Light dapples the tree-lined road and Bob Dylan is on the CD player. I spend far too long in this car, but there is enjoyment to be had in being alone with the music on loud.

Blonde On Blonde came out on May 16, 1966. It’s a double album – double the pleasure, or two discs when an edit would have produced something sharper. Over to Bob obsessives, like my professor brother. He would have an opinion on that, but I am driving through the sunny flatlands to the late shift and he is in his cottage in Brittany.

The trees thin out and the sky grows. Up ahead the light has turned red. Bob is Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again and I am stuck before a picturesque stone bridge that only has room for one-way traffic.

The lights change and I am moving again. Bob has put on that Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat now and all is well with the world.

I don’t listen to Dylan that often, not as often as I should, but I do love Blonde On Blonde. The CD version comes as one long album, whereas the original vinyl version was two albums, one sublime, the other a degree or two less so.

The songs on the first disc show Dylan completely at ease with himself, knowing exactly what he wants to do and say – even if some of the lyrics might have fallen out of a crossword from a cryptically stoned compiler.

But what songs – Rainy Day Woman Nos 12 & 35, with its barnstorming stomp, Pledging My Time with its harmonica snarl, the lovely pastures of Visions of Johanna, and the devout affections of I Want You.

Then there is Just Like A Woman, a song of love and disappointment, adoration gone sour. Dylan-ologists still argue over who inspired the song, but whoever it was turned Bob from rapture to rupture, and helped him write a timeless ballad. “There’s a lifetime of listening in these details,” the songwriter Jimmy Webb said. “I still marvel at what an absolutely stunning piece of writing this is.”

The trees disappear as you come into Howden. The half-ruined minster with its green roof looms over the wheat fields. Then I am parked up. The sunny day will go its way and I’ll go mine.

I leave the office once to buy lottery tickets for our hopeless syndicate (sorry, Steve, nothing again this week). The others quit at 6.30pm. I leave in darkness at 9pm. August is a wickedly tricky month, sunny one day, foul the next – or sometimes both in the same day, the worst sort of changeable friend. Now it is raining heavily. I drive home in darkness. Dylan is still on – it’s a long album – but he has reached the difficult second side, where the taut mastery of the first half begins to come undone.

The sky is almost black with horizontal streaks of white. The car shudders as the tyres ream through a huge puddle and the windscreen wipers go on overtime. Soon even those streaks, last scraps of optimism, disappear.

Now Bob is stretching Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands to 11 long minutes – something which bemused his musicians at the time – and the rain is truly pouring down. Never mind those rainy-day women, here is a hard rained on man.

Back home and the roads are almost dry. Those rainy women are back as the CD starts over. Weird weather, a long day, but thanks for the company, Bob.

WE’RE defrosting the freezer, Scott of the Antarctic’s fruitcake has been found, and the fruitcake in the White House has been waving his, ahem, weapon – how’s that for a frosted jumble of topics?

The freezer contained few surprises as we’d been running it down in readiness for the big chill reversal. There were a couple of slices of my banana loaf, but not a whole fruitcake.

Scott’s fruitcake wasn’t in our freezer, although I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that he’d left something in one of my mother’s two freezers – a fearless explorer should be sent in to have a poke around among those frozen treasures.

I love it that Scott’s elderly fruitcake has been found beneath the ice of Antarctica. Conservators working for the Antarctic Heritage Trust discovered the 106-year-old British fruitcake on Cape Adare, and reckon that it belonged to the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, according to the BBC website.

What a marvel of a story. Fruitcake, the best cake there is, can survive for a century in one of the earth’s most hostile environments. The cake was in a rusted tin, but otherwise appeared to be in “excellent condition” and smelled edible. The New Zealand-based trust found the cake in a hut built by Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink’s team in 1899, and used by Scott in 1911. Scott was said to be fond of the cake, made by Huntley & Palmers.

It’s good to know that I share something with Scott of the Antarctic. Fearlessness in the frozen wastes is not really my thing, but I do love a piece of fruitcake, the stickier the better, and they do say it improves with age. One mystery is why the cake was not eaten. Apparently, Scott and his doomed crew ate well in that hut, with an older BBC report saying: “The smell of fresh bread and rhubarb pie was a common feature of life there…” Fresh bread and rhubarb pie! Perhaps I could be an explorer yet.

