THE Today programme on the BBC is a politics-free zone this morning because of local elections in some parts of the country.

This decaffeinated version of the usual triple espresso of political argy-bargy takes some getting used to but it’s quite refreshing.

Other topics can be addressed instead – the make-up of Saturn’s rings as I type; a male anorexic discussing his weight earlier, without mentioning figures as anorexics can be competitive: hearing his BMI might make them jealous, the young man said. That was interesting.

You must look elsewhere for discussion of what would normally be the story of the morning: Mrs Maybe’s anti-Europe speech in Downing Street in which she claimed that dark forces were attempting to interfere with her coronation; sorry, election.

In keeping with the non-political mood, I won’t dwell for too long on her rather remarkable outburst. Never mind Russians meddling in the US presidential elections, we have our own (unspecified) Johnny Foreigners sticking their fingers where they are not wanted – or something like that: the actual speech is too depressing to reprise before breakfast.

All I could think was that the wind had accidentally blown one of Nigel Farage’s old speeches into Mrs Maybe’s hand as she stepped up to that soapbox podium in Downing Street. It was a speech written in the purple colours of UKIP, presumably to pinch votes from the floundering Kippers.

You will not be surprised to hear that Daily Mail is right by Mrs Maybe’s side. European politicians are “conducting a campaign of threats to our country” it fumes, adding: “Indeed, you can almost smell the panic gripping European elites, as polls show Mrs May heading for a thumping Commons majority to strengthen here bargaining hand in the Brexit talks.”

And there was me thinking that what I could smell was bullshit, but never mind. Apologies for that. Perhaps there is something in this politics-free approach to life, as politics rarely does much to improve one’s mood, especially not during such a dull election campaign.

If I might just say one thing: isn’t this business about a bigger majority giving Mrs Maybe a stronger hand in the negotiations just nonsense? The people she will be sitting down to deal with across the European poker table couldn’t care less about the size of her majority.

Anyway, now the Today programme is discussing singing Mozart, and Humphrys is calmly interviewing a singer rather than hectoring politicians; it’s all oddly calming.

I can predict with confidence that Jeremy Corbyn is going to win the election and that anyone who says differently is part of an establishment conspiracy.

Or, rather, my Facebook feed can foresee that unlikely outcome. As has been widely noted, social media forums can act as a sort of isolating bubble that encloses the like-minded under one roof.

From such a comradely huddle, the world can appear different than it would from another bubble. Not all my Facebook friends are followers of Corbyn, but a fair few must be, because the hopeful stories keep popping up, a stream of posts telling me that I mustn’t believe the official version of events.

I’ve just checked and someone is sharing a Channel 4 post in which the author China Mieville says that Corbyn’s policies have been “despicably slandered”.

Soon enough there will be something up from the left-wing Canary site or perhaps Off-Guardian, which is often concerned with “media fakery” (rough translation: everything you’ve been told is wrong) and the lies everyone else tells. I still prefer the actual Guardian, but that probably marks me down as a creature of the establishment (whatever that is: the ‘establishment’ in conspiracy theory terms can be almost anything you’d like it to be).

I receive nothing praising the all-round wonderfulness of Theresa May, which says something about the company I keep. There must be people on Facebook who go for Mrs Maybe, although not at my end of the ‘street’.

Before looking further at Facebook and politics, I see there are reports this morning that Mrs Maybe is continuing her people-free pilgrimage around the country, visiting a community centre in Bristol to which members of the community had not been invited. As always, Mrs Maybe dodges the hazardous business of meeting people – heavens, they are so unpredictable and might even disagree with her.

As for press conferences, journalists just ask awkward questions. And as for the leaders of the other parties, oh, she has no intention of lowering herself by meeting them for anything so demeaning as a TV debate.

No, instead she will continue her Dalek holiday, robotically barking out dull slogans while besotted young men wearing very blue ties beam at her in an adoring crush.

As Mrs Maybe goes around the country pretending that she likes to meet the people, much of the real effort of elections now takes place online, especially on Facebook.

The ‘friendly’ side of this comes with all those posts shared by friends; then you have the political adverts sent to Facebook users, often based on what they have ‘liked’ in the past. Now experts in digital campaigning have designed a free program which allows voters to see how they are being targeted with tailored propaganda.

