I HAVE just returned from hearing about crime fiction all day to discover a most appalling domestic mystery.

The house is empty, apart from a bad smell in the kitchen. As the room is small, we keep the bin outside the door. It’s a big bin and sometimes sits in the sunshine.

This arrangement seems to be the likely suspect. I empty the bin and replace the black bag.

Next morning, the smell is still there. I remove the black bag, wash out the bin, as bits of food sometimes fall to the bottom, splash on a bit of bleach and put the bag back. Job done, and thanks for the applause.

Later, my wife is doing brunch before we head off to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the temporary theatre in York. She has conjured up a spicy tomato sauce. The plan then is to drop eggs into the mixture for a Mexican-style breakfast.

As the first egg goes in, she worries about the smell and scrapes everything away from the pan. The next egg goes into a glass first, and that looks odd and smells off, too. One of the eggs is cracked across the top.

I bought these eggs on Thursday at the shop where my wife works. There are always good eggs, big, fresh and brown. What’s gone wrong?

It is then that we spot the flaw in our domestic arrangements. The eggs are kept in a china hen on the windowsill. In this crazy weather, they have cooked inside their home, heated by the constant sunshine.

It’s always been a fine place to keep eggs before, but not now.

We eat the now egg-free breakfast, hoping for nothing amiss, and escape without unfortunate consequences.

All this has left me wondering where you should keep eggs. According to the Good House keeping website, they should be kept in the fridge, but not in those egg-shaped slots in the door, as the temperatures varies too much in that part of the fridge. Not so much as inside a china hen on a hot windowsill, but there you go.

I’d always thought eggs shouldn’t be kept in the fridge, and now I’m not so sure, although we do have an attractive home for them.

Anyway, the hen has been thoroughly washed and moved to a dresser in a cooler part of the house. The eggs should be fine there.

The appalling smell has gone so the accidentally coddled eggs were to blame, not the bin, although the bin has been moved away from the door.

This incident leaves me thinking about the thin line between nutritious food and something so vile it would make you ill. Meat, fish and eggs are all only a short step away from being horribly off, while cheese takes its time, unless you’re talking about brie or camembert on a hot day, when the process occurs before your eyes (and nose).

None of this puts me off eating any of these foods or risks turning me vegan, as the prospect of ‘munching’ on a mouldy carrot is just as intestinally off-putting.

To call someone a ‘bad egg’ is to use an old-fashioned expression that implies they are not a very nice person. When applied to an egg that’s gone off, it is just the word you need. And believe me, the smell is awful.

Now to the theatre. The pop-up Shakespeare theatre has popped in the awful car park that insults Clifford’s Tower.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, should you be reading this in York, is very good, by the way. The production has a spot of gender fluidity in the roles of Titania and Oberon, with the male and female roles being swapped by the spell, and the comic business with the mechanicals at the end is properly funny.

Tickets are expensive, but it’s worth going, and we fancy returning for Macbeth if we can rustle up the readies. As for those eggs, what’s done, is done – as Lady Macbeth puts it. Where she kept her eggs is unknown.

Lee Child fits the character he created, that noble rough wanderer Jack Reacher. Child is a regular at Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, tall and slim, cigarette in hand – taller still in his cowboy boots. Those of us at the shorter end of the stalls might wonder why such a tall man needs cowboy boots, but Lee Child carries it off.

He has a sort of mid-Atlantic drawl now, as an American Englishman or an English American, and always has something to say, something funny or cutting or surprising – “My hidden secret is that I love ironing.”

Child chaired this year’s crime writing festival in at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate.

It’s a cheerful occasion. If you want to see blood on the walls, go to a festival of romance writers – or the crime writers like to say.

If you’ve never attended and wonder what happens, here goes. There’s no writing for a start, as writing isn’t a spectator sport. The bloody nub of it is that hundreds of people sit in a large room while the writers natter on the stage.

In theatrical terms, this doesn’t sound like much, but it delivers. Writers love to talk about their books and writing in general, so the festival tickles their ego – and, once tickled, the writers find much of interest to say.

In Harrogate, there are panels throughout the day. They started this year with Denise Mina, always good value, being interviewed by Stav Sherez (pictured). It was like overhearing an informed chat between two mates in the pub.

And what an odd hair convention: Denise with her trademark spiky grey cut, Stav with his grey cloud and matching beard.

