TWO quick dips into reports in The Sun today. One item is that newspaper’s curious take on how Brexit is progressing; the other is Dame Judi Dench swearing (not’ Judy’ as the website’s headline writer puts it – oh you’ll only set her off again with that).

I wonder what Dame Judi thinks of Brexit, and does her view include swearing? As it happens, and I am allowing myself to be distracted here, she believes as follows: “There is something about being inclusive that is more important than being exclusive.”

A sensible enough view, and no swearing. We shall return to what set Dame Judi off in a moment (the fact that a moment ago I mistyped her name as ‘Dane Judi’ might set her off, too – although perhaps she’d get a role in one of those subtitled crime dramas with that name).

I don’t agree with The Sun’s take on Brexit. The paper is one of the ardent Brexit brigade and I am of the opposite persuasion. But we can concur that it’s not going very well or very quickly.

Something strikes for me a wrong note in the paper’s long editorial today about what the paper sees as “a global plot to destroy Brexit”. Remainers get it in the neck and anything other than a full-metal-jacket Brexit gets it in the neck, too.

The Sun asks what the rising resistance to Brexit says to “the clear message sent by 17.4 million Leavers. They are being belittled and ignored by arrogant elite, both here and abroad…”

And there was me thinking they were being pampered to endlessly by many newspapers, including The Sun. The ‘elite’ are a flexible bunch, called on to do outrageous duty at the drop of a tantrum. Nigel Farage built his career on this: attacking the elite, to which he essentially belonged, as a way of summoning up an enemy called ‘other’.

Also, every time we hear about those 17.4 million Leavers, we should also remember the 16.2 million Remain voters. This is a matter of perspective, but I’d say they were the ones being “belittled and ignored”.

Personally, I am heartily tired of Brexit, the endless sniping and bitching of our Brexit-obsessed media. And, yes, it’s an obsession that obsesses me, too. While boring the Levis off me at the same time, up to my knees in the rank sludge.

Will it ever end? Looking back at referendum campaign, badly run and noisily quarrelsome on both sides, it seems that we all forgot to read the small-print on the ballot paper. This clearly said: “…or do you want to argue pointlessly about this until the third Tuesday after doomsday without ever reaching any damn conclusion”.

Anyway, onto Judi Dench. The Sun’s story has the rather good headline “Rudey Dench.” It reports that the 83-year-old actress went to hospital after being stung on her bum where she “told a young paramedic to f*** off for asking if she had a carer”.

This story is just a bit of promo for a film on BBC2 tonight, Nothing Like A Dame, as probably lifted from the Radio Times. There you will find Judi telling the story of the hornet sting and the incautious paramedic. “I blew my top! I told him F*** OFF. I’ve just done eight weeks in A Winter’s Tale at the Garrick Theatre.”

The documentary records waspish chat between Judi, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins. It looks to be a treat. Or, as Dame Judi might say, calling on all her Shakespearean training, “a F***ING delight”.

At least it’ll take the mind off Brexit for an hour or so.

The aged white male hypocrite can be found roaming the plains of modern life, waiting for someone to take a pop. Oh, look – there’s that old rhinoceros Nigel Lawson trampling through the grass burnt brown by the global warming he doesn’t believe in.

Behind him in the distance is a herd of male bosses forming into a circle to make sure no women can find a way in.

First and with a sinking heart it is time to shuffle towards Lawson, Tory lord, Brexit enthusiast and famed teller of environmental porkies.

Incidentally, you do wonder about a man who christens his daughter after himself by adding a ‘la’ to his own name, if that was indeed how Nigella ended up being called that. Wikipedia says the name was suggested by her grandmother, so bang goes that cheap joke. But Wikipedia has been known to be wrong, so I’ll do my bit for aged male hypocrisy by keeping the jibe in.

Arch Leaver Lawson has just applied for his official French residency card. Yes, that’s right: a man who campaigned loudly to get us out of Europe wants to get himself in there. Or rather he wants to carry on living there. He wishes to be snug in his Gascony home, while making it harder for anyone else to live in Europe.

Interviewed by a newspaper before the referendum, Lawson said: “I love Europe! That’s why I live in France.”

