HERE is an idiot’s guide to making a cup of coffee. To play this game, you need an old aluminium espresso pot and it helps if you are tired.

Our pot is more than 30 years old and came from Paris. We bought it from an African man who had a stall outside a department store. There are four main parts: the bottom where the water goes, the funnel for the coffee, the filter plate and the top with a handle and spout. The pot has kept going all these years, although we did once have to change the rubber seal that holds the filter plate in place.

It is election morning and I slept fitfully, so a coffee seems like a good idea. There is a routine with this coffee pot and I could do it with my eyes shut, although it turns out I might have made a better job of it that way.

Grind the beans, put the coffee in the basket, screw everything together and place the pot on the hob. And – hey espresso! – a few minutes later you have lovely, dark coffee.

The milk goes in the pan, ready to place on the turned-off hob so that it warms without getting too hot. It’s the attention to detail that counts, you see. I pride myself on knowing how these things should be done. A degree of smugness may even be summoned up on occasions.

But this morning something doesn’t seem right, doesn’t smell right. Then I spot my mistake, which you may be able to glean from a quick sweep of the available clues: no water.

I only realise the error when the coffee doesn’t begin to bubble as it should. A watched coffee pot doesn’t boil when you forget to put the water in. Instead it heats up alarmingly.

Using two tea towels, I try to undo the pot, but the heat expansion has stuck everything together. Do you know how long an aluminium coffee pot stays hot? Longer than you might think, longer than a man with an urge for coffee is prepared to wait.

The pot is left to cool for a few minutes, until the parts will unscrew. Then a thin butter knife is used to ease out the hot basket, spilling the ground coffee on the work surface. After that, cold water goes in the bottom half of the espresso maker. There is, it must be said, steam involved. The spilled coffee is rescued and the coffee pot is reassembled using those tea towels.

Normally the coffee bubbles up gently, but today it heats up alarmingly and spurts out of the spout. Still, it’s a coffee and – bloody hell, that’s hot! Nuclear hot, coffee bought from a stall at the core of the earth.

The coffee is poured and the warm milk added. The next part of this important process involves reading the paper for ten minutes until the coffee has cooled to a point where you can pick up the mug.

I hope these instructions prove useful. Incidentally, there is a theory that you shouldn’t use aluminium utensils because of a possible link with Alzheimer’s. It’s probably too late to worry about that now, and there’s just enough left in the pot for a mini-refill. And I’ll raise a cup to that.

HERE we are on the morning after the night before. Big political events have the narrative of a game of sport, with winners and losers, and the exciting sweep of how the ‘match’ goes.

Theresa May played the game and lost the gamble. This contest was unnecessary but Mrs Maybe held it all the same. She plunged into an election she swore repeatedly she wouldn’t hold, so that she would win a strong negotiating hand in the talks over a Brexit she said she didn’t want until she did.

Having U-turned herself into an election, she ran the worst Conservative campaign in living memory, looking uncomfortable in her skin as she droned on about being “strong and stable”, while refusing to speak to just about anyone who hadn’t been preapproved with a quick Tory shake-and-vac. She forced her personality and her presence over the entire campaign, reducing the branding of the Conservative Party into a dreary egotistical hymn to herself.

And now she has thrown away her small but workable majority and Britain faces a hung parliament. The Tories did still win, but aside from that inconvenient truth, Theresa May was the biggest loser in a tempestuous night. And Jeremy Corbyn lost but was easily the biggest winner.

With the plaster still falling from the political ceiling, let’s consider two aspects of this stormy night: the rise of Corbyn and the malign role of certain mainstream newspapers.

I stayed up only until around 11.30pm, when the exit polls were pointing to something close to the outcome we got, although Professor John Curtice did say that those first two seats in the north east showed Labour performing less well than he’d predicted.

I fell asleep and then woke up a few times, checking my mobile (usually a banned activity for anyone with insomniac tendencies), and even posted something on Facebook at 3.30am.

By morning, Prof Curtice was beaming on the election programme, as his predictions had turned out to be right.