Another dietary fixture was seal meal, curried, fried or in soup, a popular cut with the men. Stewed penguin not so much, as it tasted like very bad sardines.

But here’s the thing. Why would you stew a penguin when you had a tin of fruitcake to eat?

The thought that fruitcake can survive for a century is a comfort, a constant of steeped and baked delights in an unstable world – especially at a time when we must contend with another elderly fruitcake.

Part of me thinks that we should ignore Donald Trump in the hope that he might go away. We all seem so obsessed with whatever stupid or dangerous thing he has just said or done, that we hardly notice anything else. And that’s how bullies operate, demanding attention and roughing everyone up.

In the latest rough and tumble with North Korea – the Don and Kim Show, the craziest, scariest sit-com around – Trump tweeted that the US military was “locked and loaded”. He was operating, as is often the case, not from the White House but his golf club. And then it dawns on you. The US is being run by a mouthy golf club bore who swaggers about the place and burns everyone ear’s off with his loud opinions. A golf bore who thinks he’s Clint Eastwood.

Speaking in person rather than on Twitter, Trump later said North Korea should expect “big, big trouble” – a form of words that raises another possibility. This is that Trump is really a character in one of those Mr Men books. Mr Tweet, perhaps. Or Mr Something Unprintable.

He also said the following: “Hopefully, it will all work out. Nobody loves a peaceful solution better than President Trump, that I can tell you.”

And nobody hates a warmongering twerp with a Twitter addiction more than me, that I can tell you.

I had that Tony Blair in the car yesterday. Had to turf him out in the end, though, or I would have been late for work.

The former prime minister talked about many things, perhaps most surprisingly that he was “briefly a Trot” – and not just on a wet Tuesday afternoon but for a whole year.

Blair was on the radio rather than in the car with me, although I’d be willing to offer him a lift to the vaguely picturesque middle of nowhere that is Howden, should he wish to go there. He was talking to the historian Peter Hennessy in an hour-long interview, first in a new series on BBC Radio Four, called Reflections. And it was a good listen.

It is common to dislike Blair nowadays, with those on his own side displaying the strongest aversion. Hating Blair and all he stands for is almost an article of faith among arch Corbynites, who see “Blairite” as the ultimate insult.

There are various reasons for the antipathy, partly that Blair was around for ages and travelled in that time from shiny idealist to a man harried by his decision to take Britain into the war against Iraq.

Those who disparage Blair believe that he took Labour too far to the right – a theory supported by the fact that he was much admired by David Cameron. Chief among those critics at the time was Jeremy Corbyn, who now leads the party and is tugging it back towards the left. Pulling a rug with furniture on is hard work, and there is a Blair-shaped sideboard on that rug, however much Corbyn might wish it had been sold off years ago.

As someone who liked Blair and then slowly went off him, I think the determination to scrub him out of Labour party history is a mistake and a shame. He was a successful leader and, for a while, a popular one. And his achievements include helping to foster peace in Northern Ireland – a process started by John Major – alongside introducing the minimum wage, devolution and repairing the NHS, left in a parlous state by long Tory years.

The NHS was repaired and restored, although, sadly, by introducing dodgy private finance deals, a Tory idea that Labour embraced with reckless enthusiasm.

Anyway, history will have the last word – and history may be kinder to Tony Blair than people now are. And whatever picture emerges, Hennessy’s programme provides much to argue about.

The intimacy of radio works so well for this sort of interview, and Blair was mostly straight and upfront, with occasional convenient lapses of memory, or careful verbal swerves. And the “you knows” are still there.

History is often shot through with irony, and it was striking to hear Blair say that the Labour Party of the 1970s was “kind of anathema” for socialists when he was a student. “These were the betrayers of socialism, these were the people who, you know, didn’t really believe in the way you should believe,” he said, adding that he was critical of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan when he joined the party.

Travel from student days in Oxford to the thin oxygen of the post-political life, when he is a ghost wandering the corridors of time, and Blair is now anathema to the sort of old-school socialism Jeremy Corbyn flourishes with a surprising degree of success, for now at least.

Footnote: Madame Tussauds is said to be preparing a new waxwork of Theresa May. There’s optimism for you. The wax version of our waxy prime minister won’t be ready for months. Perhaps Tussauds knows something we don’t.