This software is called Who Targets Me? and it can be added to a Google Chrome browser so that voters can see how the main parties are inserting political messages into their Facebook feeds.

Sounds like a good idea to me, although if I receive any targeted adverts from the Tories, I will be amazed. I may even sue. The trouble is, I am still struggling to come up with the required enthusiasm to consider voting for Corbyn’s lot.

At the last election – you know, the one a few weeks back – the Conservatives are reported to have spent £1.2m on digital campaigning, against Labour’s £160,000; this time around, Labour is said to be pitching in with a million. Does all this money really make a difference or does it just make Facebook ever richer?

SHOULD we edit those bits of the past  we don’t like? The question is a recurring one, and it arises again because in Bristol there is a campaign to erase the name of Edward Colston from the streets and buildings of the city.

The first ‘victory’ in this crusade was the announcement last week that the concert venue Colston Hall would be renamed in 2020 following a major redevelopment. The venue stands in Colston Street and perhaps that will be re-christened or perhaps it won’t.

It is fair to say that there were good and bad sides to Edward Colston: as a 17^th century philanthropist, he gave a fortune to the city that honours his name, but that money was made from the slave trade.

The boss of Colston Hall, Louise Mitchell, appeared on the BBC News last week to explain the decision, saying: “It’s very important to us as a progressive, forward-looking arts organisation that we include everybody, and people felt uncomfortable entering the building because of the perception that it had in some way profited from the slave trade.”

A decent sentiment, if tinged in corporate-speak pieties, and it is true that the Bristol band Massive Attack have always boycotted the venue because of its name.

But is it right to airbrush the past in this way, to remove evidence of past sins that now offend modern sensibilities? This is an impossibly difficult padlock to unpick. The slave trade was one of the greatest iniquities in history, but we cannot deny that it happened, or ignore the ways in which the forced movement of people shaped the world as it is today.

Katie Finnegan-Clarke is an activist in the Counter Colston campaign, and she has an answer to the airbrushing claim. “I think the organisations that hold him in that honorary position are the ones who are airbrushing history,” she tells the Guardian. “He was one of the most powerful slave traders in Britain: 85,000 Africans were kidnapped and enslaved while he was running the Royal Africa Company.”

Again, this is true: but the tricky aspect to this is what happens after you have removed all evidence of people from the past who sinned against the sensibilities of the present. One answer, surely, would be to have a museum of slavery in Bristol – one that accounted for the sins of the past and placed the monumental cruelty of slavery in an historical and continuing context.

It would be quite wrong, in Bristol’s case, to remove all evidence that Edward Colston ever existed, but maybe he doesn’t need to be commemorated quite so widely. I guess that Massive Attack and Katie Finnegan-Clarke avoid eating the Colston bun, which a quick Google reveals to be a sweet, yeasted treat akin to a large hot-cross-bun

In a sense, you could argue that painting over the past in  modern colours does a disservice to those who suffered in the past. We cannot change the past but we can change the way we think about it. Don’t remove all the names or topple all the statues, but instead think how the past connects to the present (one of the purposes of studying history, some would say).

I wonder if part of this wish to erase evidence of our cruel past lies in our over-developed modern sensibilities: people become offended about everything nowadays, seeing offence wherever they look, and being ‘offended’ by the past may be an extension of that tendency.

In search of another way of looking at this, let’s head to Hull and home to the great William Wilberforce, the deeply religious parliamentarian and social reformer, who spent 18 years campaigning against the slave trade. Wilberforce retired from politics in 1825, having failed to achieve his aim, and died on July 29 1833, shortly before the act to free slaves passed through the House of Commons.

The Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation bears his name, and carries on his work, too. On the University of Hull website, you will find explanations of what the institute does, including the work of the Antislavery Usable Past project.

A statement about this project says: “There are approximately 36 million slaves alive today: more than at any point in history. Our interdisciplinary investigation into antislavery legacies, across history and multiple geographies, shows that applied knowledge of the antislavery past offers a way to ‘care for the future’.” A short film from Professor Kevin Bales explains some of the themes of the project’s work.

But just think again of that statement: there are more slaves alive today than at any point in history. Changing names and toppling statues is only one approach, but it is surely more productive to concentrate on modern injustices, too.

Thanks heavens for Andrew Marr and his questions.

Yesterday he pointed out to Theresa May that some nurses were now so poor that they were going to foodbanks.

