Is it ever wrong to use humour to deflect a difficult or even gruesome happening? A confluence of events runs into the making of this passing thought. Donald Trump’s bad hair day is in there somewhere, along with the latest edition of Have I Got News For You on BBC 1.

HIGNFY is a long-term favourite in this house. The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 is often funnier, but I’m always drawn back to Merton and Hislop and co.

Last Friday’s show was guest presented by broadcaster Steph McGovern. She described how creepy Trump was when she interviewed him. She said Trump told her she was so beautiful that he would have to leave the room to make himself look better, otherwise people would only be looking at her. Yup, that’s creepy.

What bothered me wasn’t that, for Trump-baiting never goes amiss around here. No, it was an uncomfortable attempt to find humour in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashgoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Some things are beyond a Friday night giggle, and that’s one of them. Then again, the Sunday Independent (the Irish paper I work on two days a week) has a top columnist called Gene Kerrigan, who wrote a grimly humorous little column, headlined (by someone or other) “Mohammad Bin Voldemort says his hands are clean”. Kerrigan’s Harry Potter joke was a reference to the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, the man many believe to have been behind the murder.

That column managed to be amusing and damning and shaming, all at once: an occasion when throwing humour at something dreadful worked.

Now we come to Trump’s hair and his remarkable ability to make himself the centre of everything: even hours after the shocking mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Trump arrived at the Future Farmers of American convention in Indianapolis with his hair looking out of place. His usually immaculately weird head-top architecture was looking a little less immaculately weird than normal.

Trump told the gathered future farmers he’d nearly cancelled as he’d been standing in the rain making a statement about the shooting. That had left him with a “bad hair day” (is there ever a good day for that orange mop?), but he went ahead, choosing to quip: “At least you know it’s mine…”

No one else would want it, Donald.

Trump’s tone on such occasions is always so horribly wrong. At a time when he should be leading by solemn example, he jokes about his hair – even as the bodies were still being wheeled away.

Earlier, Trump had made the sort of statement he usually does on such grim and frequent occasions in the US. He said that the synagogue should have had an armed guard, and blathered about the death penalty.

It comes to something when the US President thinks that a child’s naming ceremony should have an armed guard; and to somehow imply that the lack of one almost makes it the synagogue’s fault.

Such shooters often kill themselves (a self-imposed death sentence that removes the need for a federal one). In this case, the alleged gunman, Robert Bowers, survived and is in custody. US media reported that he had shouted: “All Jews must die” as he carried out the attack.

If you have a culture where guns are acceptable, even encouraged; if you have a culture where the president spouts hate and then blames the media for being hateful; then combustion will occur when an unbalanced person grabs a weapon.

Without all those guns, these all-too regular shootings wouldn’t happen; but America does have all those guns and they aren’t going away. Sorting that out will take someone wiser than a president who quips about his quiff on the day that innocent people died at what should have been a happy ceremony.

One of the Wednesday morning students is squatting in my past. She lives down Walmgate way in a massive student block.

My old newspaper used to stand there, until it shuffled down the street to a small new building erected behind an old one; and student city set up camp where the keyboards used to tap and clatter.

A curious circularity of events.

Where once a newspaper stood students now lay down their heads, some of them after spending the day learning how to write stories. Where once the presses rushed, young people gather, sometimes after telling their Wednesday morning lecturer that their head isn’t in the right place for writing.

I didn’t point out that my head is rarely in the right place nowadays, bobbing between York, Leeds and Howden, with the odd trip out for an interview.

The freelance bit of my head-spinning this-and-that life took me to Holbeck in Leeds yesterday, and let’s pause to thank the sainted sat-nav: without it, I’d still be U-turning down a grey confusion of streets.

That ghost newspaper office beneath student city was once bursting with journalists and photographers busy filling the paper with news; barely 100 yards away, printers turned their work into a printed paper.

First, they came for the printers, seen off by technology – and, yes, by journalists who could do their old job armed only with a keyboard. Briefly the journalists were in command, without being paid a penny extra. And then they came for us, picking us off one by one, or occasionally by half-a-roomful.