I Google ‘North Korea funfair’ and my phone seizes up and says the internet isn’t available, leaving me to wonder if something sinister is afoot.

Which of course it is, although funfairs don’t really come into it, but stick with me for a moment.

Last week we had a Korean professor of economics to stay for the night. He was from the south naturally enough, as professors from the north, if they exist, are almost certainly banned from professing anything. And they aren’t allowed to stray to an Airbnb room in York.

Our visitor was a married man with three children, but he was touring Britain alone – “My family is jealous,” he said, with a shy smile. Well, you can see their point.

Anyway, over breakfast our guest told me about his visit to the North Korean funfair. Some years ago, the border opened and for a short while people from the south headed north for ‘fun’.

Google has now recovered itself, allowing me to find details of this unlikely source of merriment – an amusement park in a country notoriously short on amusement. The Mangyongdae Funfair moves an Australian travel website to ask: “Is this the world’s most depressing theme park?”

CNN is kinder, saying that this is “the happiest place in North Korea”, although you suspect that isn’t a long list. The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes visited the fair in May of last year, and his report is still on the BBC website.

Our visitor went for the day, and said that people flooded over the border. It was his only visit to the closed-off part of his country as soon enough the border was slammed shut again. His English was difficult to follow and I didn’t manage to ask how he felt about Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump squaring off at each other. I don’t think he lived in Seoul but he did live close enough to the world’s most militarised border.

I showed him my phone, which is a Samsung, and pointed to the television – also a Samsung – and said that both had come from his country. South Korea is busily connected to the rest of the world, while North Korea is a closed-off dictatorship and one of the world’s scariest places.

This morning Donald Trump is threatening “fire and fury” against North Korea if any threat is made to the United States. North Korea is “carefully examining” a plan for a missile strike on Guam. This tiny island in the western Pacific is a US territory with a population of around 160,000, including thousands of US military personnel.

Trump says that if this happens, North Korea would face “fire and the fury like the world has never seen”. And never mind that he still conducts himself like the villain in a Batman movie – less the Joker, more the Tweeter ­– this is scary stuff.

To even contemplate that the balance of world peace lies in a ballistic willy-waving contest between two such leaders as Trump and Kim Jong-un is just the prospect to cheer you up on a soggy August morning.

How did we end up with a world run by such lunatics? The visiting Martian traditionally called on to offer an outsider’s opinion just looked at me and shrugged.

THE main headline in The Observer last Sunday read: “Stop children bingeing on social media, parents urged.” This is a serious matter, but my first thought was that two words could be swapped: “Stop parents bingeing on social media, children urged.”

This was partly a personal reaction, as far too much of my time is frittered away on Twitter and Facebook. Such a modern form of wastage demands a new word. Perhaps we should instead now say that time is “Twittered” away.

Most of those who abuse social media are adults. Flinging verbal acid with cowardly abandon. Being rude about others behind their backs, or certainly not to their faces. Some body-shame, or so I hear, sharing supposedly embarrassing pictures of body-imperfect people at the gym, say – and bodily imperfection, naturally enough, afflicts all of us, as perfection is a Photoshopped mirage.

Then you have the president of the US, a 71-year-old going on sulky seven, who sends out an endless barrage of rude and puerile tweets – that’s when he is not announcing major US policy changes by Twitter. The most important man in the world floats on a cloud of puffed-up vanity, self-pleasuring tweets, and the endless distractions of a world reduced to 140 characters.

Almost anywhere you look on social media, someone or other is being vile or rude or just plain nasty, whether it’s about politicians or parties they hate – or ‘wrong’ members of their own tribe who they love to excoriate.

There are ‘nice’ contributions too, and anyway there is nothing wrong with a bit of social media argy-bargy, but the truly nasty stuff is a spreading stain.

As long ago as 2013 – eons back in the social media blizzard – Professor Mary Beard reeled under an onslaught of online abuse after appearing on the BBC’s Question Time. The classicist mentioned that immigration brought benefits, and was horridly abused and pelted with vile sexual taunts in “language too offensive to reprint”, according to a Guardian report at the time.