The night before, Stav had won the book of the year for The Intrusions, described as a thriller for the internet age. Stav says: “The Intrusions are the stuff we have all around us – all the static and scatter of TV and phones – everything is impinging on our consciousness and you don’t have time to think.”

Panels this year addressed whether past jobs shape what you write, writing about home and the itinerant wanderer, Reacher-style, who has no home. And that last session brought up a good point from chair Laura Wilson: why are there so few female lone wanderers?

Cath Staincliffe led a session called Write What You Know, and immediately disowned that title, sensibly preferring to ask: “How does life shape fiction?”

The panels are too numerous to list in full – and if I did, you might reasonably wish to murder me. But let’s make room for one of the best sessions, an interview with someone who doesn’t exist, or at least exists only as a writerly game of two halves.

The Saturday sessions began with Nicci French as the special guest, which is to say that Sam Baker interviewed Sean French and Nicci Gerrard, the couple who have written as Nicci French for 21 years now.

The fruitful discussion touched on many things, including the mechanics of how they write. And, no, they never reveal who writes what, but do discuss the process: Nicci up in the attic and Sean in a shed in the garden, with copy emailed between.

If you wonder who might attend such an event, and they do in their thousands, the answer follows: book lovers and writers, and would-be writers, and have-been writers, and might-have-been-more-successful writers.

And I know that last point. My two York-based crime novels about the Rounder Brothers were published locally and then taken up in the US by Minotaur books, where the reviews were good enough, and the sales OK, and then everything sort of petered out.

Listening to all that book chat is inspiring and a little masochistic. There can’t be many writers who don’t wonder what it would be like to be up on that stage, to join the successful gang, but there you go. And even successful writers remain anxious and insecure.

My writing continues, a new novel is almost ready to send out, with one lucky publisher prepared to have a squint at it. I have never stopped writing and can lay my hand on assorted abandoned projects: anyone want a time-slipping murder tale with a York Mystery Plays theme? Probably not, and that’s a year or so I won’t get back.

As a published author who isn’t much published right now, my advice is simple and can be wrapped up in five words: Stick at it, write often.

As for the festival, the real stars are all those readers who love crime novels. Without them, the writers up on the stage would be talking to themselves.

LYLE Lovett is known for many things, but mostly he is still remembered for his whirlwind romance with the film star Julia Roberts.

They met on a film set in 1993 and married three weeks later. I was already a big fan by then and could never quite get my head around this unlikely romance, although they did have a love of Texas in common.

Lyle Lovett, the tall, stylish and pleasantly weird country singer in his tailor-made suits, married to that glossy film star? The gossips said it wouldn’t last and the gossips were right. The couple divorced amicably after less than two years.

One of my friends, long since dead sadly, was sniffy about Lovett, considering him not to be a ‘proper’ country singer. I didn’t really mind then what sort of country singer he was, and still don’t.

What you get with Lovett are wry, witty and sometimes properly emotional, dusty-booted songs. You also get that lovely song about a horse on water (If I Had A Boat – not on this album).

As the title suggests, this album from 1989 sees Lovett dipping his cowboy boots into country big-band swing, starting with an instrumental burst of Clifford Brown’s The Blues Walk.

After that, the album features Lovett’s own songs, such as the non-sequitur burger café chat of Here I Am, and the raucous banter with singer Francine Reed on What Do You Do/The Glory of Love, and a surprising cover.

Their interplay is fantastic – and even better on the big band live album from 1999, Lyle Lovett: Live In Texas (I only have that on CD so it’s ruled out for this vinyl discussion).

As well as the big, swinging sound, this album does have quieter country moments. Best title goes to the shot of wry sloshed into the glass of I Married Her Because She Looks Like You.

Which Way Does That Old Pony Run is a hymn to the dusty trail, while the album wraps up with the acoustic country-jazz of Once Is Enough, with lovely guitar playing from a musician with the splendid name of DesChamps Hood.

The cover version is Lovett’s take on the Billy Sherrill/Tammy Wynette classic, Stand By Your Man. Smartly, he doesn’t cheat with the lyrics, but belts the song out from the woman’s viewpoint.

Incidentally, according to a quick Google, Lovett got over Julia Roberts and is now with a younger woman called April Kimble, so there you go.

If you don’t know which way Lyle runs, he’s well worth following down that dusty track.