There is another ghost newspaper office in York, as you can see if stand across the River Ouse and look at the City Screen cinema. Etched in stone high on the cinema wall are the words: “The Yorkshire Herald.”

Walk up the stairs to the screens, turn right and pause for a moment. A tiled wall remains from the old building that once housed Yorkshire Evening Press. And that roughly is where the features desk was back in the 1980s when this boy from Bristol/Cheadle Hulme/South East London rolled up, intending only to stay a year or two. The paper moved to Walmgate a year later; then moved again after 25 years or so.

Those two ghost newspaper buildings in York were once filled with people; the pleasant new building reportedly grows emptier by the week.

One of the old crew has died, aged 94 – an innings to shame those of us who feel we’re getting on a bit in our early 60s.

A nice tribute ran on the website this week under the headline, “Farewell to York Press legend, Jack Childe, 94.”

I didn’t know Jack as well as some but do recall the impish humour mentioned in the piece by deputy editor Stuart Martel.

Richard Johns, a fellow refugee from that newspaper, had fond memories of working with Jack, saying: “He had a great sense of humour and was a real gentleman. A dying breed indeed. RIP Jacko.”

Here’s something I do remember about Jack. He used to say, at least I’m sure he did, that commas were like nuns: they come in pairs.

I won’t pass that on to the students, as it’ll only confuse them.

Many other newspaper ghosts are available, some still living and others located on an inky cloud, or to wherever it is that old journalists make their final ascension.

Richard Thompson is an unlikely sort of guitar hero, with that beret and grey goatee combo, his T-shirt and black sleeveless denim jacket, and black jeans. But what he can do with a guitar is truly heroic.

Every fret of that song-worn Stratocaster is touched, every note played and bent. Thompson takes the guitar on a furious whirl, spinning out delicate flurries of acoustic notes or brewing up an electric storm, crashing harmony into discord.

Last night’s concert was with his electric trio. “It’s a large trio,” he said at the start, pointing out that his guitar technician had somehow wormed his way into the band.

“But it’s OK – he’s on the album as well.”

Thompson is a droll fellow, on stage and in interviews. Before introducing one song, he said: “This next one is off an album none of you bought – thanks.”

Someone in the audience shouted: “We did.”

Thompson quipped back: “I haven’t named it yet.” The album was called Acoustic Rarities. “And I know the name of every single person who bought that.”

The song when it came was “They Tore The Hippodrome Down”.

The banter is always part of it, but we came for the songs, and what songs they are: Thompson is a master songwriter as well as one of the greatest players around.

“We’ll play the stuff we want to play,” he said at the start. “Then we’ll play the stuff you want to hear.”

The jerky, menacing “Bones of Gilead” kicks things off, from the excellent new 13 Rivers album. We had to wait for album opener “The Storm Won’t Come”, a song of building tension and stoppered impatience that ends with a furious guitar workout that blows in like the storm just arrived. “The Rattle Within” was also given an airing.

First of the (relatively) older songs was “Take Care The Road You Choose” from 2007’s Sweet Warrior, with the first full solo of the night, a most melodic affair.

Interspersed with the new stuff was a sample of classic Thompson: “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, “Persuasion”, the lovely “Beeswing”, “Wall of Death”, and a 50^th-anniversary outing for “Meet On The Ledge” – a timeless anthem written when he was 18, then released the following year.

“That means I’ve just given my age away,” he said.

A song that should last forever, and one containing the sort of truths you touch on as a teenager without quite knowing why.

When you’ve written as many songs as Thompson has, you can take your pick. Star billing last night was given to “Put It There, Pal” from his hefty double album You? Me? Us? A snarl of a song and delivered here with teeth bared and the most furiously brilliant guitar solo.

That’s his thing, furious brilliance. He takes a song and spins it around his head, wielding and welding the notes and the chords and the choruses, spinning until that song almost goes out of control. But it never does, because here is a man who knows exactly what he is doing.