Now Beard has been misused again, this time for suggesting that there was ethnic diversity in Roman Britain, which unleashed a “torrent of aggressive insults”. An intelligent, thoughtful woman who knows her stuff is clearly too much for the morons who gather to spit and squabble online.

So, yes, stop children spending too much time on social media, as the children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, suggests and draw them away from their tablets and smartphones – maybe even to go outside and get their knees muddy. Regulating children’s internet usage sounds sensible, although I am glad it’s no longer something I need worry about. Our children were young pre-social media, although I remember words being exchanged sometimes about computer games and Xboxes and those hand-held Gameboys.

Nowadays I probably spend as much or more time on social media as my three. Sometimes I love it; and sometimes I fear my brain will rot.

It’s all so addictive, time-wasting and endlessly fascinating in a throw-away manner. But maybe we ought to be teaching adults how to use social media before we worry about children.

OH, what a night. Unable to fall asleep in the bed where I belong, I go down a floor to the spare bed, and read for a while. It is pouring with rain and the cat is outside somewhere, an unsettling thought.

The trouble with this room is that she jumps onto the conservatory roof and demands right of entry in the small hours.

The light goes off around midnight and sleep is granted. Then I have a weird dream. The details don’t hold fast, but there is a yowling cat in that dream. I wake to find a yowling cat on the roof outside.

She’s a quiet cat, except when this happens. When she is stuck on the roof she raises a racket to rouse the neighbourhood.

Normally you open the window, she jumps through, trots downstairs to see if it is breakfast time yet, her furry behind bouncing. Rain makes this difficult. She loses her confidence when it’s wet. Switching on the light, I open both windows and encourage her to make the jump, even leaning out to haul her in, but she is wet and uncooperative, and I am not good at grabbing hold of animals. Instead she sits on the roof, looks up at me and continues loudly to complain.

I go downstairs in my pyjamas and open the doors to the conservatory and the kitchen, putting the light on in each room. The digital radio in the conservatory reveals at it is 1.58am. The cat moves around on the roof. I stick my head out of the two doors and try swearing at her in a quiet voice.

This has no effect at all, so I trudge back up the creaky stairs. We have an Airbnb guest in the front room and I worry that all this activity might wake him. He has a flying lesson in the morning and probably needs his sleep.

The cat is still on the roof, yowling and looking disconsolate in a “what you going to do about this stupid human?’ manner. I offer a look that translates as: “How you going to get through that window stupid cat?” A stalemate has been reached.

I make the stairs creak again and worry about the flying doctor (not literally, but a GP who flies). Downstairs I shut the two doors, turn off the lights, and return to the spare room. Looking out of the window, I see the cat has disappeared.

Creaking again, both those stairs and me, I check to see if she is by the conservatory door, her favoured route of entry, but there is no sign of her. It is still pouring down.

Returning to the bed where I belong, I read some more as the rain hits the skylight window but sleep is now elusive, a door that won’t shut. If I return to the spare bed the same wet cat routine will be repeated, so I chance the creaks again and make a hot drink that is said to aid sleep, then try sleeping on the sofa.

The night does not end well, but it does end in the belonging bed. Now it is morning and, having slept from around 5am to 7.30am, I go downstairs for that first cup of tea.

“She was very soggy when she came in,” my wife says. I shake my head and make a noise somewhere close to speech while flicking the switch on the kettle.

The cat is curled up asleep on the old sofa in the conservatory, just where I like to sit for that inaugural refreshment. Perhaps I should wake her in revenge.

Having a cat is a bother sometimes. But then so too is sharing the house with a nomad of the night.

AS Bob Dylan almost said – “One more cup of coffee before consumption outstrips production in the valley below…”

And as the great man never sang: “One more cup of tea before the Darjeeling crop shrivels and dies…”

Tea was our national drink until coffee mugged our mugs. Perhaps tea does still rule in the home, but not out on the streets. Here in York coffee shops spring up all the time. Park your car for too long and you’ll return to find it’s been turned into a coffee shop.

The insatiable demand for coffee combined with difficulties caused by global warming – and, yes, it’s happening Donald, so stop muttering through your cheese-burger mouth – put great pressure on the coffee crop.

In June, it was reported that consumption was forecast to outstrip production for the third year in a row, according to the International Coffee Organisation, an intergovernmental body that looks after coffee.

