with his pockets full), to be replaced by another director, who the BBC reported had to get by on a paltry bonus of £40m.

Surely you don’t have to be any sort of a socialist to conclude that paying Fairburn a bonus amounting to around 70 times what the average person is likely to earn in a lifetime cannot be right.

This calculation, by the way, is based on taking £28,000 as the average salary and multiplying that figure by 45 – taken as a working lifetime. Money earned over those long years comes in at £1,260,000, according to the calculations of this mathematically illiterate blogger.

There is no possible justification for such a bonus.

And now, with regrettable inevitability, to Trump’s reaction to the mid-term elections in the US.

The short version of this two-part story goes like this: Trump increased his hold on the Senate, while losing the House of Representatives to the Democrats.

A sort of scoreless draw, if you like: Trump is emboldened in the Senate and didn’t get the bloody nose his detractors desired. But he does now face a proper opposition as House Democrats could stall his policies, launch investigations into his behaviour, demand to see his tax returns, and even begin impeachment proceedings.

You will be unsurprised to learn that Trump declared the result to be a “tremendous success” and a “big victory” that “defied history”. Now this result wasn’t exactly good or bad, but Trump doesn’t deal in grey areas.

I have been imagining that Donald Trump has just walked off a cliff (well, you cheer yourself up as best you can). Here is his reaction to the fall…

“That was the best fall in US history. Nobody has ever fallen off a cliff like that. The greatest fall, the best. I am the best at falling off cliffs. Everybody knows that. These arms are the best broken arms in the whole of history. Nothing comes close. Those lying Democrats know nothing about falling off a cliff. But in truth these broken arms were caused by the lying media. I will be DEMANDING an investigation into how I those enemies of the people pushed me off that cliff…”

And so on, an endless and indestructible loop of solipsism.

Incidentally, is it just me or does the BBC’s US correspondent, Jon Sopel, display pro-Trump tendencies? A quick Google suggests that this must be my own mini-obsession, for no one else seems to be going on about it. But he does seem quick nowadays to put a positive gloss on Trump.

Rather than a tin of gloss paint, but never mind.

John Smith isn’t to be confused with unremarkable beer, for there is nothing unremarkable about this guitarist and songwriter.

Whether John Smith is still the most common name in the English language is something I do not know; but I do know that this John Smith is uncommonly talented.

I didn’t go along on Sunday night to write a review. This wasn’t a journalist’s freebie – just a paid for night out. But this man is so wonderful that word must be passed on.

Reviewing folk CDs for a magazine edited by a former colleague introduced me to Smith and his new album, Hummingbird. John Renbourn called Smith “the future of folk music” – a quote that’s prominent on his website. Smith is compared to many people, often John Martyn, who he supported in Martyn’s late days.

Richard Thompson is mentioned sometimes, too – and Smith is certainly a guitarist of great skill, yet that comparison isn’t quite right. Smith’s music is warmer and more romantic – blokey romantic, his songs shot through with gruff tenderness.

He opened his set with the title track from Hummingbird, an impossibly lovely five minutes of music that rings in your head long after, like a secular hymn.

Smith was accompanied by Joe McGurgan on double bass and John McGurgan on guitar – and when he tells you that these Belfast boys are brothers, it comes as a relief, for otherwise you wondered how he found two musicians who look so alike. The sound made by this trio was is warm, generous and enthusiastic it sweeps you along on a happy/sad tide.

There is humour, too, for Smith is a natural at the chat and banter, throwing out witty one-liners and self-mocking slights between songs.

Where Smith really scores is that he is so completely into his music, everything is sung and played with love and passion, and he just enjoys himself so much, as in their understated way do the McGurgan brothers. As does the audience.

As this wasn’t a proper review, I didn’t pay attention to all the song titles, although I know that he played Lowlands of Holland and Lord Franklin but didn’t play the thundersome Axe Mountain (Revisited).

An astonishingly good night, one of the best.

Two other reasons for this quick review. One, support act Rachel Newton, who performed beguiling songs from last summer’s album, West, singing and playing an electro-harp. Two, John Smith’s shout-out for Joe Coates and Please Please You – the promoter who keeps live music going in smaller venues such as this former working men’s club.