My early-hours posting drew a response from a forgivably gleeful Corbyn fanatic, who commented: “Still begrudging support of Corbyn, Julian?”

That’s a fair point. I was a Corbyn sceptic from the start, and it would be unseemly to pretend otherwise now. But throughout this election, I commented often from my ledge that he ran a good campaign. And it’s worth pointing out that some of Corbyn’s own people were managing expectations downwards early in the campaign, saying that if Jeremy ‘only’ lost 20 seats it would be a victory; or that he if matched Ed Miliband’s haul, it would be a cause for celebration.

In the event, Corbyn did much better than that and Labour has many reasons to celebrate, for which I am glad. Scepticism aside, I have only ever voted Labour, apart from one flirtation with the Greens.

Corbyn did well for various reasons, not least the fact that he was comfortable in his own skin. He smartened himself up, wearing a dark blue suit (M&S apparently) and appeared unruffled under pressure, whereas in the past he sometimes turned prickly. He calmly took the fight to Mrs Maybe and bested her, drawing huge crowds wherever he went.

Corbyn’s rise lay in a good manifesto containing policies people could relate too, an appeal to younger voters, and wide support on social media – alongside clever use of the internet. Previously the Tories were the smart ones there, but all those bloody anti-Corbyn ads that popped up every time I went on Facebook were clearly a waste of Tory money.

Old media, certainly as represented by the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, expended much dyspeptic energy in slagging off Jeremy Corbyn while also routinely rolling out the grovel carpet for Mrs Maybe. And it was all for nothing, or almost nothing.

Yesterday’s Sun had the latest in a series of frankly pathetic assaults on the Labour leader, under the headline: “Don’t chuck Britain in the…COR-BIN” beneath a mock-up of Corbyn in a dustbin. That was lame beyond words.

Perhaps the big-hitting newspapers no longer have the clout they once did; or maybe the acrid bias no longer influences their readers. Today’s Sun goes for the simpler: “Theresa Dismay” – less a pun and more a statement of fact.

This morning, Mrs Maybe is saying that she has no intention of resigning, according to the BBC and others. That may be true, but her party – the one she air-brushed out of the election – has a ruthless streak and the knives will be out soon enough.

But well done to Jeremy Corbyn – you lost, but you won. And for once that paradox wears a smile.

TODAY I shall mostly turn a deaf ear to politics, but only because I am turning a deaf ear to everything. The right one, as usual.

Here is a vignette from my life. It is breakfast time and I am in the conservatory with my porridge. The old hi-fi system is in there and sometimes one of the speakers doesn’t work. The right one, as usual.

I  crawl around trying to work out if the speaker has cut out, but this involves constantly turning my head because the right ear is wrong for this task right now. Eventually I work out that the speaker has gone silent.

I nudge the amplifier and for some reason this brings the speaker back. All is good again, except that I can’t hear any better because of my ear.

A visit to the practice nurse is arranged. For some reason, I think the blocked ear might be caused by the virus my wife passed on: sore throat, coughing, congestion and a deaf ear. She’s gone deaf in her left ear, so we need to arrange ourselves the right way around, or share a duff ear and ignore each other.

The practice nurse is a man who wears a genial smile and Doc Martens. He checks the left ear and says it is clear, then steps to my silent side. “Ah,” he says. “Completely occluded.”

What a good word for blocked, I think, as he tells me that it’s the usual wax problem, and therefore presumably not my wife’s virus.

“Try olive oil for a few days and then come back if it’s not shifted,” he says.

Here is another vignette from my life. I am in bed alone due the isolation theory which dictates that the person with the germs sleeps by themselves. My wife is downstairs with what remains of her germs for company.

The olive oil drops have been applied and, as suggested, I have put a bit of tissue in the ear to keep the oil there. I read my book, then I burst out laughing. This is because the tissue has gone in the wrong ear.

