IN THIS morning’s newspapers, you pay your money and take your ideological pick when it comes to migration. Or don’t pay your money and scan the headlines online. I now shell out a fiver a month for the privilege with one of the newspapers below and personally wouldn’t part with a penny for a free lifetime supply of the other. Which is which? Oh, go on, have a guess.

The Daily Express adopts its accustomed pro-Brexit, anti-foreigner, sod-the-rest-of-the-world stance with a front-page headline: “Call for new migrant freeze.” This is another piece of the pro-Brexit propaganda we are used to from the Express, which goes red, white and blue in the face shouting about how brilliant life will be once we have left Europe. What they will write about after it really happens is a mystery. The weather probably, which in Express world is always about to be as hot or cold as hell, rather than boringly in between in the true British manner.

The Express front page is a cry for Brexit to mean no more foreigners, or at the least only 50,000 a year, with a ban on unskilled migrants. This is proposed by the Brexit-supporting Leave Means Leave, a Tory pressure group headed by Dominic Raab, who was shuffled away from his job as justice minister by Theresa May when she swiped the keys to Number Ten.

Joining the Leave-Leavers on the front page of the Express is Migration Watch, which backs the call. This single-issue pressure group has been dipping migration in a negative pot of paint for years now, and its findings are rarely what you could call without bias.

Over in the Guardian – loved by some, hated by others, even some who used to love it – more sober analysis suggests that asylum seekers are distributed around Britain by disproportionately housing them in poor, Labour-voting areas in the north of England, Wales and Glasgow.

MPs contacted by the paper have labelled this as “appalling”, “dreadfully designed” and “a deeply unfair shambles”. By sifting through Home Office data, the Guardian calculates that more than half of all asylum seekers (57%) live in the poorest third of the country, while the richest third houses only 10% of all asylum seekers. And if that sounds to you like Mrs Maybe’s lot keeping the asylum seekers as far out of sight as possible, it’s hard not to agree.

Germany, on the other hand, is said to operate a scrupulously fair system based on the “population size and wealth of each region”.

When reading this I felt, not for the first time, that the Germans seem to have become more fair-minded than we are. Sadly, the way things are going we are hardly likely to get more fair in our thinking. Rather the opposite, especially if the Express has its way.

DONALD Trump is learning on the job, which is fair enough, but it is hard not to see him as the world’s scariest intern.

After pelting Barack Obama with endless texts saying he was wrong and in effect a dangerous idiot to consider bombing Syria, President Trump – ‘Prez’, as he is regrettably called on the front page of the Sun this morning – has gone and done just that, sending missiles into an airbase from which the Syrians are said to have bombed Khan Sheikhun town, reportedly killing dozens of people with the nerve agent sarin.

Maybe that makes him a dangerous hypocrite, although that would hardly be news – “Hold the front page, Trump displays clear signs of hypocrisy.” “That story is so yesterday, sonny.”

But the evidence of hypocrisy is there, of course. Trump went even more orange in the face than usual telling his supporters that the US had to stop being the world’s policeman; yet a few weeks into his work experience scheme, he goes and straps on his guns.

To cynical eyes, this makes him a president needing a boost in his popularity at home, and so following the inevitable pattern of throwing missiles at a problem. To less cynical eyes, it makes him a man morally offended by the sight of children dying horribly from the effects of sarin.

Whatever view you take, nothing here is simple. Were those 59 Tomahawk missiles a warning to President Assad or the start of something bigger? Trump acted alone and without UN backing, suggesting the sort of maverick behaviour the world could do without; and yet plenty of people, including our own government, welcomed his actions as a firm response to the use again of chemical weapons on his own people.

If that’s what happened: the Russians dispute that version, as do those who ally themselves with Russia and those who take a US-sceptic view of the world.

How are we to know who and what is right in the end? The use of chemical weapons is appalling; yet much of what happens in the world’s hellholes is appalling and how do we decide when to intervene? And are we content to leave such decisions to a mercurial American president who has made such a screeching U-turn in his views on bombing Syria that the volte face has seen him turning like a car doing one of those doughnut spins?

Let’s hope he doesn’t get to like that smell of burning rubber too much. Who knows what he might do next.

THE Deliveroo riders in this city often gather within sight of the restored Great East Window of York Minster. Most are young and ride bicycles, usually those fixed-wheels sprinters.

At a low point last year, I watched them as I locked up my own bicycle and thought: well, things are bad but hopefully not that bad. Life has picked up since then and now I have a mixture of jobs (one permanent part-time, one come-and-go temporary and one freelance).

Most Deliveroo riders appear to be young, and you’d probably need young knees to whizz around the city on a bike all day, carrying a box of food on your back.