A coffee shortage or price rises have been avoided so far, thanks to stockpiles built up during good years. But a pile of beans only lasts so long, and as exporters have been digging into their stock, levels of coffee are said to be low.

Dr Tim Schilling is director of the World Coffee Research Institute, which is funded by the global coffee industry – and, indirectly, by all those cappuccinos I buy. He told the BBC website: “The supply of high-quality coffee is severely threatened by climate change, diseases and pest, land pressure, and labour shortages – and demand for these coffees is rising every year.”

Especially hit are good quality coffees – just the sort I choose, dammit.

A picture on the BBC website shows a woman crouching to harvest coffee beans in Ethiopia. Such a livelihood is at threat thanks to global warming, as coffee growing areas in Ethiopia could decrease by up to 60 per cent if temperatures rise by 4C by the end of the century. This is according to a study by Kew Gardens and collaborators in Ethiopia.

That crouching woman is a reminder that our daily treats and pleasures often come at the cost of someone far away doing hard work for little money.

Picking the tea harvest is fiddly and difficult work, and two years ago a BBC investigation found dangerous and degrading living and working conditions on tea estates in Assam.

Those ‘tips’ don’t get into your teabags all by themselves, and the people at the end of the tea chain can suffer horribly. BBC Radio 4’s File on Four discovered that “living and working conditions are so bad, and wages so low, that workers and their families are left malnourished and vulnerable to fatal illnesses”.

This is why we should worry that Sainsbury’s and others appear to be stepping away from the Fairtrade mark that guarantees decent payment and treatment of workers.

As it happens, Sainsbury’s is one of the places where I buy Darjeeling, along with Waitrose. Sadly, neither shop is a regular visit due to geography and price constraints. I do love a good cup of Darjeeling, although loose leaf golden breakfast tea stands in when supplies run out.

Today it is reported that the Darjeeling crop is under threat. Darjeeling is known as the “champagne of teas” – or, to unbelievers, as that weak stuff you can’t stand a spoon in. It can be horrendously expensive. I suspect the packets I buy are from the bottom of the Darjeeling tea chain.

The tea is grown in the foothills of the Himalayas in West Bengal state. Since June, Darjeeling has been riven by violent protests and strikes in support of a campaign demanding a separatist campaign by the Nepali-speaking Gorkha community. And the crop is going unpicked.

As a person who doesn’t operate well without his tea and coffee, I am sorry to bring all this up. Better to sip and swill, to grind and guzzle, without a thought for the wider world. But sometimes the wider world threatens to take away your daily treats.

My wife works in a health food shop and she used to bring home lovely bags of Brazil nuts. Then the crop failed a few times.

“Did you know that they have to go into the jungle to pick them?”

“Well, yes you told me that – but they’re delicious. And aren’t they meant to be good for men or something?”

Anyway, those nuts have become too expensive to buy unless you’ve won the Lottery, or unless you are Prince Charles or someone.

This blog has been fuelled by one mug of tea and now the tank is empty.

I just followed a tree on Twitter.

There is every chance its tweets will be as sensible as anything else on Twitter, and besides I like trees.

Today, before the tree thing, I was casting about for ideas and wondered about ‘Lexit’. This is the neologism for left-wing people who favour Brexit. These are people who think along similar lines to me about many matters, but not about Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn is probably one, although he isn’t saying exactly. Instead he is playing a gnomic game of wait-and-see on Brexit.

Then I wondered about Venezuela. Plenty of left-wing people admire Venezuela, but the country seems to be in a mess, with last Sunday’s election reported to have been rigged. The disputed election gives the government of President Nicolas Maduro extreme powers to act as it wishes.

I don’t know enough to have an unshakeable opinion, but could always blame the US, the default turn-left position on Venezuela.

The former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone – presently suspended from the Labour Party, but not from opening his mouth – says President Hugo Chavez, often seen as a hero on the left, is to blame for the current mess because he didn’t follow Ken’s advice. “He didn’t kill all the oligarchs,” Ken told Talk Radio. Or maybe it was Talk Nonsense Radio, as it is difficult to pay full attention when Ken veers off on one.

Let’s return to that tree’s Twitter account. The tree is called Duchess Lime. Other trees with Twitter accounts are available, but this one caught my eye.