The BBC turns a deaf ear to politics today, too. Broadcasters are not allowed to report details of the campaigning while the polls are open. The BBC website’s review of the papers usually shows most of the front pages. Today, it displays the papers rolled up and concertinaed together so that only the titles can be seen, while the review  is confined to non-political stories. A bit of investigative Googling could uncover those pages, but most are best left unseen today.

But I will end with a story that combines politics and  bread, two interests of mine. The YorkMix website carries a lovely report about Phil Clayton, aka the Haxby Baker. When he’d not been long at his ovens, I joined Phil for a five-hour baking shift so that I could write a feature for my old newspaper, so I know him a little.

It was good fun and I picked up a few tips for my own baking ‘career’. Since then, Phil has become something of a star in the baking firmament and his loaves travel around York and further afield, too.

Phil has been putting his bread pictures on Instagram, including  sourdough loaves that feature Jeremy Corbyn’s face. The Labour leader is etched in flour in a rather fine portrait. Another pictured loaf features the words “Tories out”.

As Phil’s splendid bakery is in Haxby, his loaves are baked in the York Outer constituency, which usually votes Tory. I don’t know what his customers think. According to YorkMix, Phil accompanied his Instagram pictures with a message for the Labour leader: “Hope you don’t mind your face appearing on our loaves for the new few days. Getting the message across via bread.”

I am not a skilled enough baker to decorate my sourdough loaves in such a fashion. Instead I shall put a slice under the grill and make some Theresa May toast. I know she probably won’t be, but this early in the day you can still hope.

I think it must be time to shove my head in the washing-machine and flush out all the politics.

What a lot there has been these past weeks. Now that we are on the last day of campaigning, what have we learned? We’ve learned that Theresa May is a terrible campaigner, truly awful. Robotic, awkward, arrogant and strangely uncomfortable with the meat and veg of politics – the arguments and discussions, proving yourself through debate, rather that surrounding yourself with zombies sporting blue rosettes.

She has shown herself to be the most brittle crisp in the packet. And the flavour of that packet? Oh, vinegar and more vinegar.

Mrs Maybe started this unnecessary election because, she said, of Brexit. Strange, then, that Brexit has hardly been mentioned, which exposes the truth we knew all along – she wanted this election because she thought it would be a pushover.

She ran this whole me-myself-and-I election on the basis that Jeremy Corbyn was a hopeless loser. And Labour may well lose tomorrow, but Corbyn has shown himself to be a good campaigner, polite and dogged, good at meeting people, prepared to engage in debates.

I’ve always put myself in the Corbyn sceptic camp, believing that his relative extremism makes his party unelectable; and what’s the point of a political party that can’t get elected? Apologies to the Greens and Lib-Dems – but no apology to those now hopeless Kippers.

The longer the campaign has gone on, the better Corbyn has seemed. I’m not joining the converts or anything, as the evangelism might get me down. But it’s fair to say that Jeremy Corbyn no longer seems so scary to the average person – even if today’s Daily Mail devotes nine pages to saying why Theresa should win. The Express, which has taken up attic space in Mrs Maybe’s brain, offers: “Vote May or we face disaster.” The Sun, meanwhile, scrabbles in the history bin to come up with the frankly disgraceful: “Jezza’s Jihadi comrades.”

All of this is to be expected – along, too, with a well-argued leader in the Guardian the other day on why Labour deserves to win. Odd in a way, that endorsement: ardent members of the Corbyn congregation berate the “once proud, etc” Guardian for disparaging their hero. And now the paper has backed him almost with a full heart.

Yesterday we did learn something new about Mrs Maybe. Asked by Julie Etchingham on ITV’s Tonight programme what was the naughtiest thing she ever did, the prime minister stumbled and blustered.

“Oh goodness me. Um. Well, I suppose – gosh. Do you know, I’m not quite sure.”

When Etchingham persisted, the PA stalled, saying “nobody is – nobody is ever perfectly behaved, are they”.

Having built us up for a cliff-hanger revelation, she said: “I have to confess, when me and my friend, sort of, used to run through the fields of wheat – the farmers weren’t too pleased about that.”