Of course, the anti-European bigwigs are a shameless bunch, as illustrated by the patron saint of shamelessness, Nigel Farage. He refused to give up his taxpayer-funder pension after Brexit, saying: “Why should my family suffer?”

He has also spent years creaming a fortune from a parliament he despises. In ten years’ time, when he turns 63, he will be entitled to a pension of £73,000.

A gold-plated pension to match his gold-plated hypocrisy.

At which point I will just run something past you again: Nigel Farage is only 53! How can that be possible?

Now on to that herd of male bosses. A government-backed review has been looking into the reasons the boards of FTSE companies give for not appointing women.

The excuses they come up with sound like something from a 1970s sitcom. Here is my favourite: “All the ‘good’ women have already been snapped up.”

I’ve never set foot in an FTSE company, but have had a few male bosses and a far smaller number of female ones.

We all know that some bosses are fine and some terrible. Same thing with people who sit on the boards of leading companies, I’d imagine (imagination being necessary here, as that’s the nearest I’ll ever get to the board of an FTSE company).

Shuffle the words a bit and you soon see the patent inadequacy of this excuse. “All the ‘good’ men have already been snapped up – so we’ll just snap up a few inadequate time-servers, board hoppers and golf club members, like we’ve always done since God first put on brogues.”

Why the old boys’ club can’t become an old girls’ club is a mystery known only to old boys, or perhaps their nannies.

As a certain level, bosses and board members seem able to mess up at one job only to be given another. The idea that there aren’t enough ‘good’ women collapses when you consider how many men who aren’t much cop continue to be given a turn.

And with that, I am going to retire to France. Oh, drat – go to work.

It’ll be a long time short of never, before I can join the Lawson rhino in Gascony.

Catching up with Jools Holland last night reminded me that I’ve always had a blokey record collection.

This thought arose after Jools was twittering about all the women artists on the latest edition of his show. Now I like Jools and his twittering. I have done ever since his Squeeze days when he showed me his gold discs mounted on the wall of his loo.

A programme accidentally devoted to women singers seems like a good idea, until you hear that one of them is Bjork. And she gets to sing three songs: approximately three too many. Apologies if you are a fan, but I have never got Bjork and her wearisome idiosyncrasies.

The only guest who leapt to attention was Hailey Tuck, a young Texan jazz singer with a Louise Brooks hair-do and a voice like a slowly smoking fuse. She was great fun and worthy of further investigation. But she only got to sing one song.

Yes, those men do line up in the CD collection and slump together in vinyl. It’s always been like that, a boys’ chorus of Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Van Morison, Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen, John Martyn and Dire Straits, backed up by more recent discoveries such as Craig Finn and The Hold Steady.

It was the same when I was young. A flirtation with prog rock produced a liking for Yes and King Crimson. Then it was over the Atlantic for Grateful Dead, Steve Miller and Cooder (Ry’s always been there, sliding around in the background).

So where are the women? Lost in the crowd, that’s where. Joan Armatrading used to share the student turntable with Costello. Much later, I developed a bit of a quiet passion for Lucinda Williams; she now holds her own in bloke alley, as she does in life. I like Joni Mitchell, but seem only to have her tenth album, a jazz outing with Charles Mingus.

The sweet-voiced Christine Collister is another real favourite; the Yorkshire folk duo of O’Hooley and Tidow are a more recent treasured addition.

One of my favourite albums is Sarah Gillespie’s In The Current Climate. But here’s the thing: that album is a collaboration with the blistering saxophonist Gilad Atzmon. What makes it so good is the interplay between Gillespie’s songs and Atzmon’s fluent playing.

Here’s the thing again: some of Richard Thompson’s greatest work is to be found back in the days when he sang with his ex-wife Linda, especially the classic Shoot Out The Lights. It’s the vocal blend that does it, his robust baritone and the soaring sweetness of her voice.

I do like a great ‘boy-girl’ duet, too. Steve Earle has done a few, singing with Lucinda Williams, Allison Moorer and Emmylou Harris, among others.