Also in the mix last night was “Guitar Heroes”, a song that nods to his teenage guitar nerd self – and to the 69-year-old guitar nerd that boy became. This homage to Django, Les Paul, Chuck Berry, James Burton and the Shadows is much better live than on the album, Still. “Yeah, as in still at it,” as Thompson once quipped.

And he still is and thank the gods of rough and tender music for that.

His regular band of drummer Michael Jerome and bassist Taras Prodaniuk throw everything into helping Thompson brew up that storm.

OH, I’ve been trying to wean myself off feeling disgusted about Donald Trump; same way with Brexit. But those terrible twins of the modern age keep standing in the way and spoiling the view.

Trump has for days now been blowing cold and even chillier over the death of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. One dead journalist doesn’t account for much in Trump’s press-hating, journalist baiting world – a shadowed place where cameras are summoned to record his every stupid word, but prying journalists and their inconvenient questions are shunned and despised.

Now Saudi Arabia has finally admitted that Khashoggi died in their consulate in Istanbul. And that leaves Trump in a bind: does he condemn this cruel and outrageous act against a journalist or does he impose sanctions on his Saudi mates?

Oh, go on – you guess.

Trump says any retribution won’t include cancelling “$110bn worth of work, which means 600,000 jobs”. And by work, he means arms sales, as weapons are the main currency when dealing with the Saudis.

A murky pool all round, but let’s concentrate on what Trump says about journalists. While Khashoggi’s death was only still a dark and gruesome rumour, Trump told supporters at a rally in Montana that it was okay to attack journalists. He said of Republican congressman Greg Gianforte, who was charged for an unprovoked assault on Guardian political reporter Ben Jacobs – “He’s my guy.”

So a politician who’s prepared to shove and assault journalists is just the guy Trump wants to have around him. A bit of praise thrown like raw meat to his braying supporters – and another incitement from Trump for his supporters to hate all journalists.

Advocates of press freedom, journalists and the British government have chorused what the Guardian characterises as their “dismay and disgust” at Trump’s remarks.

Journalists across the States took to social media – their drug of choice, even as it eats away at journalism – to condemn Trump. To pick on one, here is Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times, speaking on Twitter: “Gianforte is a criminal. He pled guilty to [assault]. The president is congratulating a criminal on committing a crime.”

According to an Ipsos poll conducted in August 44 per cent of Trump supporters believe the president should be able to close news outlets for “bad behaviour”. And bad behaviour is basically any story of which Trump disapproves. In short, anything that’s not on the fawning Fox News.

A month before that poll, a gunman went into The Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland and shot five people at the newspaper. Jarrod Ramos said to have had had a long-running dispute with the paper. It is not possible to say that Trump’s attacks on journalists and what they do caused that shooting. But it is possible to imagine that pouring hatred on journalists in a country full of guns might not end well.

Being a journalist can be like any other job. But it can also be dangerous. The Committee to Protect Journalists calculates that 44 journalists have died so far this year. Four of those were among the dead in Maryland.

Trump can’t bring himself ever to praise journalists, even dead ones, preferring to stir up hatred in a self-serving bid to preserve himself and his deeply questionable ways.

MRS Maybe had another fruitless day out in Brussels. She came, she saw, she failed to conquer the usual fine-sounding platitudes, and then she left empty-handed while declaring that real progress had been made. She was not invited to the EU dinner, so maybe she packed Brexit sandwiches made from old meat paste found at the back of the cupboard.

I’ve been swearing off the B-Plan Diet lately, as it has the dreary consequence of making one feel empty and bloated at the same time. But today I’ve risked another mouthful.

All that emerged from yesterday was the suggestion that the transition period could be extended by a year to keep the Irish border open.

The Brexit-bonkers newspapers are flapping their arms about this, along with the Brexit bonkers Tory MPs (to avoid accusations of stereotyping, Brexit-bonkers Labour MPs are available, but are fewer in red-faced number).

