YOU’LL have to excuse me for a moment. I’ve just heard arch Brexiteer and Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith being peevish on the radio. And that always puts my mood out of kilter.

There has, you seen, been another shuffle inch along the cul-de-sac known as Brexit Avenue. Or, if you are the Daily Mail, and heaven help you, the UK has taken a huge step. Never mind all the scaremongering and cynicism of the Remainers – we are set for a smooth and amicable departure from the EU, the paper insists.

Ah, such optimism. The thing is, this strikes me as being a bit previous. Yes, we all want this Brexit business to be over. But proclaiming Brexit a victory before it has happened and after two years of slow-motion squabbling seems to be pushing it.

Isn’t that as if Captain Scott had declared his expedition to the South Pole a great success before he set off? “We are confident of a smooth and amicable journey to reach the South Pole before anyone else,” as Scott never said.

In the event, Scott and his ill-fated expedition reached the South Pole, only to find that a Norwegian party led by Roald Amundsen had beaten them there. He and his men started their journey back, but never made it.

“I am just going outside this Brexit debate and may be some time”

Famous last words were spoken by Captain Oates – “I am just going outside and may be some time,” Suffering from severe frostbite, he walked out into the freezing conditions and was never seen again.

Sometimes it is tempting to be echo Oates, but minus the heroic stiff upper lip – “I am just going outside this Brexit debate and may be some time.”

In this scenario, the role of Scott falls to David Davis, the bluff and bumbling Brexit secretary – a man whose demeanour suggests that he has just swotted up on that day’s business on the ride over. That’s on a good day. Some days it looks like he hasn’t bothered to read a word.

The latest Brexit agreement to be heralded by Davis features a few climbdowns, including one over fish that has upset the ardent Brexiteers – and that adjective is redundant, as their fizzing fervency is guaranteed by their beliefs.

Sadly, it is not thought that the fish will throw Rees-Mogg overboard

Michael Gove, the environment secretary, had been demanding a renegotiation of the fishing quotas, but the UK has rolled over on that one.

In protest at this concession, Jacob Rees-Mogg says that tomorrow he will board a boat and throw fish out while sailing by Parliament. Sadly, it is not thought that the fish will throw Rees-Mogg overboard.

Long since thrown overboard is former prime minister David Cameron, whose blithe self-belief got us into this Brexit mess in the first place.

Cameron and Daily Mail supremo Paul Dacre fell out after Cameron suggested that the editor “cut him some slack” over Brexit. Cameron reportedly asked the Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere, to sack the avidly pro-Brexit Dacre in the run-up to the referendum.

Dacre, who remained unsacked, heard about this and made his newspaper even more pro-Brexit.

It could therefore be argued that the spat between the prime minister and the all-powerful editor helped to shape the political landscape we now see around us. And it certainly explains the Mail’s continued enthusiasm for Brexit.

TODAY the hand passing along the old record collection rests on an album that has been with me since its release in 1973. It will also see me out, as my wife says that May You Never will be played at my funeral.

Some albums live with you, and I have certainly swallowed a few vinyl atoms from Solid Air. The album was recorded over eight days with double bassist Danny Thompson and members of Fairport Convention, including Richard Thompson, who played mandolin on Over The Hill.

The nine tracks have an immediacy granted by the short studio time: Solid Air was recorded in eight days. The opening title track, with its jazzy drift, is a song for a troubled friend, later revealed as the singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who died of an antidepressant overdose a year-and-a-half after the album’s release.

The song sounds as mysterious now as it did then: the aural equivalent of looking at someone trapped beneath the ice. An undyingly lovely piece of music. Over The Hill is more of a straight folk song, but with emotional heft (Martyn was good at emotional heft).

All but one of the songs are by Martyn, the exception being I’d Rather Be The Devil, by the blues singer Skip James. The Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin is a Martyn fan (as is his character, Rebus), and he used the title for one of his recent books.