May bristled at this, as she does at any evidence that contradicts her ironed-sheets view of the world. “There are complex reasons why people go to foodbanks,” she snapped.

The pained look on her face suggested she’d known all along that it had been a mistake to indulge this man’s impertinence. How dare he ask her such questions? Didn’t he know that she was the Queen – on, hang on, that wasn’t quite right. Almost the Queen. They’ll be telling her to meet some real people next, instead of mixing with those awfully nice Tories she has hired to trail around the country after her in an adoring huddle of blue niceness. And here this man was suggesting she might be a Blue meanie.

Mrs Maybe looked uncomfortable when Marr mention foodbanks, as well she might. And her answer was a typical dodge. The reasons people do to foodbanks aren’t complex at all but the absolute opposite; they are shamefully simple. Nobody wants to go to a foodbank to survive, but they go because they don’t earn enough or because they don’t receive enough in benefits. Or maybe they go because someone blew a hole in their life and they’d sink without what they can take home from the foodbank.

No, what’s complex is Mrs Maybe’s ambivalence when it comes to answering questions about foodbanks. The existence of foodbanks shames her – as it should shame us all. Foodbanks are a disgrace – or, rather, the need for foodbanks is a disgrace.

How can a wealthy country leave people to struggle by on charity handouts? Without the help provided by foodbanks, often run by the church, some people wouldn’t get by at all.

You sense that those ‘Jams’– the “just about managing” people Mrs Maybe likes to talk about – are somehow a notch or two above those who need foodbanks. They are more fitting to be helped than people who have been careless enough to slip that far down. The “just about managing” are more like one of us than the “not managing at all”.

Anyway, good on Andrew Marr. Awkward questions are what we need to hear right now.

MAY 1, 1997. The sun shone on Tony Blair on that now distant day when he overturned 18 years of Conservative rule, achieving a record-breaking majority of 179.

Twenty years on, the sun rarely shines on Tony Blair. His youthfulness greyed and his reputation has long since been tarnished by Iraq and the slow disappointment of time. Yet how good it was to be alive on that morning. Say what you like about Blair – and I liked him more than many now do – he was an inspiring figure then, and he remains the most successful Labour leader ever.

I don’t wish to make excuses for Blair, but it is interesting to compare his youthful vigour with Jeremy Corbyn’s grizzled, stubborn integrity. And to wonder at this barbed irony: the disciples of Jeremy mostly regard Blair with the sort of hatred earlier generations of lefties – talkin’ ’bout my generation – regarded Margaret Thatcher

The gap between now and then also reminds us that elections come and go; that winners become losers; and that the world won’t end when Theresa May wins. Not everyone thinks Mrs Maybe will win. Jeremy from Islington thinks that theory is got up by the conniving establishment. I wouldn’t be sorry if he turned out to be right; not sorry but surprised, as just about every opinion poll would have to be wrong.

Twenty years is a long time and yet a blink of a bloodshot eye, too. It’s worth remembering that as this election campaign bores on. Theresa May doesn’t deserve to win but almost certainly will. Her campaign is sterile and boring, an endless round of dull speeches held at ‘community’ events from which the community has been excluded; or factory visits from which all the workers have been banished.

Sometimes it looks like you have stumbled into one of those post-apocalyptic films where the streets are empty, apart from Mrs Maybe and her band of blue zombies, all holding the same placards, and all not doubt muttering “strong and stable” as they shuffle along.

And Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t deserve to win and almost certainly won’t. He doesn’t deserve to win because having decent enough opinions – even if they haven’t changed in dusty decades – that appeal to your supporters doesn’t speak to enough people.

Or maybe it does and I have joined that establishment plot, even if one man on a ledge hardly constitutes an establishment.

Whatever the case, I still remember that distant day in May, a day when hope buzzed through the air like a bee on a pollen high.

A TEXT arrives from my wife. It reads: “Have we got any quinoa in the drawer?”

I look and discover that we are right out of quinoa, whatever that is. I text back: “What sort of a middle-class question is that? But no.”

That drawer is a lucky dip of ingredients, some used often and others used once, knotted and forgotten. There is brown rice, pulses, seeds, a newly opened bag of caster sugar, some dried chillies in a jar, assorted bags of herbs and spices, and a box of matches. I wonder idly if the matches are there in case one day we need to start a bonfire of orphan ingredients.