The now marginally less Brexit-bonkers Daily Mail goes for: “Another year in Brexit limbo” while the Sun chunters about: “Brextra time”. I reckon my ex-colleague Georgie Greig, newly installed in the editor’s office at the Mail, is on to something there: but never mind another year, Brexit threatens to be an unending limbo, an endless nowhere land, a dry desert where over-hyped hopes go to die.

The Sun reckons the possibility of staying “under the control of the EU” for another year “runs the risk of infuriating hardline Brexiteers within the Conservative Party”. Oh, do come off it! Those hardline Brexiteers are permanently infuriated; they wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning without being infuriated; they wouldn’t expend such energy bashing the top of their boiled eggs without being infuriated.

Indeed, one of the big problems all the way along has been that the whole debate/row/scuffle has been driven by an infuriated minority.

Still, let’s remember those wise words of Dr Liam Fox, who said on the BBC Today programme on July 20, 2017 that a post-Brexit free trade deal with the EU should be the “easiest in human history”. Way to go there, Liam; any more predictions up your sleeve?

The other night on the BBC news, 10 voters from Swansea – five remain voters and five leave voters – were invited for a catch-up. It was a slight piece, but one thing struck me. One of the leavers said that Brexit had to go ahead because “more than half the country had voted for it”.

The leavers did win, no point denying that: but the margin was 1,269,501votes and that doesn’t constitute half of the country by a long way. In Yorkshire, often seen as a leave stronghold, the leave majority was 422,639 – decisive for sure, but still not massive.

Although some on the left dislike the EU, seeing it as a bosses’ club and so forth, the tenor of the Brexit debate has been set by Brexit-bonkers Tories with their wet-dream fantasies about the outcome, along with their internal slanging matches. A matter of great importance for the country is being dictated to by the internal politics of a bitterly divided political party whose membership is dwindling by the day.

Brextra time will probably be the least of it.

The put-upon donkeys of Santorini were towards the back of last Saturday’s Guardian. An accompanying photograph showed the steep rise from the old port. The sea sparkled deep, the buildings shone white against the blue.

And a pair of weighty male tourists sat astride two of the over-burdened beasts, carrying cameras and an incidental metaphor about tourism.

This story spoke to me in different ways. Partly, it spoke to a long-lost version of me: young, a bit adventurous, a bit lonely, and drawn to Greece in the summer. First with a good schoolfriend, staying on Crete, and other years solo with a sleeping bag and a small tent.

I don’t remember much about Santorini; not even if I had that tent or just a sleeping bag. Here is what I do remember, or think I do. The sand where I slept was black, the sea deep blue, the buildings hard white in the sunshine. And I recall that haul from the old port where the ferry from Athens dropped off the backpacks with young people attached.

As used to happen then, and seemingly still does, the locals wanted you on those donkeys. Being young, fit and broke, I carried on walking.

Santorini is a volcanic island of great beauty and a place blessed/cursed by tourism. And those donkeys have had enough. The demands of carting sometimes overweight cruise passengers up the hill from the port to Fira has resulted in a record number “spinal injuries, saddle sores and exhaustion”.

Greece was slow to act, but tardy legislation by veterinarians at the ministry of agriculture will now make it illegal for owners to burden animals with “any load exceeding 100 kilograms or one-fifth of [their] weight”. Obese cruise-lovers beware.

Those knackered donkeys stand as an image for the insatiable nature of tourism. Not so many tourists went to the island in the days when I slept in the beach in the early 1980s. Were the backpackers in their early or mid-twenties helping the island or being a nuisance? Hard to say now, but the nuisance has moved on a pace since then.

The island is now a magnet for cruise ships, those weird floating cities that loom over the world’s precious places. If you have seen photographs of these top-heavy behemoths dwarfing the fragile antiquity of Venice, you will know the picture.

From 2021, huge cruisers over 55,000 tonnes will be banned from Venice city, banished instead to dock on the mainland at Marghera.

On the day of writing, four cruise ships were due to dock at Santorini, according to the island’s cruise ship calendar: the Mein Schiff, the Rhapsody of The Seas, the Seabourn Odyssey and the Coast Deliziosa. The island reportedly receives 800,000 cruisers a year, according to Santorini’s Cruise Ship Timetable; and for ‘cruisers’ read people, as there can’t be that many ships, even in a world increasingly obsessed with cruising.