Heavens, the world paused on its axis at that. Who among us knew that Mrs Maybe grew up with Thomas Hardy or that on the quiet she was once known as Tezza of the d’Urbervilles?

Of course, she could have said the naughtiest thing she’s ever done was cut police numbers, collaborate in the clandestine privatisation of the NHS and help to bring schools to their knees. But I’m sure that trampled wheat has been marked down in the sin book.

She likes trampling on things, does Theresa. Now she says she wants to trample on human rights legislation in the name of fighting terrorism. A lot of people may think that’s fair enough, but such kneejerk pronouncements – especially on the cusp of an election – have little to do with what will or won’t work, but are merely opportunistic politicking.

Instead we should redouble our efforts to keep track of these dangerous Islamist ideologues, boost community policing and listen when concerned Muslims pass on their worries about evidence of extremism in their community.

And while there may be things that Facebook and Google could do to stop the spread of extremism, we can’t just blame the internet for everything. Jihadists will have used the internet at some stage because they live in the modern world and we all use the internet. It’s all too easy for ‘that there internet’ to be blamed for everything.

That’s enough politics for now. I’m going out to find a field of wheat to run through.

All you need is love, as the Beatles said on a different occasion. And sometimes music is all you need.

Here then are a few thoughts on music in these fractured days. Days of bad-tempered electioneering. Days of anger and sorrow. And puzzlement at what is happening and why it’s happening and who might be to blame.

These thoughts were stirred by Sunday’s One Love Manchester concert and by Sgt Pepper’s Musical Revolution with Howard Goodall on BBC2.

I didn’t catch the whole concert but saw enough to appreciate that Ariane Grande and her manager did an amazing job in pulling together so many artists for this emotional benefit concert two weeks after the attack on her concert at the Manchester Arena.

It might have seemed odd – a mass charity gig so soon after the original ended with tragedy for an encore. And happening the day after the London Bridge attacks. But in the event, everything seemed right. Even Chris Martin and Liam Gallagher together seemed right. Even Coldplay seemed right and it’s not often you can say that.

Martin led the crowd in a swelling version of that Oasis hymn to Manchester, Don’t Look Back In Anger, and it was good and it was right.

Ariana Grande, who is 23, looked tiny on that stage, all heels and hair, but she belted out her songs and pleased her fans, and you can’t fault her for that. Or for her guts and spirit. She wanted to do something and this was it.

Many of her fans are girls and young women, and they love her beyond reason. And that image acts as a bridge here. For Howard Goodall’s programme began with footage of young women screaming themselves into a swoon as the Beatles sang.

That hysteria drove the Beatles to stop touring and hide in Abbey Road studios to concentrate on recording what would turn out to be their masterpiece.

It was 50 years ago today – or last week, if you’re being picky, that the Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Goodall’s programme took something familiar and showed how strange and mysterious and wonderful it really was, and still is. And you can take that from someone who isn’t even that much of a Beatles fan.

Goodall is a musical archaeologist who digs through layers of music. And there is so much to sift with Sgt Pepper – an album of many styles and moods that pretty much made the mould for modern music.

Using original tapes, outtakes and studio conversations, Goodall explains the sheer ambition of the album in its composition and recording. The Beatles took strands of their past and odd bits of reportage from the newspapers, and somehow span these fragments into something magical.

We already knew that Sgt Pepper wasn’t just a collection of great music – it was the creation of studio brilliance from George Martin and his team at a time when studios were basic, just four-track tapes and whatever hands-on cleverness could be summoned up.

But Goodall’s film reveals more about the recording, and shows just how inventive everyone was in that studio. With endless splicing and laying down of new tapes, those four tracks in Abbey Road produced effects that still astonish today – when a studio wizard can produce just about anything with a twiddle of a dial or two. Or 202 probably.

Goodall is the perfect guide here, as he knows the nuts and the bolts and the notes, and yet can still marvel at the music as he prises it apart. And plays the tune on a keyboard. He likes doing that and it helps.