Thanks, Joe – that gig was memorable.

ARE we all turning vegan? This possibly scary thought arises after certain happenings lined themselves up like spice jars on a dusty kitchen shelf.

First happening: the unpleasant vegan cauliflower curry I made the other weekend to please my vegetarian wife. I hope never to cook or eat that meal again, even though other meals by that weekend supplement writer have been good. The curry pleased my vegetarian wife only mildly and greatly displeased me and my stomach.

Second happening: the top-notch, and incidentally vegan, dahl I will be eating as soon as I stop typing. This is regularly cooked up from a recipe by Simon Hopkinson, a man on whom you can depend.

Third happening: the row that puffed up around William Sitwell like turmeric spilling from one of those jars on the dusty kitchen shelf.

As outrages go, posh man sacked from posh supermarket magazine for being disobliging about vegans is not much of a story. Sitwell was the long-time editor of the Waitrose Magazine, until his rudeness to a contributor was made public, and he had to resign.

Sitwell got into this meat-free tangle after he spurned an idea for a feature about veganism with what he took to be a joke, writing in an email: “How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy. Force-feed them meat? Make them eat steak and drink red wine?”

The writer asked for an explanation or apology, and, receiving neither, went public with Sitwell’s admittedly not that funny joke. And Sitwell resigned, unseated in a manner he perhaps hadn’t seen coming.

Sitwell, who you may recognise from the BBC1 series Masterchef, has been hailed by some as a martyr to free speech; others have pointed out that he edited a PR puff sheet for Waitrose, and should have realised his words might not please his employers.

My passing interest in this story was snagged by a follow-up in the online version of the i newspaper. This story was built around remarks by a vegan heckler who phoned an LBC talk show, possibly to insert a carrot in the presenter’s ear.

The caller said that Sitwell’s unfunny joke about killing vegans was an example of “food racism” – a form of intolerance that may be new to you, as it was to me.

Perhaps some vegans lack a sense of humour, although I hesitate to pursue that as a theory, because most of the ones I’ve met can still raise a laugh. But still, that “food racism” remark got to me in a way that seems unreasonable.

This is, I think, because the general intolerance in society and politics seems to have bled into food. If that seems to be an inappropriate image to conjure up near a non-meat-eater, some vegan burgers spill ‘blood’ extracted from beetroot (a confusing innovation).

Another reason for meat-eaters, even one who eats meat sometimes only once a week, to feel got at is that veganism has become super trendy.

This is probably a good thing, but it can be annoying, especially if the number of vegans is exaggerated; and if not exaggerated, then waved in our faces so often that it seems you can’t move without tripping over vegan articles, products and proselytisers.

According to a BBC report from last June, research from the Vegan Society suggests there were around 540,000 vegans in Britain in 2016 – up from 150,000 ten years earlier.

That is a remarkable change, but it is still a minority choice, something you could miss thanks to all the articles about how we’re all turning vegan.

Veganism is trendy and trendy things can be annoying, apart from trendy craft beer in tins, which is surprisingly good. One potential problem from all this is that big food firms, including Waitrose, get in on the act by producing vegan ready meals, which are as likely to be healthy as any other ready meal you pop in the microwave.

To answer my opening question, I hope not. But should we eat less meat? Quite possibly, although less than once a week would in my case add up to no meat at all. And however moral I might try to be, or pretend to be, there is no way that I could give up cheese.

Nothing seems surprising today about Elvis Costello going to Nashville to record an album of country covers under the eye of veteran producer Billy Sherrill (writer of Stand by Your Man).

Fans now expect Costello to slide all over the place, but in 1981 he’d released five albums in four years – all post-punk swagger and punchy verbosity, a long way from the buttercream sorrow of country music. Why was the urban pun-slinger and writer of killer songs turning all rhinestone cowboy? Well, he’d always liked country music, and as we now know, he cannot resist doing something different.