Going on a cruise used to be grand and expensive; now it is commonplace and not so expensive. Whether this is good or not depends on perspective. I won’t ever go on a cruise, but that’s not for high-minded reasons so much as that my wife won’t tolerate the notion: her idea of hell is to be cooped up on a ship with too much food and drink. “You’ll have to go on you own,” she says.

I might well like a cruise, while also feeling guilty about bruising the environment. Then again, I’d love to fly more, as we did last year on a trip to Australia – and that damages the world, too.

There isn’t an easy way to balance the desire to travel with the problems it can inflict on those who are visited.

Giving the donkeys of Santorini a break is a good start, or at least the cruisers could go on a diet (not easy on a cruise, apparently). Next year, the lovely Greek island will limit to 8,000 a day the number of cruisers who can visit. Cruises can’t be stopped, and neither should they, but they should be made to account for the harm they do the once-quiet places they loom over.

Another royal baby, I can hardly contain the excitement. Oh, hang on a second. That opening sentence has been affected by an enthusiasm malfunction…

Sharp-eyed readers, should such a visitor be standing before this here ledge, will notice a cut-and-paste intro borrowed from Saturday’s blog about the royal wedding – well, we are all told to recycle nowadays.

The baby news was apparently revealed to the inner royal cabal at Saturday’s wedding, but they were asked to keep it to themselves. Instead the pregnancy was announced yesterday as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – just had to check they aren’t the Baron and Baroness of Brighton, or something – flew into Sydney on their first overseas tour.

Meghan’s pregnancy is making headlines across the globe, apparently. And what hope does a sighing man on a ledge have when faced with that reaction?

My usual response to the trumpeted arrival of royal babies can be summed up as: “nice for them, so what for the rest of us”. But this isn’t a popular view. Just now over her morning cup of tea, my wife said: “Well, it will be a very attractive baby.” And that’s the sort of thing normal people say, rather than scowling and muttering out loud at the fuss.

She also said that Meghan couldn’t afford to hang around, thanks to her age. That was in response to my tart observation that she’d done her duty and set about providing another royal sprog in record time.

Easier it would be to surrender and join in the swooning fuss. I like babies, loved our three (still do, naturally) and without babies the world would grind to a halt. Is it just that the arrival of each new prince/princess ensures the survival of the royals? Maybe, but a lifetime of grumbling about the royal family has got me nowhere and seen them thrive. It is hard not to conclude that one of us is wasting our time.

Let’s try to swap that frown for a crown. Harry and Meghan have been given baby presents already, which is nice, although if one thing can be said about royal babies, it is that they don’t need any presents. But baby Ugg boots do sound quite cute, and very Australian – and more befitting than, say, a baby-sized can of Fosters.

Another present comes from the Daily Telegraph, in the form of the gift-wrapped headline: “Heir Dinkum!” Should this news be puzzling to you, we are talking about the Australian Daily Telegraph. Our own Telegraph prefers to splash on whatever self-serving words Boris Johnson has just swilled up in his weekly column (for the writing which, astonishingly, he is paid £270,000 a year; that is approximately £270,000 a year more than I earn on this lonely ledge).

Well, good on that Aussie headline writer – a clever play on words.

The West Australian goes with the more standard newspaper-speak of “True blue baby joy.”

Our own papers are fully of baby-themed purple prose, none more so than the Daily Mail. This leads with the headline “Oh, baby!” and then, rather heroically, manages to fill 11 pages and an eight-page supplement with stories about one woman’s pregnancy.

The Daily Star, a paper best glanced at from behind the sofa, goes with “Meggers preggers” – a headline that manages to be both grubby and unnecessary. Tabloid newspapers have always invented their own language, and sometimes to brilliant effect, although not in this case.