All I can say is give that programme a watch: it’s marvellous.

Goodall unearths so much, and his taking apart of A Day In The Life is fascinating. He shows how this is essentially two songs linked by that orchestral surge when the players were told to start as low as their instruments would go and find their own way to E.

He also explained that triumphant final E major chord. Eight people played seven pianos, plus an electric organ and a harmonium. The dying sounds of the notes were recorded separately and the sound extended by the fader on the mixing desk.

That’s why that chord goes on for so long. Why it has echoed for 50 years. And why it will last longer than our present troubles. Sometimes music is all you need.

I SAW a note on a door the other day asking for no election candidates to visit. We don’t have such an advertisement on our door but we might as well have.

With four days to go, there has not been a single canvasser at our door on the west side of the York Central constituency. We have had flyers and leaflets from Rachael Maskell, Labour candidate and MP since 2015, one leaflet from Liberal Democrat Nick Love and on Saturday a glossy fold-out affair arrived from the Tory candidate, Ed Young.

The last leaflet came in the post and was addressed to our daughter, who is in Australia for the year. I think Ed may be wasting his time as she follows this family’s left-wing tendencies. Her mother has been deputised to vote on her behalf through a complicated arrangement.

Oh, and we had that ‘personal’ family letter from Theresa May in which she repeatedly claimed that letting Jeremy Corbyn win in York Central would bring about the end of the world as we know it and so on.

This lack of callers seems strange. Are they all too busy to drop by or are we too far away all the way out near the ring-road?

Rachael Maskell’s leaflets list what she has done as a local MP and, in the latest, makes five promises to York on NHS cuts and privatisation, affordable homes, protecting the environment, a £10-an-hour minimum wage, and a strong relationship with the EU.

Ed Young’s leaflet is a curious affair. On the plus side, he tells us that he grew up in York and his family still live here. He is genuinely local, and that is not always the case, with candidates often being imposed from outside the city, as indeed happened with Rachael Maskell.

The curious part comes with the fact that Theresa May has mugged his leaflet. There are four pictures of the Tory leader – just in case we’ve forgotten what she looks like – and Ed says that he is “standing with Theresa May”. One page in the leaflet is given over entirely to Mrs Maybe, with a large picture of her at that Downing Street lectern and the words “Theresa May: Strong, stable leadership in the national interest.”

And again: “Strong, stable leadership in the national interest” or “A coalition of chaos with Jeremy Corbyn.” Another fold in the leaflet features a letter from “Rt. Hon Theresa May, Prime Minister”.

All this did bring about an unaccustomed outbreak of sympathy for the Tory candidate, who is much less prominent in his leaflet than Mrs Maybe. Are all Tories leaflets like this – making sure the political dominatrix holds the whip, as it were?

Something about that letter headed “Rt. Hon Theresa May, Prime Minister” bothers me, in that Theresa May seems to be making greater capital than is usual of being prime minister during the run-up to an election.

Yesterday electioneering was suspended, with the Conservatives being first to declare a fitting day’s silence following the latest terrorist atrocity. Then later in the day, Theresa May dragged out that lectern again – her version of John Major’s soapbox – and made a statement in Downing Street about how we show too much tolerance towards Islamic extremism.

Now I understand that delivering such lectures to the nation is part of the job description. But is it also electioneering in a subliminal way? Anyone who is undecided may well think: “Theresa May must know what she’s doing as she’s the prime minister, so I may as well vote for her.”

Maybe this is unavoidable, as a day’s silence from the Prime Minister after the horrors of the London Bridge incident would have seemed strange. By tradition, MPs are no longer MPs in the run-up to an election, while prime ministers keep their title, and Mrs Maybe is certainly flaunting hers.

Incidentally, I have not mentioned Nick Love’s Lib-Dem leaflet, possibly because I cannot find it. I have met Nick once or twice and spoken to him on the phone in my old job, and he seems a decent man.

Looking online, I can tell you that Nick wants to “put York first” and that he has lived in the city for 32 years, after first coming here as a student. What he says seems sensible, if on the hopeful side.