And if you really want to cheer yourself up, listen to Dr John sharing vocal honours with Shemekia Copeland on Louis Armstrong’s Sweet Hunk O’Trash.

Sometimes the best music comes when men and women sing together.

I realise I have got this far without mentioning Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Sharon is dead now, sadly, but her album Give The People What They Want will stay with me forever, not least for the fantastic pop-soul protest song, People Don’t Get What They Deserve.

Turns out there a few women hanging around in bloke alley, but not as many as there should be.

Three years ago, redundancy came my way and I shuffled onto this ledge in the cruel daze of being without a job. What follows is a catch-up in the experiment known as my life.

The slightly older and hardly at all wiser version of me has a few things to say to that man as he contemplates life after 27 years on the same newspaper.

Mainly the old me wants to say: what were you thinking of? Staying put like that suggests a chronic lack of ambition. To which my slightly younger self replies: well, yeah, but that job was all right, or it was until they messed it up, and anyway I’m a creature of habit, a man who likes a familiar berth.

Mostly I was happy, or as happy as anyone is doing a job for so long. The other week, I bumped into someone who is still there and he said: “I bet you’re glad to have left now.”

The answer depends on the mood of the moment. If life had carried on just the same, the past three years would have been a lot more comfortable and a lot less worrying: a dependable job you mostly like is like an old friend. And, of course, it comes with old friends you now see only rarely.

The truth of it is that being made redundant was a terrible experience, but you cope with terrible experiences as best you can.

I felt untethered, unmoored and other disconnected things. For a year, I pretended to be a freelance journalist. I was selling features and having them published, as I still am today occasionally. But the money wasn’t good, and my year of total freelancing was sponsored by the redundancy.

Towards the end of that year, I entered the dark period. That came when I signed on, a common enough experience, but one so depressing that it haunts me still. It didn’t last long, six weeks perhaps, and I ‘signed off’ before a short holiday in France and have so far managed never to step inside that place again.

But I don’t want to be gloomy about this because there have been ups in my precarious new life.

That dazed man would have been amazed that his slightly older self has spent the best part of two years teaching journalism at a university. You know, standing in front of students and talking to them about writing – and occasionally inspiring some of them to produce good work.

They don’t all turn up all the time, emailing assorted apologies and excuses. Or they wander in halfway through, having sent early warning – “Sorry, I may be a tad late this morning.”

But I like those students. Last week, a group I have taught since the start were on the last day of a project. They needed photos for the website we’d been working on. We went outside into the sunshine and took the headshot photos. Then they wanted a group shot with me in, too. It felt good, an achievement of sorts, like I almost belong somewhere else.

But don’t get carried away with the idea that I am now set up for the rest of my working life or anything. In that job I am set up until the end of July, with the new academic year still a distant promise, depending on budgets. I have spoken informally to another university, and they were encouraging, but no promises.

Two days a week are still spent in Howden working for the Press Association, editing stories for the Sunday Independent newspaper. Last Sunday morning, after the landslide Yes vote in the abortion referendum, our handiwork was read out in the paper review on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House (my favourite programme, just about), so that was nice.

Working every Saturday, until 9pm every other week, isn’t what I’d planned to be doing at the age of 61, but there you go.

One thing the slightly older me has to say to that crazy young fool of 58 is this: you wittered on a lot at the time about how you were going to make a living from words, with a novel or two on the go. How’s that all shaping up?

To which both versions of myself reply in unison: oh, do shut up.

I’ve learned a lot and I’ve learned nothing; and I’ve earned, well, not nothing but not a lot.

But here I am, in one piece. A bruised apple but hopefully still worth a bite.

TODAY belongs to Mamoudou Gassama – and what a cheering thought that is.

The Malian migrant was hailed a hero after an astonishing act of bravery in Paris, when he hauled himself up a four-storey block of flats to rescue a child dangling from a balcony.

If you do nothing else on social media today, go on to YouTube and call up the footage. It really is something: Mr Gassama gets up the side of the building in about 30 seconds, pulling himself up on to one balcony and then another. He is almost with reach and hauls himself up one more level to save the child.

The footage of the rescue last Saturday was being widely shared on social media this morning and was then picked up by broadcasters and newspaper websites.