So that’s your lot. Another royal sprog. Read all about it for the next eight months. And that’ll just be the start of it…

Another royal wedding, I can hardly contain the excitement. Oh, hang on a second. That opening sentence has been affected by an enthusiasm malfunction. It should read “can hardly raise an eyebrow off the carpet for lack of interest”.

Apologies all round if you are agog with anticipation at the prospect of the second daughter of the Queen’s third child marrying a man who acts as a tequila ambassador.

I was previously unaware such a job existed. It is common for countries to have ambassadors; now tequila bottles have them, too.

Jack Brooksbank’s official job title is “tequila brand ambassador” for George Clooney’s tequila brand, Casamigos. Princess Eugenie’s job description is being one of those two princesses most sensible people cannot tell apart.

Here is her own take on this. She and elder sister Beatrice are both “just young women trying to build careers and have personal lives… but also princesses”. Vogue was the lucky recipient of that illuminating nugget of self-unawareness in an interview conducted to mark her engagement to the man with all the tequila bottles.

Still, it’s been an age since we had a royal wedding. Oh, hang on, it’s been a blink or two since Prince Harry married that attractive American divorcee with the troublesome relatives. Five months, if you wish to split hairs or indeed heirs.

Prince Harry marrying Meghan Markle was a big thing if you like sort of big thing; a bit of a bore if you didn’t. Now Harry’s 28-year-old cousin is having her bit of a royal do at St George’s Chapel in the grounds of Windsor castle. Her bash seems just as grand as that of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (I do hope those titles are right).

Quite why the second child of the Queen’s third son needs such a lavish wedding is a mystery to anyone who isn’t a young woman trying to build a career while also being a princess.

Thousands of well-wishers are expected to line the streets, according to the BBC. But perhaps not if they’ve read the Daily Express. The Express website predicts that the wedding is going to be a “HORROR WASHOUT” (their excitable capitals, not mine).

If that suggests the sort of film where you keep your eyes closed, I guess the same thing applies with this wedding. Or it would do if I had been unlucky enough to win a ticket in the ballot to admit 1,200 members of the public.

Proud dad Prince Andrew/the Duke of York is said to have harangued the BBC about covering the event. The Beeb stuck fast in declining his kind if persistent offer, and that job now falls to ITV. Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford are the lucky pair employed to wave the bunting and summon up the gravitas from somewhere or other.

George Clooney will be there, looking out for his tequila brand; and the Beckhams will be there, as they always are, looking out for their brand (hopefully David won’t break the speed limit on the way to Windsor). Robbie Williams and his missus will be there; Prince Philip might not be, depending on how he feels this morning, reportedly.

Whatever happens, it will be a lovely day for Princess Eugenie, weather horror stories excepted, just of limited interest to almost anyone else. Even the royal-groupies must be having a harder time of it. The Princess Eugenie ‘party masks’ don’t look that alluring, and the ordinary young woman princess perhaps lacks a certain sparkle.

This might all seem a bit mean, I guess. But if you struggle with supporting the main show, summoning up any enthusiasm for a royal support act is a step too far.

And what will this cost us? Reports suggest the policing bill could run to £2m and I doubt the bride’s father will be dipping his hand into his wedding trousers.

The weird thing is, if I’d been Eugenie and the tequila man, I’d have wanted a lovely quiet wedding somewhere lush and out of the public eye. Not the full-blown royal do that leaves everyone wondering, “What was all that about, then?”

HERE’S what you look like if you think it’s a good idea to go straight from the squash court to a game of badminton.

Our weekly shuttlecock convention has been disrupted by the return of the students to the university. Unreasonably, they want to use their sporting facilities.

The regular badminton game is moving around for now, and after missing last week’s session, an opportunity pops up. Play the Wednesday game of squash, then join two of the usually larger crew who have hired a badminton court for an overlapping hour.

First, I suffer/enjoy 40 minutes of squash against the unconquerable one (losing 4:1). In fairness to the one who is never beaten, it’s not that he’s unconquerable so much as me being all too conquerable.

It’s the getting cross that does it. However chirpy the mood at the beginning, that long line of defeats queue up to mug my confidence. Once I start losing, that’s it: another sweaty tragedy.