So those are York Central’s three candidates – not one of whom has rung our bell.

Another day, another atrocity. It’s hard to know what to say that wasn’t said after the Manchester Arena bombing nearly two weeks ago which cost the lives of 22 people, many girls and young women. Words seem inadequate yet they’re all we’ve got.

Here are a few numbers: six dead and 48 injured as a white van sped into pedestrians. Three men in the vans jumped out and started stabbing people and were then shot dead.

This happened in London Bridge and in nearby Borough Market. London Bridge is an unpretty corner of the capital, but Borough Market is great in the day. Browse the over-priced foodie stalls and you can then go on one of London’s great walks along the South Bank and past the Globe, the National Theatre and others, with the wide Thames glittering at your side.

It might seem wrong to mention that so soon after people have died, but while we mourn in shock we should also remember the every-day glories of London. Otherwise the idiot ideologues will have won a sort of victory.

According to a witness who spoke to the BBC, “the men were running up shouting, ‘This is for Allah’. They stabbed this girl maybe 10 times, 15 times. She was going, ‘Help me, help me’.”

Haven’t we had enough of angry gods? Enough anyway of demented ideologues who hijack angry gods to their own twisted ends. If you don’t believe in any god, it’s hard to know what to say about this, except that Allah must surely despair of the cruelty done in his name.

The Conservative Party has suspended electioneering for the day, as Theresa May has more important things to do than going around the country looking brittle and trying not to talk to real people. Has a general election ever before been suspended twice in two weeks thanks to terrorist atrocity? It seems unlikely

After a short hiatus, the Manchester bombing was dragged into the political arena in a manner that seemed unseemly all around. Perhaps the same will happen again the last few days before the election on Thursday.

Are politicians right to suspend electioneering? Some people don’t like this pause in proceedings – however appalling the reason – as they believe that taking time out can be advantageous to one party or the other, usually the one in government at the time.

Such suspicions are understandable, yet it’s hard to see how the politicians could carry on slagging each other off while people lie dying.

Maybe part of the problem is that we hope our politicians might have an answer to such atrocities, but in general they do not, other than to say that the terrorists cannot win – a necessary platitude.

Mrs May described last night’s events as ‘dreadful’ while Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called them ‘brutal and shocking’, and no one can have any argument there, even if such condemnations get us no closer to a solution.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said what happened was “a deliberate and cowardly attack on innocent Londoners”, adding that the capital remained the “safest global city” and Londoners would not be cowed by terrorism.

Older Londoners who endure the Blitz may shake their heads at this latest sad news, while also quietly observing to themselves that they lived through worse. Which they did during a war that cost so many lives on all sides. But this sort of terrorism is something different, in that it flies out of nowhere and turns ordinary people into “enemy soldiers” who are worthy of being killed.

It’s scary stuff and sitting on my ledge, I don’t have a single answer – other than to say that we have to carry on living our liberated life as best we can.

LET us today consider two rival coach tours into the future.

Parked on the left is an unwashed Greyhound bus with the words “Make America Great Again” plastered on the side, only for the penultimate word to have been sabotaged by green campaigners, who have scrawled “Dirty” over it.

The driver has left the engine running and the coach is billowing out a diesel cloud. On the front, the flickering lights read Trump’s Tours. The driver wears an ill-fitting cap over his straw flop bearing another slogan: “Pittsburgh not Paris.” The passengers are mostly coal-miners or Republican politicians who can’t see beyond the last election ‘donation’ they received from an oil company.

The engine rumbles on, the coach rattles and the air turns even thicker with fumes, so thick that you can barely see the coach.

Parked next to the Greyhound is a smart new coach with the single word “Theresa” painted on each side, while on the front the flickering lights read: “Mystery Brexit Tour.”

The coach is pulling a trailer carriage plastered with posters saying: “The 48 per cent.” The passengers in the main part of the coach look a little nervous, but the chatter is hopeful. “I’m sure she knows where she’s going,” one man says to his wife.