All the songs here are good: Don’t Want To Know, Go Down Easy, The Man In The Station and The Easy Blues. But one song came to define John Martyn, May You Never, his three-and-a-half minute bluesy hymn to brotherhood…

You’re just like a great strong brother of mine
You know that I love you true
And you never talk dirty behind my back
And I know that there’s those that do…

It’s a great song, with a flurry of finger-picking blues notes chasing each other to a rousing finish. And it’ll be my rousing finish, too.

Eric Clapton, one of many to have covered the song, paid Martyn the ultimate tribute, saying he was “so far ahead of everything else it was inconceivable” and adding that he had influenced “everyone who ever heard him”.

Partly this was down to his experiments with the Echoplex tape looper, a pre-digital effect that let Martyn accompany himself, creating swirling layers of notes.

John Martyn died in January 2009, aged 60, and it still makes me sad to write that down. In his youth he was a beautiful young man, wild-haired and mischievous. He followed a self-destructive path, eventually losing a leg late in life. But he had a resurgence with On The Cobbles, an album released in 2004.

I saw him three times. Once at Salford University at about the time Sold Air was released, then twice in York: at Fibbers and then at the Grand Opera House. He played May You Never at the Opera House and he wasn’t in great shape, but the song still was. After the last notes died he said something about that not being easy. But he always made it sound easy.

An album for ever and beyond.

Martyn recorded for 40 years, with the best albums coming out in the 1970s: Bless The Weather, Inside Out and One World. All worthy of mention in this vinyl chapter, except that I only have them on CD. And that would be cheating.

LOSING things is one of life’s frustrations. Twice this month my house keys have disappeared down one of Stephen Hawking’s black holes.

The first time it turned out not to be a black hole so much as my sister-in-law’s handbag; and the second occasion is a tale told by a key-losing idiot.

My wife’s sister popped round for a chat, a cup of tea and to meet our daughter just back from her year away. She stayed an hour or so, then drove home.

Sometime afterwards, my keys disappeared – although, if we’re talking theoretical physics, they’d already been transported by then.

I was heading out to play squash and had no way of locking my bike without those keys. In a lathering dash, I borrowed a bike lock and pedalling off towards probable defeat (later translated with sweated inevitability into actual defeat).

While I was busy getting bashed around the squash court, my wife texted her sister asking if she’d picked up any keys. Turned out she had and later I was reunited with my keys.

‘Pockets are rifled, bags upended; my mind is upended, my memory rifled’

Now it is 7am and I am about to drive to work and my keys have disappeared again. I can’t blame my sister-in-law as she’s not been here.

Pockets are rifled, bags upended; my mind is upended, my memory rifled. But those keys have vanished. I drive off with a spare front-door key. At work a university porter to lets me into my office – well, I say ‘my’ office, but there are two other names on the door and I’m the squatter.

My wife sends me a text telling me to think back to what I was doing at the time. A good idea, except that what I was doing at the time was forgetting where I’d put my keys.

The day passes. Home again, I scrabble through drawers, lift the sofa cushions and retrace my steps to the garage. But there is no sign of those keys. Up in our little attic bedroom, I hunt through the pockets of the jeans I was wearing, look in the drawer full of change, foreign notes and plastic collar stiffeners from shirts I no longer own. Still not a trace or a twinkle of those bloody keys.

Back in the kitchen, I check the back door is locked. It is but something seems amiss. Through the glass I can see the reflection of the keys, only the mirror image doesn’t seem quite right.

That’s because it isn’t a mirror image at all, but my lost keys on the outside. They’ve been in the door for a day.

As Alfred Lord Tennyson almost said: “’Tis better to have loved and lost your keys than never to have loved at all.”

That other poetic sage, Ozzy Osbourne, once said that of all the things he’d lost, he missed his mind the most.

Losing those keys times two felt like losing my mind. It’s that blank panicky feeling: something should be there and it’s not.