I discover this from a glance. If I was brave enough to jump right in there, I would probably find other lost things, an archaeological dig’s worth of forgotten ingredients layered in time. You could send Indiana Jones into that drawer – Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Drawer.

My wife the vegetarian brings home many of these ingredients from the health food shop where she works. Some days it looks like she could start her own shop in that drawer.

There is certainly brown rice in there; there is always brown rice. I don’t remember spotting it at the time, but I think brown rice must have been in the marriage vows. You will love, honour and obey the command to like brown rice.

I have spent years moaning about brown rice, complaining that it tastes as nice as stewed carpet. But lately something alarming has begun to happen to me. I tried some and quite liked it, even cooking some for myself to go with a curry (chicken – hurrah!). Perhaps I am going native after all these years.

There are always green lentils in that drawer, but you won’t hear me complaining about that, as I love those things. They go particularly well with bacon, which is a disadvantage when you are married to a vegetarian who works in a health-food shop.

The bacon stays out of my favourite recipe for spiced lentils, much in the same way that anchovies are banished from my pasta recipes, unless I am cooking for myself. Sometimes I fry breadcrumbs in melted anchovies and sprinkle them over my dish.

Anyway, quinoa. It’s a grain of some sort that is popular with South American natives and people who work in health-food shops. It’s been trendy for a while now and the new bag my wife brings home from work is British-grown. That’s just as well because all the quinoa-munching worthies were in danger of seeing those South American natives going hungry. Perhaps they got lucky and discovered baked beans instead.

The quinoa is an ingredient in what we will be eating tonight after I get back from work – a Green Pea Falafel Bowl from the Green Kitchen Stories website, somewhere my wife dips into on Facebook.

I like to grumble , but it will probably be lovely. These veggie meals often are, even if I do seem to be turning into an accidental vegetarian. Fortunately, there are some emergency supplies in the freezer from the sausage shop in Shambles in York, just in case I should come over all faint one day.

I see that MailOnline has dredged up a row about the BBC being biased against the Conservatives after a nurse who was interviewed about NHS cuts was revealed to be a Jeremy Corbyn supporter.

Now this is only a guess, but perhaps the three nurses in the country who support the Tories weren’t available.

Maybe they’d all joined one of those Theresa May rallies you see on the BBC news every bloody night, where handpicked supporters carrying placards are arranged in an adoring huddle to gaze in wonderment at She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Honestly, the other night a young man in a blue tie stared so hard at his leader he looked like a stalker. I reckon Mrs May should check her washing line to make sure that man hasn’t been stealing her underwear.

The BBC has an almost impossible job during election times, attempting to be even-handed while covering weeks of wall-to-wall politics, most of which may be important but it’s hardly news in the strictest sense of being new. It’s just an empty-vessel political charade in which politics is reduced to a vacuous slanging match. No one really discusses anything; they just shout.

This latest row erupted – that’s if one Tory MP moaning can be called an eruption – after a nurse called Danielle Tiplady appeared on the BBC News Channel’s 5pm bulletin last night and endorsed Labour’s plan to end the one per cent pay cap on NHS rises.

Presenter Huw Edwards introduced her as a ‘community nurse from London’ but made no mention of her being a Corbyn supporter during the five-minute interview. According to the MailOnline: “The broadcast was seized upon as an attempt by the BBC to promote Mr Corbyn and his policies.”

If you are wondering what sort of a dunderhead could possibly think such a thing, let me introduce you to Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who told MainOnline: “The Conservative Party gave up expecting balance and impartiality from the BBC a long time ago. The fact is, however biased the BBC is, even they cannot possibly get Jeremy Corbyn across the line and into No 10.”

This is the same BBC that is constantly harried by the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, who feel certain that the Corporation is horribly biased towards their man. I guess the BBC must be doing something right if both sides accuse it of bias.

I would say that the BBC has a bias towards small ‘c’ conservatism, but other than that mostly tries to be fair. Bias is often in the eye of the beholder anyway

In the case of Nurse Tiplady, the BBC did tell MailOnline that it should have made clear she was a Corbyn supporter. That’s fair enough, but it hardly amounts to a BBC plot against the Tories, as Mr Bridgen maintains.