“So you keep saying,” says his wife, clinging determinedly to her handbag.

In the trailer carriage, the passengers look glumly unconvinced, and grumble that the driver is paying them no attention at all.

The tour driver isn’t anywhere to be seen, and then the rumour spreads through the passengers that Mrs May won’t be driving the coach at all. She doesn’t want to face all those questions – sorry, on-coming headlights. Instead she has sent an imperious and grumpy-looking woman called Rudd to do the job for her.

The two coaches are ready for the off. The dirty Greyhound rouses to a roar and then reverses at great speed, heading forever backwards, while the driver sticks up a finger to the watching crowd or indeed world.

As for the coach hired by Mrs May, that sets off at a nervous pace and the mystery turns out to be that she will lock herself in the on-board lavatory and refuse to say anything at all about Brexit. The journalists who try to shout questions through the locked door can only elicit one answer: “You don’t want Corbyn driving this bus, do you?” And after that she starts making a deathly sound that turns out to be the laugh of a woman who doesn’t really know how to laugh. “At least we can’t see that smile,” says one of the journalists with a shudder.

Not long into the journey, the 48 Per Cent trailer is detached and left behind in the road.

What strange journeys these are. Trump the Terrible says that he won’t be signing the Paris Accord on climate change and will instead be fulfilling his “solemn duty to protect America and its citizens” – by refusing to clean up pollution and dismissing climate change as a myth. This may be deemed an odd sort of protection.

“We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore – and they won’t be,” he says.

Oh, but Donald – they are. They haven’t stopped laughing since you blagged your way into the Off-White House (the pollution is to blame for that). Only the tears they are now crying are real and caused by frustration.

Trump’s refusal to sign is mostly a symbolic act, as well as a shambolic one. But it is also a signal that he is a man of the past and not the future. Here, if we needed it, is further proof that Trump is a disgrace to the country he wants to make great – and to the wider world.

As for the Brexit election called by Mrs Maybe, this is turning out not to be about Brexit at all. Here we are at the end of the Brexit election in which Brexit dare not speak its name.

Are we any nearer to understanding what Theresa May truly thinks about Brexit? Nope – all we get are patriotic platitudes and pleas to trust her ‘strength’. And vicious but empty slogans from Mrs May as lamely parroted across the front page of today’s Daily Express – “Corbyn doesn’t believe in Britain.”

Does that mean anything at all? Nope again, nope times twenty. Mrs May called this election to strengthen her hand in the Brexit deals, or so she tells us. And yet she has run a cowardly campaign in which she has given no details about Brexit at all.

And we still don’t know where that bloody bus is going.

I AM looking for a lost lottery ticket that should be on the coffee table. That’s where I left it. Normally the ticket would be safe in my wallet, but there are others in there from a work syndicate, and I separated them to avoid a muddle. And now I am in a muddle.

My wife glances up from her end of the sofa. “I’ve not moved it,” she says. “I never touch things like that.”

I’m not sure this is true, but carry on looking. And chuntering. This search takes me to two places where we keep newspapers, before they are handed on to our son to use as a guinea pig toilet or something. I return empty-handed and my wife glances up.

“Don’t know why you’re worrying,” she says.

Her implication is that since we never win anything, checking the numbers is a waste of time. Doesn’t she know that the Saturday syndicate just won a life-changing £25, split five ways; or is it six?

My chuntering takes me outside to the recycling box. I start to empty the box and find the lottery ticket hidden among leaflets and envelopes removed from the coffee table during a tidy-up.

I return indoors with the ticket in my teeth and chunter some more. My wife wonders out loud how the ticket ended up in the recycling. I wonder silently if she put it there; she is wondering silently if I put it there (don’t ask how I know – I just do).

Sometimes in this house when something domestic goes awry, my wife will say something like: “People keep putting that in the wrong place.” Whenever that happens I suspect, having had a quick look around the house, that I must be ‘people’. We did have people here once but they’re all grown up and off misplacing things all by themselves.