So that’s my advice for today: if you lose your keys, look in the lock.

Incidentally, in my life I have done this at least three times: keys have been left in a motorbike, in the car door and, once, overnight in the front door.

THE impromptu obituarist sitting on a ledge is not short of snippets to glean about the surprisingly long life of Stephen Hawking.

The theoretical physicist has died aged 76. Not a grand old age, but Hawking lived with motor neurone disease for more than 50 years. He was struck by the disease in 1963, at the age of 21, and given two years to live.

Although his academic achievements were towering, his fame rested on the connections he made with the wider world, including through his book A Brief History of Time. This surprise bestseller sold ten million copies but was famously said not to have been read or understood by many of those who bought a copy.

Through his work with the mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, Hawking demonstrated that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning and an end: a Big Bang at the start, with everything ending in black holes.

It would be foolish of me to pretend to understand his theory that if a black hole could evaporate, then all the information that fell inside over its lifetime would be lost forever. Untruthful, too, to say that I’d read A Brief History of Time.

Still, you cannot help but be aware of Hawking, not least for the way he surmounted the cruel parameters of the disease that contorted his body but left his mind free to roam the universe.

‘We should not mistake someone for a saint because of the challenges they face’

Remarkably, he achieved so much without being able to write anything down in the usual way. This reminds us that a person is so much more than their body. It should prompt us never to make assumptions about physical disability.

Those assumptions include not mistaking someone for a saint because of the challenges they face. Hawking had personal ups and downs:  his first marriage ended in divorce when he married his nurse, a relationship that also ended in divorce.

According to this morning’s obituaries, in his undergraduate years at Oxford he was not particularly hard working. After three years he sat on the borderline between a first and a second-class degree. Calculating that he was regarded as a difficult student, he offered his viva examiners a proposal: give me a first and I’ll pursue my PhD at Cambridge. They obliged and were rid of him – and he of them.

A small incident in the grand scale of things, although it does suggest that native cunning accompanied the intellectual smarts.

Hawking initially resisted a wheelchair, preferring to use crutches. But when he had to give in, he was known for his reckless driving around Cambridge.

As his illness took a greater toll, he could no longer speak – something which, ironically, made his voice all the louder. Using a synthesiser, he acquired the sparky robotic tones that carried further than most natural voices.

Not many scientists connect so widely. Hawking did this through appearances in everything from the Simpsons to a Pink Floyd album – and on the American comedy The Big Bang Theory, where he reviewed Sheldon’s paper on the Higgs boson: “You made an arithmetic mistake on page two. It was quite the boner.”

Hawking’s early life was portrayed in the biopic The Theory of Everything. The film was final proof that his surprising life had reached beyond science.

Most of us die and are forgotten by all apart from family and friends. Stephen Hawking will long be remembered and has almost certainly achieved immortality. Not a bad trick to play with time.

MRS Maybe has issued a ‘midnight ultimatum’ to Russia over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on a former spy and his daughter. The Sun rallies behind the prime minister with the headline: “WE’VE VLAD ENOUGH” – the second time in days that pun has been dragged onto the page.

Perhaps that bit of feeble wordplay will be used until we’ve all “Vlad enough” of hearing it. The Mirror joins in the game, urging Mrs Maybe to “Put-in the boot.”

Putin sends us deadly poison – and we reply with puns.

Yesterday, The Daily Mail was worrying about the Duchess of Cambridge’s hands – “Why are Kate’s fingers all the SAME length?”. This question that precisely no one had been asking was illustrated by a picture below the masthead of her allegedly ill-formed hand with a dotted line drawn to make the point: a framing device that showed they weren’t all the same length, but never mind, the blurb box was filled for another day.

Today the never knowingly less than incandescent Mail joins the spy fury with a different sort of hand-wringing – “HOW CAN WE GO TO PUTIN’S WORLD CUP NOW?”