During elections, the newspapers are free to say what they want, and as most of them have right-wing affections, they constantly rant against Labour. This has been going on just about forever. In April 1992, Neil Kinnock was placed in a lightbulb on the front page of the Sun next to the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”

While most newspapers are rampantly partial, the BBC tries to tread a cautious path down the middle. Yet the newspapers have a lot of clout in setting the news agenda, and sometimes the BBC seems to be following a line or story got up in that morning’s newspapers. That isn’t exactly bias, but it is allowing itself to be pulled along in the gale.

What you can expect between now the election day is that the anti-Labour papers will portray Jeremy Corbyn as unfit for office while also stressing how dangerous he is. This double approach is because the Conservatives want to obliterate Corbyn – but they still want him to look like a credible enemy, otherwise their supporters might think the election is a done deal and not bother going out to vote.

As for Nurse Tiplady, perhaps the BBC should round up a collection of doctors and nurses who support the Conservative Party and truly believe that the Tories have the best interests of the NHS at heart. Mind you, there are only six weeks left and they might have trouble finding any in that time.

WHO does Theresa May remind me of? It took a while but then the answer popped up. It’s Hilda, not that she was ever called that. Hilda was mostly known as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Fans of John Mortimer’s novels, and the TV series they spawned, will recognise Rumpole’s fearsome wife.

For some reason, it is a comfort to find a fictional parallel for our party leaders, and I shall get around to Jeremy Corbyn in a moment. Partly this is because the game is mildly disrespectful. You see, at election times politicians tend to be more than mildly disrespectful of voters, treating us to cartoon versions of life.

May and Corbyn had their last pre-election clash at Prime Minister’s Question Time yesterday, and the ding-dong lasted nearly an hour, twice the usually allotted time. Working out who ‘won’ any given session is a poor sort of sport, as the partial can usually find something that favours their man or woman. Yesterday May and Corbyn were more vigorous than usual in the exchange of insults, but other than that it ran as expected.

Corbyn delivered his usually gloomy prognosis of life under the dreaded Tories – the world’s about to end, basically – while May boringly repeated her “strong and stable” leadership slogan so many times the words appeared to have become lodged in her brain like a deadly virus.

I imagine that over breakfast May must turn to her husband and say: “Philip, would you like a strong and stable piece of toast?”

How patronising it is of Theresa May to believe that simply repeating that dull slogan will somehow win the country round. She has clearly been drilled to repeat “strong and stable” at every turn.

As for the She Who Must Be Obeyed label, she earns that for her clear disliking of opposition. Remember that her stated reason for calling a surprise snap election was basically that people would keep opposing her wish to get things done the way she wanted.

This dictatorial tendency she has seen John Crace, the Guardian’s political sketch writer, calling the prime minister Kim Jong-May. If she turns that sensible grey cut into an alarming black quiff, then we should start to worry.

The real She Who Must Be Obeyed rarely wobbled, but the May version gives the impression of panic, and at times you can almost see the nerves jangling beneath her skin. Just look out for her momentarily startled face. Maybe that’s why she won’t take part in a TV election debate. She is, to use a word Margaret Thatcher favoured, ‘frit’.

But whenever panic strikes May swallows those pills, the ones from the bottle marked ‘Strong and Stable’.

As for Jeremy Corbyn’s fictional parallel, perhaps it’s a bit obvious of me, but I still can’t resist Citizen Smith, the late-1970s sitcom character created by John Sullivan, who went on to write Only Fools And Horses.

Quite a lot of what Corbyn says makes sense to me on one level, but he does over-do the ‘dreaded Tories’ line – and take that from someone who has done the same for years. While his beliefs may be true, this approach risks reducing him to a caricature of the Tooting revolutionary. It also leaves his listeners thinking they’ve heard it all before.

Incidentally, David Cameron is apparently going around saying that his referendum ended the “poisoning” of British politics. And there was me thinking it was the burst appendix of British politics.

IT’S strange hearing your brother on the radio, talking politics. But if you want to know about French politics, my brother is the go-to man.

He’s a professor of French politics who lives in Lyons. We Brits are not always that interested in the politics of France and sometimes his speciality is not called on so often over here. But when an election looms – and especially such a close and quarrelsome one – he is in demand again.

Last night he was on the BBC PM programme, explaining to presenter Caroline Quinn what might happen after May 7. Caroline is good, but it’s a shame my brother wasn’t talking to Eddie Mair. Eddie is a true star of the airwaves.