The games are good and close, but I still lose; and between points I still call myself out for being an idiot; the usual self-sabotaging stuff.

Game over, and I walk downstairs into the sports hall. With the badminton I do try to contain the crossness. I hardly ever drop a racket nowadays, although there may be muttering. The first game is a bit of a massacre, so maybe there is a mutter or two. The sitting-out friend mildly tells me off for being too hard on myself, as I’d just been playing squash. The second game is close, but both are lost.

That makes the final joint tally: six games lost, one game won.

We’re told to keep fit as we age. And this is my possibly idiotic contribution. It won’t be a regular thing and hopefully the games will appear on different nights again soon. But I couldn’t resist the idea, even if I did end up in a puddle of defeat.

Bits of me do ache nowadays, but I keep those aches on the move. A recent weekend away in the Dales saw my knees heckling me for a week after a tough 13-mile walk, but there you go.

I’m the eldest of three boys and we all try to stay active. But the middle brother told our mother that I am too old to play squash. I’d better not tell him about the squash/badminton double. If it comes up, I’ll tell him that my other squash opponent has five years on me.

After badminton, there is no one else in the changing room, so I take the sweaty selfie.

WHAT’S more important to our future: the Strictly curse or scientists making a final call on rising global temperatures? Oh, Strictly beats the planet’s last waltz by a mile, if the front-page headlines are to be believed.

An illicit embrace between partners on the BBC’s dance show garnered many headlines yesterday, followed by a fresh slew today. The Strictly curse, should you not be up to newspaper speed, is the supposed relationship-wrecking attraction that can arise between the show’s stars.

That frilly bit of betrayal won far more headlines yesterday than scientists issuing the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures. Only the Guardian and the i newspaper put the call from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on its front pages, although the BBC news led with the story.

A skim of today’s coverage of this important issue (the world potentially ending, not sequined snogs) runs from the Guardian declaring that the unstable climate presents an existential threat to the world, to the Spectator website complaining that the “climate change doomsday warnings are sure to backfire”.

The science is both clear and confusing: clear in that all respectable research suggests we have a problem; confusing in that naysayers are willing to sew doubt by picking holes in those findings. When one of those naysayers is the president of the US, you know we are in trouble.

That IPCC report charts the impacts of a 1.5C rise in warming and lays down the dangers of breaching that limit. Yet in the Guardian this morning, climate scientists warn that the IPCC report could be underplaying those risks by not paying enough attention to the tipping points that could see a “runaway spiral of climate change”.

It is all very confusing; yet can we really ignore the rising thrum of alarm coming over the horizon? The argument put forward by the Spectator suggests an obese person warned to lay off the cream cakes who wakes to greet another day with the thought “not dead yet” – and celebrates with a fry-up and double chocolate eclairs for elevenses.

Just because the worst hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean that it won’t.

The IPCC advises that keeping warming to 1.5C instead of two degrees reduces the impact of climate change in important ways. But even do that needs huge changes to the way we use energy, manage land and transport ourselves.

That requires international cooperation on a massive scale – something that is difficult when dealing with the Trumps of this threatened world. Much easier to say that climate change is all nonsense, fake news and a put-up job by the Chinese.

Should you be thinking, well, at least we’re not as bad as Trump, perhaps another thought should be slotted in.

Sure, we’re not as bad as Trump – hardly anyone is. But Britain has just jailed three environmental activists who took part in a peaceful demonstration at a fracking site in Lancashire. The sentences of between 15 and 16 months have been described as “excessive and extraordinary” by Mike Schwarz, a lawyer who has represented Greenpeace for more than 20 years.

Not only that, but the fracking site operated by shale gas company Cuadrilla is only in operation because the government overturned a decision by Lancashire county council. In conspiracy theory shorthand: one arm of the government imprisons peaceful protesters, while another over-turns local democracy to force fracking on an area.

All that at a time when we should be looking to greater use of green energy; not blasting and blowing through the earth to extract a short-term supply of gas.