President Macron swiftly called Mr Gassama to the Elysee Palace, where he thanked the brave migrant and promised he would be made a naturalised citizen. He also gave him a medal for courage and said he would be offered a role with the fire service.

It is reported that Mr Gassama arrived in France last year, after taking the arduous and dangerous journey to Europe on a boat over the Mediterranean to Italy.

He told the president that he was walking through a street in the north of the city when he spotted a crowd gathered in front of a tower block. Seeing the child, he just acted on instinct, telling Mr Macron: “I just didn’t have time to think, I ran across the road to go and save him.”

Mr Gassama has been nicknamed the “Spiderman of the 18^th”, a reference to the area of Paris when his daring deed occurred.

While it is possible to overdo these things, it is equally hard not to spot the symbolism in his story. If Mr Gassama hadn’t made it to France – or if the more right-wing elements in French society had sent him packing already – that child would have fallen and died.

Yes, you can overdo these things. But what a brilliant image this is: the brave migrant leaping to action while others stand by; leaping to action with such swiftness that he beat the firefighters to rescue that child.

If you ask me, we far too often see migrants and immigrants cast in a negative light. So the next time someone who should know better starts to chunter about “letting all those foreigners in the country”, just smile and mention Mr Gassama. And, yes, that was in France and not Britain, but split the difference anyway. You won’t ever find a better image of the good that migrants can bring to society.

Just imagine if Marine le Pen had been standing there; or indeed ‘our own dear Nigel Farage’ – and think of those apostrophes as oven-gloves. The outcome for that child would not have been nearly so bright. And the same, in fairness, would be true if I’d been wandering along that Paris street last Saturday.

So, yes, Mamoudou Gassama is a hero for the day and for a good sight longer than that, too.

Let’s just hope and pray the Daily Mail isn’t already scrabbling around in his past in the hope of finding something to do the man down.

Incidentally, the Daily Mail front page today splutters: “BBC ‘fritters’ your cash on Taylor Swift gig”. Oh, the BBC spends its money on all sorts of things that don’t bother me, from The One Show downwards. If they want to have the popular Taylor Swift in concert, what’s wrong with that? Nothing much, even though watching her wasn’t for me.

IT’S fair to say that I may have read more than the average number of words on the Irish abortion debate, although not all of them will have stuck in my mind.

At the time of writing, exit polls by The Irish Times and RTE suggest a 69% vote for Yes – in other words, to repeal part of the constitution, the Eighth Amendment, that effectively bans terminations.

At the time of writing times two, the counting has only just begun so we will only know the result for sure later today.

This issue has received a reasonable amount of coverage in Britain. Over the sea in Ireland, the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment has been a cause of endless debate, some of it heated, much of it falling strongly on one side or other of the divide.

My reason for having read so many words on this contentious matter is spending two days a week editing stories for an Irish newspaper.

As a man, and an Englishman too, I have hesitated to enter these waters, although there is no question that a Yes vote is the only modern way ahead.

My hesitancy can be traced to being a man, yes, and also because men, and the state and the Catholic Church have been telling Irish women what they can and can’t do with their bodies for far too long.

I almost feel it shouldn’t matter what a man thinks, but here goes.

For my tastes, the No side concentrated too much on the grisly reality of abortion, running gruesome narratives and posters as if that settled the argument.

Yes, abortion is a horrible procedure and a terrible thing to have to do. But Irish women are having abortions anyway – although the system forces them to do so clandestinely or in another country, miles from home and in miserable circumstances, despite the good care they usually receive here in England.

The history of this debate is long and tortuous, with many disturbing stopping-off points, including what became known as the X Case from 1992. ‘X’ was a 14-year-old rape victim who became suicidal after what had happened to her. She was initially prevented by the courts from travelling to England to terminate her pregnancy – a heartless way to treat a young victim.

That case led to three possible amendments to the constitution: one of these, the Twelfth Amendment, proposed that “the possibility of suicide was not a sufficient threat to justify an abortion”, as the BBC website helpfully reminds us. That amendment was rejected.