Like most people who know about these things, my brother thinks that Emmanuel Macron is likely to beat Marine Le Pen, but believes that difficult political deals may lie ahead in fixing a presidential majority, or something. He spoke well and confidently, but the trouble with hearing your brother on the radio is that you just hear your brother, not the expert in French politics.

There he was, going on about French politics, like he often does. Only this time he wasn’t addressing his family but the nation, or those parts that tune into the PM programme.

There are three Cole brothers and I am the first but perhaps not foremost. Two of us went to the local grammar school, and the third went to the secondary modern. This meant that the professor-in-waiting walked in my shadow for a while, although not for long. At school I was nicknamed Duke, and sometimes my brother was known as “Duke Cole’s little brother”, at least according to memory.

Soon enough he made his own way, and he’s been doing so ever since, far out-running his big brother. And it’s been a while since anyone called me Duke.

That’s the strange thing about growing up, the way you start in a line and end up in such different places. The brother on the BBC is the same little blond boy who went on camping holidays in the back of that Mini-van in the 1960s. The same brother who liked to play football as a lad and was photographed dipped in mud during one match, a picture our mother has on her wall at home.

Anyway, I hope my brother is right about Le Pen not winning. I don’t know much about French politics, but I do know a ruthless right-wing opportunist when I see one.

Never mind the new paint job, Marine Le Pen remains a nasty piece of work, with all her cries of closing borders, stopping immigration and putting France first. It’s tempting to wonder if she pinched that slogan from Donald Trump, but in fairness she’s been saying that acrid stuff for years, long before Trump’s unlikely swerve towards world domination.

Incidentally, I see that Trump is still struggling to raise the funds for that ridiculous wall with Mexico. The Mexican finance minister, Luis Videgaray, has said that his country will never agree to pay for the wall, calling it “hostile” and an “absolute waste of money” – “Under no scenario will we contribute economically to an action of this kind,” he said.

So hopefully that’s another brick not in the wall.

MODERATE exercise a few times a week can keep the minds of the over-50s sharp, according to reports this morning. This is good news for those of us who try to keep fit by running away from what Andrew Marvell called “time’s winged chariot”.

That chariot was “hurrying near”, according to the metaphysical poet and man of Hull. It wasn’t death on his mind so much as sex: he was, to put it crudely, pleading his case in the hope of a shag.

And if he had been aiming to dodge death, there was a final irony in the poem To His Coy Mistress: Marvell was dead by the time it was published.

The poem was on the A-level syllabus back in the dusty desk of time, and perhaps it still is today. Anyway, I liked the poem – and the poet’s name, which I half-inched for the first crime novel I wrote (sadly never published).

Marvell seems to have distracted me from my starting point, which is an Australian study reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The study draws on 39 trials involving 13,000 adults and found that thinking and memory skills were most improved when people exercised the heart and muscles on a regular basis.

This improvement could be seen even in those who were already showing signs of cognitive decline.

Exercises such as T’ai Chi were recommended for those over 50 who couldn’t manage more challenging forms of exercise. I couldn’t see horse-riding mentioned anywhere, but our Queen seems keen on that form of exercise, as the front of today’s Daily Express reminds us.

Now I don’t know if this was happy juxtaposition or just one of those things no one noticed, but the Express carries this story under the headline: “EXERCISE TO BEAT DEMENTIA” right next to a photograph of Her Majesty scowling on a horse. “Queen gets wrapped up as icy blast hits Britain,” reads the headline.

By making companions of those two stories, the Express celebrates various common obsessions: health being one and the weather another. That ‘icy blast’ can be literal in that the day was unduly chilly, and sometimes it can be political and ideological: the invading hordes of foreigners the newspaper sees over every horizon.

The trouble with relying on the newspapers for health alerts is that you never know if you are coming or going. One minute the over-50s could be eyeing their bus-pass to eternity; the next they could spot that Marvell’s winged chariot was about to run them over.

The zigzagging extremes of good and bad news can be exhausting, and someone ought to conduct a study into whether reading health stories is bad for your health.

Anyway, I like this study. No time to put on the running shoes today, but if exercise boosts the brain by increasing supplies of blood, oxygen and nutrients, as well as a growth hormone that helps form new neurons and connections, well that can’t be bad.