That trip to Nashville was filmed by the South Bank Show, and old footage shows the gentlemanly Sherrill trying to understand the smart-alecky young Brit as they record a dozen country songs in what Costello later remembered as a blur. He also found Nashville to be tense and threatening. “That’s probably the lease comfortable I ever felt in America,” he said years later.

The closest cousin to a Costello song on this album is the 90-second blast of opener Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do). The Hank Williams song is a good accusatory fit, delivered in a furious, shoving rush. All the songs are short, if not sweet: mini soundtracks to the shot lives of strangers.

The hits from this album were track two Sweet Dreams and side two opener, Good Year For The Roses. Both survive the years well, and the tearful petals on those roses haven’t dropped yet.

This was a divisive project: Costello fans didn’t immediately understand why he was recording country; and traditional country fans didn’t much like his Brit shove attitude.

Costello has always been a broadminded musician, even back then when he didn’t quite know his own mind. Listening again all these years later has been a tearful treat.

It’s silly poppy story season again for upholders of propriety and patriotism.

This blog has been going long enough now to have a file of silly poppy stories. Last year’s remembrance blog ran on November 8 under the headline “What’s so funny about peace, love and white poppies?”

It was inspired by the Whitby author GP Taylor stirring up a poppy palaver in a column for the Yorkshire Post.

“Remembrance,” he wrote or possibly fumed, “is increasingly being seen as a glorification of violence, tinged with the toxic aroma of ardent nationalism.”

He then had a pop at the “snowflake generation”, calling on that unpleasant insult to young people, and complained that teachers were forcing white poppies on children. This turned out to be a reference to a story in the Daily Telegraph. That tale had alleged that the Peace Pledge Union, which promotes white poppies, had signed up 100 teachers who belong to the National Union of Teachers.

Wind back a year, and on November 3 we had: “Another year, another poppy row.”

That poppy row was about a ban on footballers wearing poppies. Fifa had decreed that English and Scottish players could not wear poppies when the teams met on Armistice Day.

Put the clocks back another year to November 3 2015, and this blog ran with “When did we get so silly about poppies?”

This was a double-header. First up, actor Sienna Miller caused so-called offence by forgetting to wear a poppy while exchanging salty sofa-bound chitchat on the Graham Norton show.

And poppy row number two was another footballer row. For variety’s sake, this time it was about a player who didn’t want to wear a poppy. The Northern Irish footballer James McClean refused to wear a poppy on his shirt while playing for West Brom.

This year’s model is a tweet from the Tory MP Johnny Mercer. Last week he laid into people who wear white poppies as “attention seekers” who should be ignored. “If you don’t want to wear a poppy don’t bother; they fought and died so you could choose. But don’t deliberately hijack its symbolism for your own ends.”

Oh, here we go again. Another believer in respect behaving in a disrespectful manner while believing they are doing the proper thing.

What is it about white poppies that gets some people so aerated? Red poppies were first worn in 1921 to remember those who fought and died in the First World War. The white poppy was first worn 12 years later, in 1933, making it almost as old as the red poppy – and hardly a product of the so-called snowflake generation.

Both poppies remember those who served and those who fell. That should be enough to bring on a moment of thoughtful retrospection – not yet another by-numbers rant from a military-minded Tory MP.

On the BBC website there is a photograph of someone wearing both colours of poppy, the white one laid above the red. That seems to be an appropriate matching of the two: respectful of those we lost, and respectful too of the idea that no one should die in wars (a good hope, but, sadly, a hopeless one).

On the website of the Peace Pledge Union, Symon Hill dismisses the idea that his organisation is hijacking anything. “White poppies were founded in 1933 by women who had lost loved ones in World War One and who felt that the red poppy was moving away from the original message of ‘never again’.”

Both poppies are a symbol of respect, and sensible people who aren’t fuming Tory MPs should be able to see that. As has been written here before, I shall take Remembrance Day to recall my grandfather Bill Cole, who wouldn’t fight but instead carried the injured and the dying on stretchers at the Somme.

Private reflection is important; public reflection is important. Seeking out ridiculous stories about supposed lack of respect is in the end the ultimate act of disrespect. They died so you can have this silly row every year. No, we should be better than that, and on the quiet most of us are.