THE news still comes at us like a dark blizzard. President Trump claims he ‘misspoke’ when he supported Putin over his own intelligence agencies; Theresa May survives the latest Brexit cliff-fall thanks in part to four Labour MPs voting her way (the silly toads).

Enough of all this, though. Here are two surprising foreign stories, one an uplifting tale – and the other tragically not. Brexit-weary, Trump-tired eyes will find the full versions on the BBC website.

Here’s the mood-enhancing story. In the US, a company owner gave an employee a new car after he walked all night to make his first day at work.

The day before Walter Carr was due to start his new job for a removal firm, his car broke down. Seeing no other option, he walked 20 miles through the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama and turned up on time.

A police officer – all too often the bad guys in this sort of story – was impressed by Mr Carr’s grit and treated him to breakfast.

The story emerged after Jenny Lamey, a customer of the removals firm, posted on Facebook. She explained how Mr Carr had turned up at 6.30am with the police officer who’d stood him breakfast.

Ms Lamey wrote: “He WALKED ALL NIGHT to get from Homewood to Pelham. Because he needed to get to work. For those reading this that are not local, that’s over 20 miles.

“The police officer said they picked him up earlier that morning, took him to get some breakfast and once they checked his story out, brought Walter to our house.”

She suggested that the young man might want to rest before the moving crew arrived, but he declined and set to work.

The story reports that Mr Carr told her of his childhood in New Orleans, Louisiana, and that his family had moved to Houston, Texas, after their home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“I just can’t tell you how touched I was by Walter and his journey,” Ms Lamey wrote in her Facebook post.

“I can’t imagine how many times on that lonely walk… in the middle of the night did he want to turn back. How many times did he wonder if this was the best idea.”

It is reported that Luke Marklin, the chief executive of the moving company, Bellhops, drove from Tennessee to meet his new employee.

After chatting over coffee, Mr Marklin handed Mr Carr the keys to his own 2014 Ford Escape.

This story made a nice sort of social media splash, going viral with a surge of pleasant energy – rather than the usual bile-flecked fury. A reminder that sometimes social media works in the social way that foolish optimists hoped it might. But the pessimists can take heart: someone would have been trolling or abusing someone else even as those hopeful words were being typed.

The story with the wrong sort of uplift is probably only included here thanks to the headline on the BBC website. Sometimes it seems that the art of the headline has been lost to technology, but this one draws you in… “Brazilian plastic surgeon ‘Dr Bumbum’ on run after patient dies.”

Dr Denis Furtado is a celebrity plastic surgeon, if you can believe such a thing, who is famous for enlarging women’s bottoms. He appears regularly on Brazilian TV and is reported to have 650,000 followers on Instagram.

Investigators report that Dr Furtado carried out the procedure on Lilian Calixto at his home in Rio de Janeiro. She fell ill and died hours later in hospital. Dr Bumbum then disappeared just as a warrant was issued for his arrest.

It is genuinely tragic that someone should die from being dissatisfied with the size of their bottom. My wife accuses me of having a skinny arse. And it’s staying that way.

“THAT man is very strange,” says our Austrian guest. “He looks like, what do you call it…?” Here our visitor mimes washing the floor. “Yes, he looks like a mop.”

It is not always my habit to talk to our Airbnb guests about Donald Trump, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, as that’s all anyone talks about nowadays anywhere in the world, or so it seems. That and the immovable lump of Brexit.

Anyway, after talking Trump with the young American woman the other day, here we are talking Trump (and a bit of the immovable lump) with the young man from Austria.

“He is an idiot,” the Austrian says of the US president, an opinion that is guaranteed a certain universality.

This morning some commentators are saying that Trump is also a “useful idiot” – a phrase that generally refers to someone who is seen as a propagandist for a cause they perhaps do not fully understand.

It was often used of left-wing people who supported communism, so there is something pleasing in seeing ‘useful idiot’ used to disparage a right-wing nutjob president for supporting President Putin, the post-communist leader/virtual dictator of Russia.

Trump’s latest tour has been alarming to world sanity. First, he abuses Nato and then boasts about negotiating a better deal (that had already been agreed by everyone else). Then he stirs up chaos in Britain seemingly to damage the EU (which he later lists as a number one enemy), before shooting off to crawl to Putin in Helsinki, where he supports the Russian leader over his own security services.

Sometimes it is hard to concentrate on all this; sometimes all you want is for the noise to die down; sometimes you wonder if banging your head on the nearest wall might not help; sometimes you just want it all to end.