Anyway, the full result will be known this evening, and the Sunday Independent will have a perfectly timed story for tomorrow’s edition.

This doesn’t always happen on Sunday newspapers. Three years of Saturday subbing shifts on The Observer in the 1980s saw only two big stories breaking perfectly for a Sunday publication.

One was the sinking of the Townsend Thoresen ferry the Herald and Free Enterprise.

The other was the killing in Anderstown, Belfast, of two undercover British army corporals who drove, apparently by mistake, into a funeral procession for an IRA member. Both men were dragged from their cars, stripped, beaten and shot – a sober reminder that life in Northern Ireland has improved in the past 30 years.

As I will be spending the afternoon and evening editing words about the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment, I thought I’d offer a few of my own. But proper work beckons now.

I hesitate to bring this up, but it seems fair to wonder how much sunshine is falling on the optimistic uplands of our post-Brexit life. Anyone hoping to bask in that economic heatwave will find that all we have so far are stormy clouds, with darker weather forecast.

The pro-Brexit international trade secretary Dr Liam Fox seems to flit and fly around the world as our eternally optimistic salesman, shoving his foot in doors and then trying to bamboozle us about the small-print.

The likes of Dr Fox – and there’s a name that doesn’t often keep company with the world ‘like’ – put much faith in deals to be struck with the US. How’s that going then?

The headlines are not encouraging, unless you’re the sort who wants more expensive medicines for the NHS, your chicken washed in chlorine, a bigger sprinkling of pesticides on your vegetables, fruit and nuts, your meat to come from animals fed a diet of hormones and steroids, and milk that might contain more pus, thanks to the US wanting more white blood cells in milk than is accepted anywhere else in the world, even though this can indicate that the cow has an infection.

My, this post-Brexit breakfast is looking lovely.

The likes of Dr Fox – there we go again – put great faith in deals with the US, and a while ago he could be heard complaining that he wished everyone would shut up about chicken dipped in chlorine as it annoys the Americans.

And what’s all this with the chlorine anyway? Apparently, it allows the Americans to rinse meat in antimicrobial wash instead of keeping and killing animals in healthy conditions.

Good God, if that happens I might even walk to the vegan end of the table, even though everyone going on about veganism gets on my nerves; but that’s another grumble.

President Trump has already started to complain about our “socialised medicine” service pushing up the prices of pharmaceuticals in the US, and he wants to force a deal that lowers prices at home and makes the NHS and other services pay more.

On top of all that, here is a headline from the Observer – “Secret Brexit deal could threaten future of Scotch.”

According to this alarming theory, a post-Brexit deal with the US could see a glut of imports from the US that would threaten distillers of scotch whisky.

US trade groups want to drop the EU requirements relating to the ageing of whisky, allowing US producers to promote younger products as whiskey (the spelling for non-Scottish spirit, as also used by the Irish, who make some decent stuff).

The likes of Dr Fox – that’s the last one, honest – don’t want us to talk about any of this as the talks are sensitive and confidential, but thankfully Greenpeace has been sticking its oar in and asking awkward questions on our behalf.

On top of all these alarming possibilities, the US also wants to do away with the protected designation of origin. And if that all sounds a bit technical, what they want to do is make their own cheese that can be passed off as stilton.

First they come for your whisky, then they ruin stilton. Now this is getting serious.

The designation requires that a product bearing a place name be produced in or near that place: a restriction, yes, but a good restriction; a restriction that helps maintain genuine local produce.

The trouble with Britain trying to deal with the US, and let’s not even be distracted by Trump the disruptor for the moment, is that the US will be much more powerful in any post-Brexit trade deal. And we could end up swallowing expensive medicine and dodgy food as proscribed by Dr Fox.

Look, I like Dire Straits. There, I’ve said it. It is true that the later albums became overblown, and little of the subsequent music lived up to this eponymous debut. But there is much to love about this first album.

Dire Straits may have become classic dad rock in the end, but back in 1978 they delivered with Mark Knopfler’s take on pub rock: Dylanesque Americana with touches of country and jazz, built around the main man’s flowing, jittery guitar playing and semi-mumbled vocals.