That’s a great threat, isn’t it? If you don’t come clean, we’ll refuse to go out in the first round of your World Cup. Yes, I know we won the Jules Rimet Trophy once. I was ten at the time and now I am 61.

Sadly, I am more likely to see England win again than I am to see the Russian President quaking in his army boots over anything Mrs Maybe says.

Foreign secretary Boris Johnson went rogue in a speech the other day, saying that if the Russians were behind the assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, then Britain would not compete in the World Cup – seemingly forgetting that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had taken a principled stand by losing the qualifiers.

The prime minister has a difficult task in dealing with Russia, partly because Russia doesn’t much care what she says or thinks. It is perfectly proper that she should get tough with Russia over what many say is a state-sponsored poison attack. She couldn’t really say anything different: but that doesn’t mean Putin will give a vodka tot for whatever action she demands.

Incidentally, Mrs Maybe’s fury over Russia doesn’t seem to extend to Russian donations to the Tory Party. Last weekend, the Sunday Times reported that Russian oligarchs and their associates (a sinister-sounding job title) had registered donations of £826,100 to the Tories since she entered No 10 Downing Street.

A cynical person might wonder at that: don’t send us your poison, but your pounds will do very nicely.

World politics is in a sense just local politics writ large and shouty. President Trump is claiming credit for ‘forcing’ Kim Jong-un to the summit table. The North Korean leader claims the provisional agreement to meet as a personal triumph. It shows his country can sit at the big boys’ table, as it were.

Both men say they are winning, as you’d expect. But Donald Trump would say he was getting the better of a quagmire even as it closed over that eccentric plumage he calls hair.

With regards to Mrs Maybe’s threat to Putin, I don’t think I shall bother staying up until midnight to see what happens.

Here begins a sporadic look at albums plucked from our collection, many dating back 40 years or so.

A new record deck bought last year has revived these black discs, crackles and all. Selection will be a random spin to a degree: pick a sleeve and pull it out (the albums are not always easily identifiable, after the cat scratched all the spines).

Bobby King and Terry Evans, Live and Let Live! (Special Delivery Records)

Just look at that cover: fashions were different in 1988, but Bobby and Terry cut a dash. Bobby is a veteran gospel singer who often sings with Ry Cooder; Terry was a blues and soul singer (he died in January) who sang with Cooder, Joan Armatrading, Eric Clapton and others.

Together, they sang backing vocals on Cooder albums and toured with the great slide-man, too. Live and Let Live! is a Cooder project, produced by him and featuring his characteristic chunky rhythms and slide guitar.

Bobby and Terry are elevated to lead vocals and do a rousing job, putting a 1980s gloss on their 1960s sound. Nine songs in all, starting with Just A Little Bit, which is more than a little bit good, followed by Bald Head and the great Bobby King song, Seeing Is Believing.

Best track: At The Dark End Of The Street, a perfect way to close the album. Everything that comes before should cheer you up: always does the trick for me.

The link below should give a taster…

“Collateral damage” is a cold heartless phrase indicating innocent victims of war.

Last Sunday, Det Sgt Nick Bailey went to work in Salisbury, Wiltshire, a medieval city surrounded by picture-book English countryside. With its cathedral viewed across water meadows, this place is, according to the local tourist board, famous as the “city in the countryside”.

In 2015, Lonely Planet decreed Salisbury to be one of the top ten cities in the world to visit. The Early English Gothic cathedral is home to one of four original Magna Carta manuscripts – the best one, according again to the tourist board (not that they’re biased or anything).

Not a bad place for Sgt Bailey to work, then. And the least likely city in the world in which to become gravely ill during an ordinary day’s policing thanks to an alleged Russian poison attack.

Yet that is exactly what happened to Sgt Bailey who was first on the scene at the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33. He was reportedly alerted to two drunks acting strangely, as drunks do – everyday nuisance policing, in other words.