People keep… For some reason that line always brings to mind the old Louis Jordan song – Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens. Perhaps I should sing that when the matter comes up again.

The American band leader liked a good song title, but he wasn’t above contradicting himself. One of his numbers was called I Like ’Em Fat Like That while in another he declared The Chicks I Pick Are Slender and Tender. Make your mind up, Louis.

In case you are worrying, he was singing long before political correctness had even got its booties on.

Here’s another Louis Jordan title I like, although it’s not a personal manifesto or anything – What’s The Use of Getting Sober.

With the ticket in my hand, I sit at the laptop and check the results. Nothing doing with the numbers, so I check the raffle that nobody ever wins, and discover that I haven’t won it either. Once again, my wife was right with her pessimism/realism. Now the ticket can go back into the recycling, and along with it my plan to extend the back of the house and other still distant distractions.

We’ll probably never know which of us threw out the lottery ticket, but it doesn’t really matter now. After all, people keep doing things like that. And there Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens…

EIGHT days to go and the political garlic hangs heavy on the nation’s breath. Don’t know about you but I am feeling all politicked out by a campaign which has said little in proportion to the noise that’s been made.

Let’s catch up with the overnight stories. Theresa May inserted a curious image into her dreary drone of a campaign. She said that Jeremy Corbyn would be “naked in the negotiating chamber” when the Brexit talks start next month.

This slight was presumably a dig at Corbyn’s anti-nuclear stance and nodded to a statement famously used in 1957 by Labour’s Nye Bevan against unilateralists on the left of his party.

The thing is, Theresa, virtually no ordinary voter will know what you are talking about. Instead they will be left wondering why Corbyn would choose to go to a meeting without wearing clothes. That sort of thing only happens in weird dreams, but then politics now often seems like a weird dream.

And in this dream, Theresa May is our own Lady Godiva riding naked on a moth-eaten old cart horse. Or maybe she’s come to this dream in that story about the Empress’s New Clothes, because we don’t really know what she thinks about Brexit except that she wants a hard variety. She parades about the land in carefully stage-managed encounters with ‘ordinary’ folk wearing her Brexit suit – but she doesn’t seem to be wearing anything at all. In this she seems as naked as Jeremy.

In an increasingly personal campaign, Mrs Maybe’s robotic ramblings can be summed up as: “Vote for me or you’ll get him.” Not much more to it than that.

On the other side of the political divide, Jeremy Corbyn gave The One Show a jar of jam. And can’t you just hear Mrs Maybe heckling in the background: “He gives you jam but I will give you Jerusalem.”

I didn’t see the whole thing because watching The One Show is like drowning in jam. I did see the highlights and Corbyn came across quite well, for what it’s worth, which is not a lot.

Earlier in the day, the Labour leader got in a tangle on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour when he floundered over the cost of his party’s proposal for universal free child care. An “excruciating exchange” says the Mail today – a “car crash” says the Sun. Well, yes – but these traps laid for politicians are becoming tedious. The presenters get so excited about their ‘scoop’ that all sense of proportion is lost. Yes, Corbyn should have known that, but recovered well enough.

The bigger car crash would be for Theresa May to lose this election (still unlikely) or to end up with a hung parliament (still possible). For a while now, I’ve been wondering if there wouldn’t be a sort of justice in the Tories ending up with exactly the same number of seats they had before – and thus making a nonsense of this snap election.

In the Times this morning, a shock YouGov poll suggests that the Tories could lose 20 seats and Labour gain nearly 30. That’s hardly the Brexit-proof mandate Theresa May bet the house on, is it?

Political narratives like a twist, and the longer this campaign grinds on, the more likely it seems that the accepted script – Theresa May wins a whopping majority – might have to be rewritten.

Corbyn is certainly the more human proposition, and the more he is seen, the less ‘scary’ he seems. But that might not be enough, and maybe people don’t want human leaders. Maybe they prefer robotic drones with nothing much to say.

Whatever, we’ll find out in eight days.