I like this album because of what it has to say musically, its freshness and immediacy. And I like this album because I was there. Not there in the studio with Knoplfler, brother David Knopfler, bassist John Illsley and drummer Pick Withers. But if you look on the fringes, peer into the shadows, there I am. Once I interviewed Dave Knopfler backstage at the Lewisham Odeon before a concert, Mark being unavailable.

Dire Straits lived for a while on the Crossfield Estate in Deptford. I was a student at the time, then worked on the local newspaper in Deptford High Street. A little bit of Deptford DNA rubbed off on me, the Albany Empire and the tatty pubs, the sausage shop and the south London chat from the wheeler-dealer opposite the office who let me park my car in his lot for a weekly fee.

In my student spell, Dire Straits played their first gig in a festival on the Crossfield Estate. We all crowded into someone’s flat for a view from a balcony above. Later, they played a gig at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden, and we were there, too.

That was before any deal for this album, before the initial rejections, and before radio DJ Charlie Gillett championed the band’s cause; the album is dedicated to him.

In 2009, a plaque went up on the Crossfield Estate to mark that first concert, and the Yorkshire Evening Post got in on the act, reporting that “ex-Leeds musician Mark Knopfler said he was ‘honoured’”. Knopfler briefly worked as a reporter on the paper, before heading further south, having started out in Newcastle.

Opening song Down To The Waterline could be a hymn to the south London waterfront, but in fact it harks back to the quayside in Newcastle. Knopfler’s arrival in London does generate some songs, most famously Sultans of Swing, inspired by a jazz band playing without fanfare in a Greenwich pub. One of those timeless songs that sound fresh with each playing.

The lovely Wild West End is another London song, with Knopfler self-consciously casting himself as a guitar cowboy, and Water of Love still rings clear.

The needle stuck on the opening chords of Wild West End. Annoying but also fitting, as for a while I was stuttered back to those distant days, watching Dire Straits before anyone knew who they were.

Dire Straits, 1978. Songs: Down To The Waterline, Water Of Love, Setting Me Up, Six Blade Knife, Sultans of Swing, In The Gallery, Wild West End, Lions.

SOME days it seems you are doing everything wrong.

Just now there are headlines proclaiming: “Polluting wood stoves banned” and the other day a new report was slamming Airbnb. Two great pieces of news for our Airbnb with a wood-burning stove newly fitted at some expense.

To tackle the stove first, those headlines are misleading in the sense that what is being proposed by Environment Secretary Michael Gove is the banning of wet wood as this gives off dangerous particulates (and if you want to be particular about what a particulate might be, you’ll have to go somewhere more scientifically literate).

We only burn kiln-dried wood, apart from the time when we unsuccessfully attempted to ignite the ‘wet’ stuff by mistake. Kiln-dried wood mostly gives off steam, at least according to the man who sold us the stove – and, yes, he would say that, but there you go up the chimney.

Here are three thoughts to set your fire going.

ONE: The wood-burning stoves angles makes for a good headline, but it’s a distraction in the sense that all the serious pollution comes from vehicles – especially dirty diesel – and the government doesn’t seem to be proposing much, apart from passing the fume-enriched buck to local councils. Pollution from vehicles is much more serious than that from burning logs in a smug, middle-class back to the woods in the suburbs way. And, yes, selfishly perhaps, but I do love that fire.

TWO: People who drive their cars too much are helping to screw up the planet – a thought that often arises when I am stuck in traffic during one of my commutes. I don’t like those stickers activist cyclists have proclaiming: “One less car on the roads” (and that should be fewer, you with the sweaty Lycra shorts on). But I am thinking of having one made for the car that reads: “I’d rather be on my bloody bicycle.” Some people in cars are a rolling contradiction in search of a way out of that queue.

THREE: Michael Gove and health secretary Jeremy Hunt spout off in the Telegraph that Breixit will allow the UK to go “further and faster than the EU in reducing human exposure to damaging pollution” – and they say that while introducing changes being forced on Britain by the EU. Meanwhile, my good old friend The Observer reports that the UN has warned the government that Britain’s reputation is at risk over post-Brexit plans that would weaken protection for the environment. Who you gonna believe? Not Gove and Hunt for a start.