Sgt Bailey was taken ill after finding the pair slumped on a bench near the Maltings shopping centre last Sunday afternoon. It is thought that they had been poisoned by highly toxic chemicals known as nerve agents.

‘It is hardly surprising that the finger of suspicion should point at Russia and President Putin’

As Skripal was a Russian double agent who had betrayed his country, it is hardly surprising that the finger of suspicion should point at Russia and President Putin.

In a sense that doesn’t much worry me either way.

It seems reasonable to suspect that Putin or someone close to him might have ordered this poisoning. This has happened before, to Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian security officer who died in Britain of radiation poisoning in 2006, after drinking a lethally laced cup of tea in a Mayfair hotel. Putin washed his hands of that one, as Putin would.

Some theorists suggest the latest poisoning could have been a put-up job to swivel suspicion towards the Russian leader.

Either way, it doesn’t matter.

What is telling here is that an ordinary British police officer came close to death on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in Salisbury. Whoever administered the poison, they were not thinking of a blameless British police officer.

That’s the way with collateral damage.

Mrs Maybe is acting tough in today’s newspapers. She’ll be giving Putin a talking-to, that sort of nonsense.

Well, maybe she will.

But earlier this week as she hobnobbed with the de facto Saudi ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, was she thinking of the innocent victims of the murderous war in Yemen? No, mostly she was thinking (again) of Brexit and how to strike deals (including arms deals) with the Saudis once she’s cut the last chain tying us to Europe.

When the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks, was anyone thinking of the 2,000 US soldiers who would die, the 20,000 Afghan soldiers or the 30,000 civilians (figures from Jason Burke in the Observer)?

‘I can’t speak for Sgt Bailey, of course, but I don’t imagine he feels heroic, so much as deeply confused’

No, just more collateral damage.

The world is full of innocent victims, from Syria to the Congo and many other places of misery in between.

Sgt Bailey of Salisbury is just the latest of many accidental victims. At the time of writing, he is said to be “conscious but stable” but he is at least sitting up in his hospital bed.

Some of the newspapers cast Sgt Bailey in the hero mould, a routine reaction, but not necessarily a helpful one: he was just a man doing his job who stumbled on something very nasty. I can’t speak for Sgt Bailey, of course, but I don’t imagine he feels heroic, so much as deeply confused.

Mr Skripal and his daughter remain critically ill. Incidentally, virtually all the newspapers put the story on the front pages. Did they use large pictures of the ageing and balding alleged former double agent or did they use pictures of his daughter, who is youngish, female and attractive?

Oh, you work it out.

RESEARCH is important when writing a blog. That’s my excuse for typing Stormy Daniels into Google and looking at her pictures.

The alleged relationship between President Trump and the woman the Guardian describes this morning as “a pornographic film actor” is knottier than a tangled sheet: she says they had an affair, he denies it.

Stormy Daniels is a brassy blonde who appears to have undergone a degree of enhancement a few inches below her sharp chin. She is a cartoonish representation of a woman, all tumbling peroxide, thrusting chest and pouty smile.

She is, in other words, just the sort of woman you imagine Donald Trump would choose for an extra-marital dalliance.

“By the president’s personal attorneys and for details on that I would refer you to them.” Er, what?

Days before the 2016 presidential election, Daniels is said to have signed a non-disclosure agreement barring her from discussing the alleged rumpy-Trumpy. She now contends that this deal is “null and void and of no consequence” because it was not personally signed by Trump.

This matter has resurfaced again after the White House mysteriously claimed that Trump won a case “in arbitration” against Daniels about their alleged affair ten years ago.

In an oddly worded announcement, press secretary Sarah Sanders appeared to confirm the existence of such a contract, saying that the case “has already been won in arbitration” – thought to refer to a cheaper option to litigation.

Then she uttered the following enigmatic words: “By the president’s personal attorneys and for details on that I would refer you to them.”