Duchess Lime is from Sheffield, not a good city to call home if you are a tree. Around five years ago, the Labour-led city council in Sheffield signed a PFI contact with Amey Hallam Highways to resurface roads, replace street lights and maintain the city’s 36,000 roadside trees as part of a 25-year programme.

As far as anyone can see, Amey’s main wish is to chop down as many trees as possible, just to make the job easier. People in the city have been arrested defending those trees – and some healthy trees were felled in the early hours and with a police escort.

That sounds like the actions of a police state, not a local council. You don’t have to go all the way to Venezuela to feel outraged.

The Labour politicians in Sheffield should be ashamed of themselves for coming to such a rotten deal. They can blame government cuts all they like, but they hired the tree hit men. Duchess Lime can have that one for free.

We live in an avenue of lime trees and this is partly what drew me to the Duchess. Maybe it shows a lack of imagination to worry about trees in Sheffield because of the trees outside our house. But I love those mighty old trees. They green out the traffic and soften the view. And I’ll be there with a climbing rope and a pair of ageing knees if anyone from our council signs a money-saving deal with a bunch of corporate tree assassins.

And thank you, Duchess – you gave me something to think about. I’ll tweet you later.

“YOU’VE been reading the Guardian again” is an accusation thrown my way sometimes by those to the right of me and those to the left.

Guilty as charged, although I do dip into different casks. The old Blairite – another accusation – sitting on my right shoulder directs me sometimes to the Spectator online, where much of interest can be found. And the dusty old idealist sitting on my leftie shoulder points me towards the New Statesman.

But this morning, let’s begin with the Guardian and a good – if shameful ­ – report. In a few paragraphs, reference will be made also to the front page of the Sun and the Great British Bake Off, should you fancy a lighter sponge.

According to today’s edition, the London borough in which the remains of Grenfell Tower stand like a charred tomb also contains 1,652 properties listed as unoccupied by Kensington and Chelsea council.

While residents who survived that atrocity remain homeless, properties are left empty by wealthy absentee owners, including “a Ukrainian billionaire fighting extradition to the US, a former mayor of New York, a high-profile luxury property developer and a senior television executive”.

Oligarchs, foreign royalty and multimillionaire business people own vacant properties, some within sight of the burned-out tower block where at least 80 people died.

The names of the owners were accidentally sent by the council to the Guardian and “multiple recipients” with details of the council tax information of the vacant homes and their 1,197 distant owners. More than a third of those homes were reported as having been empty for at least two years.

Was that release of information an accident or the actions of a whistle-blower keeping their head low? Who knows, but the revelation is a disgrace, if not exactly a surprise.

What a perfect illustration of how housing in this country risks becoming a game only the wealthy can play; and in London that is happening already. For people to buy up properties they don’t need – as in need in terms of a roof over their heads – and keep them sitting empty to cash in on rising property prices is shameful.

Jeremy Corbyn, who inspires in me cautious regard and a dusting of scepticism, said that empty properties in the borough should be taken over to house those made homeless by the fire. And he has a point.

But it’s unlikely to happen, as the ultra-rich find ways of protecting themselves, extreme wealth being the most reliable form of insulation known to man.

The answers are hard to find, although if you are looking for a cause – or the main cause – hover your magnifying glass over Margaret Thatcher’s decision to sell council houses cheap to tenants, in a bid to turn more people into Tories.

Governments since of both persuasions have done little to improve matters, and now we have a situation where some people are as likely to be able to afford a home as they are to win the lottery. That is also their only hope of joining the home-owning classes – of which, hardly surprising disclosure, I am a member, thanks to lucky timing and years of mortgage payments.

A few paragraphs ago, I rashly promised something lighter. So here goes. According to the Sun splash, Mary Berry and the BBC are being accused of a “Great British Rip-Off”. This is because Mary’s new cookery show is said by Channel 4 to be too close to the GBBO.

Oh, come off it. Channel 4 poached what had become a BBC institution, and now complains because Mary is doing another show, this time one about home cooking.

The weird thing is that this story has been known about for ages, whereas the Sun claims to have baked it freshly. It was always clear that Mary Berry would be a judge in a show in which contestants donned aprons, so Channel 4 – a station I admire – should go and shove its head in the flour bin.