But you had to concentrate yesterday, for what Trump was saying was remarkable (in an entirely bad way). The American president told the world he didn’t believe his intelligence or law enforcement agents in what they said about Russia interfering in his election to the presidency. He sided with the Russian president against his own country.

This prompted the director of the CIA, John Brennan, to say that Trump’s performance was “nothing less than treasonous”.

In chummy-ing up to the Russian leader, Trump offered victory to Putin and was, in the words of this morning’s Daily Mirror, “acting as Trump’s poodle”.

Trump craves a new world order, in which only the big boys have a say, shoving and back-slapping at the top table. Institutions that have helped keep the peace, or at least helped to give smaller countries a voice, are brushed aside as unnecessary or harmful to the US.

Trump wants to demolish the global order. “He thinks everything is simple and only he knows the answer,” says our Austrian guest, shaking his head over breakfast.

Sometimes laughter is the only refuge. In that spirit, please hunt out something I have already shared on Facebook. Randy Rainbow, an American actor and comedian, is new to me but that man is certainly a discovery.

He has just delivered a mock Gilbert & Sullivan number on the theme “A stable genius of his magnitude deserves an anthem”. It’s brilliant and hilarious – and includes a line that sent me to bed with a smile on my face that was still there in the morning – “He is the very model of a very stable genius/And of all the US presidents he is the Mussoliniest.”

You have to laugh sometimes because the alternative is just too gloomy.

As for the immovable lump of Brexit, our guest says that we voted for it. And then he shrugs…

A young American woman is staying with us and I show her the headlines about her president. It is the morning after Donald Trump lambasted Theresa May in an interview for the Sun.

That interview was headlined “May has wrecked Brexit… US deal is off.” Mrs Maybe and the president then gave an excruciating press conference during which Trump rowed back on everything he’d said to the Sun, lavishly praised his host and said the relationship with her and Britain was some special kind of special.

He also said that the Sun interview was “fake news”. But the Sun had a recording on which Trump could be heard saying exactly what he now says he didn’t say.

The Sun riposte to Trump’s outrageous claim of lying is a good headline up with all the good headlines from its past (far from always the case on that newspaper nowadays) – “Fake schmooze.”

A lot of context for a breakfast chat with an Airbnb guest, but keeping up with Trump is exhausting.

Our guest, who is 23 and a recent graduate, is about to start a new job as a trainee with an international bank in New York.

“That’s what he always does,” she says. “He’s rude about people behind their backs and then takes it all back when they meet.”

Her take on this is that back home people have almost stopped noticing these Trumpian tricks. She also believes that Trump’s outrageous behaviour is beginning to deliver a boost to the Democrats, although the backwoods supporters still love their man.

Our guest is from South Carolina and sounds like an all-American girl, yet appearances can be deceptive. It turns out that she is a Russian immigrant who arrived in the States at the age of 11. Her mother is Russian and her step-father a Trump-supporting American.

“People always asked about the accent,” she says. “And I got tired of telling the same story.”

So she lost the accent.

Chatting to guests over breakfast is the best part of being a host, and I like this guest, as she is pleasant, smart and about the same age as our daughter. She books an Uber that keeps disappearing off her phone. I offer the number of a local taxi firm, but she looks puzzled. She’s from that generation who find anything other than tapping on an app to be a drag. I run her to the station in the end.

It was interesting having a young American to stay during Trump’s visit. She was with us twice over the week, and when she arrived back from Edinburgh, I said that her president had been on the news talking about “Scatt-land” and how much he loved the place and how much the Scots loved him and how he had many properties in “Scatt-land”.

She looked deflated at this news, as if hearing about her president was the last thing she needed after a long journey.

Sometimes it feels that hearing about Trump is the last thing any of us need. Trump is the great distractor and disruptor, a man who sails on a sea of lies, abuse and racism; yet we keep tuning into to what he says, even when it is vile and ridiculous and contracts the last vile and ridiculous thing he just said.

We learned nothing new from his trip to Britain. The deal with Britain is on/off; Theresa May is a terrible prime minister/great woman; oh, and the Queen is a little old woman who can easily be lost behind a lumbering orange lummocks.