What an impenetrable sentence: its meaning as mysterious as its gnomic syntax.

For a moment there, I recalled former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his famous statement that “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns…”

Rumsfeld was speaking about what was known about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He was addressing something important and much contested. Trump’s press secretary was addressing whether Trump had an affair with a porn star or not.

“Perhaps Trump isn’t so exceptional then, although it does appear that Kennedy had better taste, if nothing else”

The truth is oddly immaterial as Trump famously says whatever he likes and shouts down opponents by calling them liars.

Did he have an affair with that porn star – sorry, “actor”? Who knows, but it seems snugly within the realms of possibility. And that’s why electing someone like Trump risks all sorts being brushed under the White House carpet.

Rumsfeld was much mocked at the time for a statement that seemed designed merely to obfuscate. But in the present American political climate, his “known knows” suddenly sound like the clearest good sense.

A National Geographic feature from October 2013 reminds us that other American presidents have had affairs. The historian Robert P Watson, who has researched sexual indiscretion in the White House, numbers seven straying presidents, from Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton. John F Kennedy’s dalliances were the most legendary and are said to have included an affair with movie star Marilyn Monroe.

Kennedy’s friend told Kennedy’s biographer, Robert Dallek, “Jack liked girls. He was a great chaser.”

Perhaps Trump isn’t so exceptional then, although it does appear that Kennedy had better taste, if nothing else.

WE are driving to my in-laws. They are expecting the two of us, but we have a passenger. We park in the drive and let our daughter out first. My mother-in-law opens the door and suffers a dislocating moment. She starts to speak, thinking that she is talking to her daughter. We’d spun a yarn about needing to borrow their shower as our manky old sprayer has been ripped out to make way for a new one.

She has no idea her granddaughter is back from her year in Australia, as we have been telling fibs all week. “Kenneth!” she cries, as we get out of the car. “Did you know about this?”

“No,” the father-in-law says, laughing.

“Well, I’ve been cleaning the shower all morning,” my mother-in-law grumbles. But she is pleased to see the wandering girl and the doorstep surprise raises plenty of laughter.

They had no idea, so sometimes it is good to lie. The lies continue throughout the week. We have arranged to go by train to Manchester with the oldest boy, to meet the middle boy for lunch. My mother, who is coming along too, keeps asking me when our daughter is back.

I have my answers ready. “We don’t know,” I say. “She’s booking her ticket any day soon.”

‘No we still don’t know when she’s coming back’

While taking one of these calls, I walk out of the study and stand with our daughter in her room. “No, we still don’t know when she’s coming back,” I tell my mother.

We worry that the lie might be uncovered, as our daughter tracked her return on Facebook and my mother, aged 86, does go on there occasionally. But the good lie holds.

At Piccadilly station, we are waiting for our son to show, and he does. My mother is due to drive to a tram-stop and ride the rest of the way. By chance, as we wonder what to do next, my mother pops up behind our daughter – “You’re here!” she says, or something like that.

Lie number two works.

We head for a coffee, then walk through the Northern Quarter, a scruffy corner of central Manchester fast turning trendy.

‘For mysterious reasons people outside form a queue with fat little dogs’

After coffee, we walk to the place my son had found online. For mysterious reasons, there is a long queue of people outside, all with fat little dogs.

A sign on the door reveals that this is a “bring you pug” day. As we don’t have one and don’t fancy sitting in a pub for lunch surrounded by asthmatic wheezers, we look for somewhere else.

After being turned away from a busy brunch bar and a packed café bar, we find a hipster pub doing Sunday lunch. Beef times two and one lamb for the boys; three veggie lunches for the girls.

In the afternoon, we visit the People’s History Museum, at my mother’s urging, and this turns out to be a good urge: it describes itself as the “national museum of democracy”, and if you have Jeremy Corbyn for an uncle, he’ll love it; if your auntie is Theresa May, I’d gently steer her away.