Like many other aspects of modern life, Airbnb is a great idea grown massive. What started out as a way for people to rent out their spare room to temporary guests has become an enormous business.

A report cleverly titled UnfairBnB claims that the short-stay rental service could be shutting locals out of housing across Europe, while also changing neighbourhoods.

The report’s author, Kenneth Haar, suggests that the EU is in awe of Airbnb and is blocking attempts by European cities to block the service.

I don’t have the time to fully unravel that knot, but it is fair to say that our Airbnb is the traditional sort: a spare room turned into a cosy little space for guests, who have been coming here now for nearly three years.

Most people are happy; and we are happy with most people (even the guest who drank two bottles of wine in an evening). Our level of Airbnb seems unlikely to be harming anyone much, although owners of traditional B&Bs may disagree.

The trouble is, once you crack open a good idea, everything can get out of hand, with a single room to let replaced by whole apartment blocks in tourist cities given over toAirbnb and blocking out the locals.

It’s a tricky question, and another example of how the internet constantly disrupts the way life used to be. Like many other familiar development, Airbnb wouldn’t be possible without the internet, so it’s one of those good-bad-good turn of events.

Most days on this ledge start with a glance at the newspaper headlines online, so this a trudge of a morning for a royal wedding agnostic.

We briefly went to the pub late yesterday afternoon, allowing mother and daughter to chat about the wedding and look at outfits on our girl’s phone.

Feeling saturated with the wedding, having sat before it at work on Saturday in an endless TV loop lasting for hours, I didn’t join in much, other than to praise the young cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and the gospel sway of Stand By Me.

The burden of being a half-arsed republican is that you try to take a polite interest in royal weddings, while inwardly chuntering: “Oh, can’t we all shup up about that now.”

I was happy to see Prince Harry marry Megan Markle, as they do seem to delight in each other’s company; but only happy in the way that you might walk past a wedding and think, “Oh, that’s nice.”

Other people’s weddings really aren’t all that interesting, unless loved ones or friends are involved.

Saturday’s nuptials are widely seen as having been a triumph, with Trevor Kavanagh, for example, writing in the Sun this morning: “Hollywood would kill for the sort of ratings our royal soap scored on Saturday. This was a truly uplifting occasion it showed this country is world class.”

Oh, I guess you can be ‘world class’ at one thing while being bottom-of-the-class at everything else; good at faintly ridiculous pomp and circumstance, while also dragging the country through the endless deeply quarrelsome maze of Brexit; good at royal fluff and puff while still having a struggling health service and councils – Tory councils, too – running out of money thanks to the cuts; good at royal processions while privatised rail services are bailed out by the taxpayer, and so on.

But I’ll stop myself before I end up sounding like Jeremy Corbyn.

It is hard to avoid most royal weddings; and it’s been near impossible to dodge this one. In the unlikely event that you are feeling unsated, today’s newspapers contain endless coverage and commentary.

The Mail flourishes a “sumptuous 32-page souvenir photo-album” and promises: “The secret royal asides – by our lip reader.” Ah, a colleague at work on Saturday said: “The papers will all be using lip readers” and it seems he was right.

The Times plays a straight bat, with a picture of the couple and the strapline: “Souvenir supplement: the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.”

Many of the papers draw attention to Meghan’s personal views, with the Telegraph opting for: “Meghan to fight for feminism.”

The Daily Star lamely offers: “Royal wedding bits you missed.”

Of course, the royals are the unofficial patron saints of the world’s media, proving endless copy with the ‘ups’ such as a wedding on a sunny day in May. Then providing even more copy when things go on the slide.

A tremendous amount of hope and significance now rests on the shoulders of one American actor with a huge new role to play. Can Meghan Markle live up to her billing; or is it all part of the best survival show in town, with the royal family using a glamorous mixed-race outsider to add sheen to the old silver?

For modern royals, it seems a shame that Harry and Meghan have been given that silly Sussex title, but I suppose most people will just use their names anyway.

Anyway, this half-arsed republican – once “fully arsed” but I wore myself out disliking the royals – has had more than enough for now.