Piers Morgan is claiming a world exclusive for his airborne interview with Trump for Good Morning Britain. He says that Trump reveals that the Queen thinks Brexit is a complicated business – breaking royal protocol by telling us something blindingly obvious. I didn’t watch this morning’s interview, not wishing to feel sick before breakfast.

Crawling to Trump with a mock-state visit won’t get us anywhere much, but his visit did leave a few strong pointers. Chief among which is that thinking the US can pull us out of the post-Brexit quagmire is foolish optimism at best.

Actually, Trump’s visit did teach us something valuable. It reminded us how witty the Brits can be in a protest. Some of those banners carried on the mass march through London were a witty delight – as, too, were the responses on Twitter from Scots outraged that Trump said everyone loved him there and they were all glad they’d voted Leave (which of course they didn’t).

Now Trump is off Fake Schmoozing with President Putin, and we all know that he likes an autocratic leader more than a democratically elected one.

FOOTBALL is not coming home. This leaves me unexpectedly sad, although no longer having to hear the words “football’s coming home” will be some compensation.

Football’s going to Croatia or France instead, going somewhere else, as usually happens in the World Cup.

The mood of the moment mixes disappointment with pride in what was achieved. This time was meant to be different; this time we were in with a chance; and this time was different, as we had a good run before everything slipped away again.

England’s bid to reach a first World Cup final since I was ten years old came to nothing after Juventus striker Mario Mandzukic scored in the 109th minute, slotting in from Ivan Perisic’s flick-on into the area.

Thanks to the BBC Sport website for that sporty information, as my football knowledge isn’t up to much more than working out which shirts we are wearing. And knowing for sure that we lost to Croatia, dismissed at half-time by one of the ITV commentators as “not a very good team”.

But I was thrilled – honestly, that doesn’t always happen – by Kieran Trippier’s 20-yard free-kick after five minutes. I was watching by myself as my wife didn’t return from the gym until half-time. After the interval, a bit of England’s vim seemed to have gone, lost in the sweaty spasms of muscle pain, although I don’t think my wife was to blame.

The newspapers are almost universally kind this morning, with ‘heroes’ and ‘pride’ appearing in many headlines. The Daily Telegraph has “Pride of Lions” – a nice, simple and complete headline.

Over at the Mail, a newspaper known for carping, the narrative headline for an inside story is unusually kind, reading: “Yes, it all ended in tears. But they gave us pride – and brought the whole nation together.”

It is a rule in the Man on Ledge handbook of life that suspicion should be steeled whenever the phrase “the whole nation” is used. Those words are so often misappropriated by politicians on the make, especially in these days of over-selling us Brexit (and I bet that’ll go into extra time, too). But I’ll forgive the Mail just this once.

I like this declaration from the Telegraph: “You did us proud. It’s not coming home, but it was great fun while it lasted… Hold your heads high.”

As is more often the case, I also agree with the Guardian. The paper’s anguished view is that in Moscow hopes were shattered and hearts broken. But fans who watched the game on a big screen at home told the paper that Gareth Southgate had “relit the fire”. Yes, and didn’t it need a match or two.

Yes, that seems about right from this rare watcher of football. Southgate is a gentleman manager who quietly went away and rewrote the way England should play and summoned up a collaborative spirit. And he seems to truly care about his young players.

Yes, there is disappointment; and, yes again, the queue of “what ifs” will do a gloomy waltz to the horizon and beyond. But it was fun while it lasted and I do feel a sense of pride.

Will I watch another game of football before the next World Cup in four years? Oh, you never know…

You might think that a man writing a blog sits in peace while bashing out the words, but you wouldn’t always be right.

“I can’t find my keys,” my wife is saying in a pre-work dash. “And the cat’s been sick.”

She has now been reunited with her keys, and the cat’s still been sick. I break off typing to clean up the latest display of feline ill manners. She sits on the garden bench, looking supremely unconcerned. Not my wife, but the cat. My wife has dashed off for her bus looking concerned.

Now, where was I? Ah, yes, here’s what I had just typed. I like Boris Johnson, I’ve always liked him – ah, sorry, the lack of quotation marks could lead to all sorts of bother here. It’s been a distracting morning.

I don’t like that shameless chancer and back-stabbing charlatan at all (Johnson, not the cat). I regard him as a stain on the untucked shirt of British politics. The person expressing admiration for the ex-Foreign Secretary is Donald Trump, and why is that not a surprise?