The story of Manchester’s people and their labours runs from the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 to the present day.

My mother begins to tire, so the Manchester boy walks with her to the tram, and then we fit in a quick visit to the John Rylands Library, a late Victorian neo-Gothic delight with a snazzy modern extension.

‘Dinky downstairs drinkery’

Both places are a top tip for Manchester, as too is The Brink, a tiny subterranean bar that describes itself as a “dinky downstairs drinkery”. Great beer too, all of it from within a 25-mile radius. This happy circumference just touches Huddersfield and the Magic Rock Brewery, with its High Hire West Coast Pale – lovely beer in a lovely little place.

As for the girl, it’s great to see her back, although she mysteriously doesn’t share my view that life is too short to watch The Chase on ITV; but honestly, it is… and that’s no lie.

No more lies for now, although my dad doesn’t know about the prodigal return yet…

ENDEAVOUR is one of ITV’s finest diversions. Last Sunday’s John-le-Carré-meets-Bond episode was watched a day late, just as news surfaced of the apparent poisoning of a Russian spy in Salisbury, of all the unlikely things in all the unlikely places.

Sergei Skripal is a former double agent who is said to have passed secrets to MI6. Today’s newspapers report the mysterious collapse of Skripal and a younger woman. The headlines run from the lurid to the straight, with the Times being admirably matter-of-fact: “Russian spy critically ill after suspected poisoning.”

Wiltshire police are said to have removed a suspicious substance from the scene. Dark conclusions are being jumped to, thanks to memories of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian security officer who died in Britain of radiation poisoning in 2006. Poisoned by polonium in a cup of tea at a Mayfair hotel, of all the unlikely things in all the unlikely places.

‘A one-shot umbrella and a killer snake fish’

Endeavour was full of unlikely things too, including a lethal one-shot umbrella and a killer snake fish. A West German man was murdered during the filming in Oxford of It’s A Knockout, spies and communists stepped in and out of the shadows, and a nice old double-dealing dear executed the inconvenient, but spared Morse.

The last episode of Inspector Morse ran in 2000. The Remorseful Day was watched by 13.66 million viewers, who tuned in to see the mournful conclusion to the 33^rd episode of the crime series that reinvented the genre, with slowing unspooling plots that ran for two hours.

Morse and Lewis had a final pint together beside the Cherwell at sunset, with Morse reciting the AE Houseman poem that gave the episode its title. Morse later collapsed on an Oxford quad, with Fauré’s Requiem being sung in the college chapel – a lovely piece of music, that gave way to Wagner as Morse breathed his last. Lewis arrived too late and kissed Morse’s head, saying, “Goodbye, sir” – an unbearable scene, and yet so right and sombre.

‘It began with an E…’

An incidental quirk of Morse was that you never knew his first name, other than that it began with ‘E’, and you had to wait until the end to discover that he was called Endeavour. Lewis took over and kept the spirit of Morse alive, until ITV took the poor decision to run hour-long episodes.

After Lewis came the prequel, Endeavour, with Shaun Evans as the young Morse starting out in the 1960s. No dead horses were flogged with that idea, and Endeavour has turned out to be a rewarding chip off the old Morse marble.

Shaun Evans seemed almost ridiculously fresh-faced at first, but as the series has continued he has grown a little older, a little grumpier, and a little bit more of that lovable scowl on legs.

He’s still young, of course, and a bit of a ladies’ man, too. Yet long-term fans can see the looming shadows: the solitariness, the obsessions, and his luckless love life – still popular with women as an older man, yet never settled, and always falling for the wrong woman (sometimes, if memory serves, those with blood on her hands).

If you watched and loved Morse, still love Morse to this day, then Endeavour is good entertainment; sharper in some episodes than others,but with depths from seeing Morse begin to grow into what he will become.

The before-and-after comparison is surprisingly moving at times, or it is to me, because we all live somewhere between before and after, don’t we?