Must stop now as the devil on my right shoulder has started up a dreadful racket with the devil on my left. The ‘leftie’ usually wins, even if I am at the stage of life when people are supposed to turn into right old devils.

HERE’S what is odd about reading a restaurant review – likely as not, you’ll never eat the food so fully described, whether the critic leaves the table with a happy strained belt or a bad case of dyspepsia.

Still, I do read about those uneaten meals. My favourite critic is Marina O’Loughlin in the Guardian Weekend supplement. Never shared a mouthful, but her words go down nicely. Having said that, my mother went to the Con Club in Altrincham on the strength of a rave review in Marina’s column, and didn’t like the place much at all.

Jay Rayner in the Observer Magazine – I’ll read him too, even if sometimes he goes out of his way to be annoying. Although his BBC Radio 4 food prog The Kitchen Cabinet is good fun and he makes for an amusing host.

But I did read his latest review, word for word. Jay was in York and I’d been to the restaurant. The food going into his mouth had been into mine, as it were. He reviewed Mr P’s Curious Tavern, which is a spin-off from Andrew Pern, of the Star Inn in Harome and the Star Inn the City in York, and the newly opened Star Inn The Harbour at Whitby.

And Jay was not ‘inn’ a particularly good mood – not at his carping worst, but he didn’t much enjoy the meal. He said the place was trying too hard to be zany and different.

As he pointed out in the review, Jay has form with Pern, having written an unenthusiastic review of the other York joint, where he complained about being served food in a flat cap. I wouldn’t disagree with him there, as plates are a fine invention.

Jay was suspicious of the theme for Mr P’s Curious Tavern, distrusting the phrase “Yorkshire tapas” – “I searched deep inside myself for the Spaniard by way of Heckmonwike. He wasn’t there.”

I searched deep inside myself for a reason for a reason not to like this place, and found none. Don’t eat out a lot, but my friend Robert – who is kind enough to indulge these laptop meanderings – took me there for lunch recently. I didn’t recognise everything Jay ate, although the boudin noir bonbons seemed familiar. And I did have the same pud – the chocolate mousse with orange sorbet, served in a hollowed-out orange. Very nice it was, too.

It’s a quirky place this tavern, eccentrically decorated, with columns of books on the bar, but I felt at home, even with a beer-dulled head on a hot afternoon, two treats having queued up on subsequent days.

We were greeted by a friend of my daughter, who is away in Australia, where the friend’s sister lives, so there was a bit of chat. Then I chatted to Robert and ate three good courses, plus that orange, and one modest glass of white wine, an Albarino if memory serves.

Other friends thought the place good but pricey ­– hinting that you didn’t exactly leave over-burdened in the stomach department. I left happily full for a lunchtime, and would return, although saying that I never saw the bill.

Back in March, Jay Rayner gave a rave review to another York restaurant, Skosh in Micklegate. He listed the travelling times to York from various other cities, then said: “All of these (and more) are entirely reasonable journey times to experience Neil Bentinck’s clever, delicious and often brilliant cooking at a price that won’t leave you feeling like you’ve been a willing accomplice in your own mugging.”

Critics give and they take. Skosh sounds great. My teacher son went there shortly after it opened and raved about the place also. Perhaps one day I’ll get there, although Jay has made that harder.

I have been to Partisan a few doors up the street and liked that. Last week we took our other son and his girlfriend to Source in Castlegate, where the food was pretty good, although Jay might not appreciate his meal served straight on a tray.

That’s quite enough places mentioned for someone who mostly eats at home, where I read also about meals I will never probably never get around to cooking, even though we do experiment sometimes by following recipes in the weekend supplements.

In my days at the Press, I even passed on a few recipes, many of them for bread. Incidentally, restaurant reviews were removed from that paper years ago, due to cost-cutting and complaints from the advertising department – “You can’t say that meal belonged in the bin, they’ve just paid for a month’s worth of adverts.”

Now the reviews are back and they seem to be popular. I try not to take an unhealthy interest in my past, but I was glad to see those reviews return. The expenses would probably cover Jay Rayner’s pudding bill, but it’s a start. If not a starter – and I suspect the drinks are on the reviewer, too.

As for York, this city seems hellbent on giving Jay Rayner plenty more places to visit, with everywhere turning into bars and restaurants. The poor man will be on his knees by the time York has finished with him.