Ahead of his arrival in Britain tomorrow, with British police massing for the expected anti-Trump demos, the US president was asked if he had spoken to Johnson since his resignation.

“I have not, no, I have not,” Trump said. “Boris Johnson’s a friend of mine, he’s been very nice to me, very supportive and maybe I’ll speak to him when I get over there. I like Boris Johnson, I’ve always liked him.”

What could possibly attract those two to each other, apart from the self-serving, egomaniac charlatanry and lying? And the allegations of sexual misbehaviour. The other night, Panorama ran with an edition titled, “Trump: Is the President a sex pest?” A question that supplies its own answer, but reporter Richard Bilton went ahead anyway and interviewed assorted women who claim Trump is indeed a sexual nuisance.

A whiff of disgrace hangs around Boris Johnson, too. His old editor at the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, described his former Europe correspondent as a “gold medal egomaniac” who had been guilty of “manic sexual adventuring”.

Mind you, Hastings is not without blame, as many of the anti-Europe lies we’ve heard ever since originated in untrue stories Johnson wrote about the EU – fake news, as his presidential mate says, or flaky news.

Anyway, it is hardly surprising that Trump and Johnson should cuddle up to each other in the truth twisters’ self-admiration society. But it is still a surprise, even though it shouldn’t be, the way Trump reduces everything to the personal exchange. The important thing is not what has happened, but just that Trump ‘likes’ Boris Johnson who is “a friend of mine”.

Trump also told reporters that Britain was in “turmoil” – a reference to Brexit, naturally, a departure that Trump originally said was a wonderful thing, but only after Nigel Farage whispered sour nothings in his ear.

Farage, incidentally, has just popped up at the smeared window of British politics to say that he’ll be back to lead Ukip if Theresa May doesn’t get Brexit “back on track”.

How you get something “back on track” when it’s never even touched the rails is another matter, but there you go.

In other news (but only sort of), the Sun reports that the government has drawn up a “secret plan” to stockpile processed food in case of a ‘no deal’ Brexit. Oh, that’s a relief – the government as a secret Spam plan. There’s hopeful nostalgia for you. We can hunker down to making our own future while eating our own cans of Spam.

The cat, incidentally, is still on the bench.

WHILE it would be pushing it to say that Brexit just got interesting, the resignation of David Davis is a tasty plot twist.

The man in charge of the Department for Exiting the European Union has instead decided to exit his job, having taken Brexit-shaped umbrage at the Chequers last-chance saloon.

Last Friday’s meeting has been irresistibly compared to an Agatha Christie novel, the one where all the suspects hand over their mobile phones on arrival and are told that if they don’t agree with Miss Marple-May, they’d be given a card for a local taxi firm and told to take a long walk down the drive to the big gates at the end.

Some have summoned up And Then There We None, and the Chequers edition would certainly be a tempting watch. Who would be left standing at the end? I reckon it is another Christie classic that should grab our attention now – that little-known follow-up, And Then There Was Nonsense. Or maybe it was one of the Hercule Poirot novels, Three Act Tragedy – as renamed for Brexit as Three Hundred and 33 Act Tragedy, a thriller without an end, and not many thrills at all.

This morning’s paper-and-ink sheets were printed before this latest twist in the Tory whodunit, a psychological thriller about a tribe of political cannibals clad in boring suits. This lot take bites out of each other while chuntering about what the people voted for.

Most of the people probably can’t remember what they voted for by now. It is unlikely that many of them voted for endless chaos, backbiting and butter-knives between the shoulder blades – all enacted without getting any closer to the grand denouement where Poirot explains everything. Hercule, please use those little grey cells to untangle the endless, self-harming Brexit blood-fest.

Mind you, Poirot’s from Belgium so the Brexit-besotted Tories such as Jacob Rees-Mogg won’t listen to a word he says.

The newsprint version of the Daily Telegraph leads with “I will vote down May’s Brexit plan, warns Mogg” – a story now as stale as yesterday’s toast.

In my version of And Then There Were None, Mogg would be the first to choke on a hard-boiled Brexit egg. The Tory Brexiteer has spent two years moaning about the progress of something he desperately wanted to happen.

Over at the Brexit-bonkers Daily Express, the headline will raise a dry chuckle in Brussels – “MAY TELLS EU IT’S TIME TO GET SERIOUS.”  Get serious? You can’t even keep hold of the man who’s meant to be in charge.

Mogg and the other leavers are wrapped in a hollow fantasy in which everything would he perfect if only we just went for a hard, Europe-booting Brexit – without ever explaining how that would work, beyond gin-fumed fantasies about breaking free. Details are thinner on the ground than the hairs plastered on Poirot’s skull.

Davis sent Mrs Maybe a tear-stained letter, saying he would not be a “reluctant conscript” to the plan agreed at Chequers. He said the plan was “certainly not returning control of our laws in any real sense”.

The famous board game Cluedo has more than a passing similarity to an Agatha Christie novel. The game is sometimes released in new versions. The latest one is the Brexit edition, marketed under a new product name: Cluelessdo.

I am not exactly a fan of Miss Marple-May, but it is possible to feel sorry for her at times. She and her headache-racked officials spent months trying to come up with a compromise that could move Brexit forwards – only for the Brexiteers to denounce the draft as a betrayal.

If only this were a locked-room mystery, then we could leave them all in there to play out this endless Tory drama.

YORK is a small, beautiful city that resonates with history – or it’s a drunken hellhole full of people urinating and vomiting. Opinion is divided after a notably raucous weekend, caused in part by the heatwave and the races coming together.

The drunken behaviour has been a hot topic all this week and here I must own up. I joined that tipsy throng, although I only had the one pint and then caught the bus home to drink wine and watch television.

It is tempting, if a touch ridiculous, to say that if everyone behaved like that, there wouldn’t be a problem. Don’t all these weaving drunks realise that there are good subtitled crime dramas to watch on BBC4 on a Saturday night with a glass of wine to hand?

In a moment I will put forward an argument for York being a better place than it used to be. But first, here is an eyewitness account from last Saturday that seems to suggest the opposite.

Having been in town early in the evening, we went for the bus. “Let’s walk up Micklegate,” said my wife. Five minutes or so later, she said: “This wasn’t one of my best ideas.”

We were pushing against the tide. Racegoers were streaming down the old street, a rare hill in York. They weaved and tippled around, shoeless and senseless in some cases.

They shouted and were a nuisance, although nothing bad happened. At the bus stop, we sat and watched the flow of people. Many were smartly dressed, although men in suits can still get out of hand, and often do on race days.

On the last race weekend, we were on another bus home when we saw a fight at the station, as a young man enraged or made stupid by drink lashed out at people who appeared to be his friends. The first one to be hit sat on a bench, seeming both hurt and confused, as if he had no idea why he’d been struck.

Last Sunday morning, my wife went to the gym and reported seeing blood in Micklegate and a pub with a smashed window, and shards of glass on the pavement.

My own newspaper ran the drunken York story on its website, drawing initially on what people were saying on social media. And what they were saying wasn’t pretty because it rarely is.

Over the week, this story expanded and later ran under the headline: “Angry residents say York must tackle drunken yobs – but others say there’s no problem.”

While those words are less than snappy, they do suggest a divide in local opinion. Dip into the comments section and you will discover the usual miserable congregation complaining about the world, while endlessly slagging each other off.

A common thread was that the railways were to blame for bringing people to York, especially from the North East. It was possible to detect a class issue here: we don’t want all those pissed-up working-class Geordies in York.

Another thread was the presence of stag and hen parties, and I’ll admit to my own snobbism on this matter. Those hen parties are shockers, the older women in too-shirt skirts and plunging tops, all wearing sashes and weaving around drunkenly.

But then I tick myself off: aren’t people allowed to enjoy themselves as they wish?

Some commentators blame the bars, but there have always been bars and pubs in York, and there has always been drunken behaviour. In the Eighties the piss parade was mostly confined to the Micklegate Run, but then the change in licensing laws allowed the drunkenness to flow throughout the city.

York is popular, and popularity is a blessing and a curse. And I like much about York today, a more varied and interesting city than the one we moved to 30 years ago.

Last Saturday, we ate in SparkYork, a new but temporary food village made from old shipping containers (loved by many, hated by the inveterate moaners), then went for a drink in Brew York. This new brewery is a boon for the city and we will be returning there for its beer festival this weekend.

Many of the new bars, restaurants and cafes in York and locally owned and run, and those are the places we should be supporting.

I don’t claim there aren’t problems, for clearly there are. But those problems have existed for a long time, and York long ago signed a deal with the (drunken) devil thanks to the popularity of its racecourse, and the umbilical link between racing and boozing.