Deliveroo like the taxi firm Uber operates under what is called the ‘gig economy’, something which sounds vaguely exciting and daring, and fun, too – like going to a gig. This is a typical modern deception: a lively word or phrase used to disguise the reality of a situation.

One definition of the gig economy lies in the old idea of being a freelance, which is working for yourself and selling what you do to others; the freelance bit of me writes feature and sells them to newspapers (usually one newspaper; I do need to try more on that score).

But the darker side of the gig economy comes when firms such as Deliveroo or Uber use thousands of self-employed contractors instead of employees. These non-employees are expected to behave like loyal employees, but without the associated benefits, such as holiday pay and sick pay. It also saves the companies millions in taxes.

It is – and pardon me for this – one of the shit deals of the modern world. When you hear a politician, usually a Conservative one, burbling on about how many jobs they have created, many of these new jobs will be attached to the gig economy. It’s work, Jim – but not as we used to know it.

Deliveroo was founded four years ago by an American investment banker who moved to London and found that he couldn’t order in late-night takeaways as he had on Wall Street. Will Shu and his friend Greg Orlowski started with deliveries from three restaurants and they are now hoping to go worldwide (while paying not a lot to their insecure riders)

In this morning’s Guardian, there is a report about the ways in which it is said Deliveroo avoids giving the impression that its riders are employees. Managers are reported to have a six-page booklet containing rules about what they should and shouldn’t say. The couriers whizzing takeaway meals around our cities should always be referred to as “independent suppliers” and never as employees, workers, staff or team members.

The first of these, as quoted in the Guardian, is as follows:

Do say: Independent supplier, eg: “We offer riders hours of work and they choose how many to accept based on their availability and the areas they want to work in.”<
Don’t say: “Employee/worker/staff member/team member. eg “Drivers are employed by Deliveroo to complete deliveries.”

I don’t use Deliveroo. This isn’t for moral reasons or anything, but because we don’t eat takeaways, preferring our own food. Perhaps this is unusual nowadays, but after learning how Deliveroo and others apparently dodge having any responsibility for their staff who aren’t staff, I am sticking to that principle.

Such companies are all part of a shifting modern world that is reshaping itself before our eyes. Some of what this new world brings we generally like – such as Google and Amazon or Facebook and Twitter, say – yet this same modern marvel is also removing responsible notions such as work coming with social and personal benefits, rather than being something you do for an unprotected pittance, and for which you should still be grateful. Who knows where this will all end – probably no one up to and including Mark Zuckerberg.

Oh, and why do these trendy firms always have such silly names – cleverly coined to conjure a sense of fun, while in truth being nothing of the sort? As for Deliveroo, it’s a Deliver-noo from me.

THE row about the National Trust removing the word ‘Easter’ from the publicity for its egg hunt has been dragged from the dull dust and thrashed into a dreary sort of scandal.

It has drawn comment from the prime minister and the Archbishop of York – and even the usually shy and retiring Nigel Farage has felt moved to speak.

Cadbury’s, which sponsors the event, stands accused of “airbrushing” Christianity out of the publicity for its hunt for chocolate eggs. And as any student of the Bible knows, the stone that was rolled away from the mouth of the tomb at Easter was in fact a giant chocolate egg.

Dr John Sentamu jumped into this row with a degree of tedious predictability, and that’s a shame, because in many ways the man has been an inspiration as Archbishop of York, but here he lets himself down. He said the supposed removal of the word ‘Easter’ was tantamount to “spitting in the grave” of John Cadbury, founder of the company. Except that as a Quaker, Cadbury is unlikely to have celebrated Easter at all.

Sentamu can at least claim to be sticking up for his side, even if a quick look at the National Trust website would have showed him that the word ‘Easter’ is littered all over the place, and has only been removed from the main title, giving prominence to Cadbury’s as the sponsor.

But Theresa May’s response to this non-story puts Sentamu in the shadows. She said she was furious on two fronts – “I’m not just a vicar’s daughter, I’m a member of the National Trust as well,” she told ITV. “I think the stance they have taken is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know that they are thinking about frankly.”

So that’s why she got the gig: a vicar’s daughter and a member of the National Trust, a holy and conservative communion if ever there was.

Two observations can be made here…

One: Do we really want the Prime Minister to spout off like a not very good Daily Mail columnist?

Two: she made her silly statement while heading to Saudi Arabia, a country which is far from friendly to Christianity.

And there was another murky wrapper round the cheap chocolate egg here. Mrs May was crawling to the Saudis to boost British arms sales: this was the prime minister as morally dubious saleswoman (and defender of chocolate-themed Christianity).

BBC journalist John Pienaar asked Mrs May if we should be selling arms to Saudi Arabia, which is autocratic and illiberal, and has been accused of possible war crimes in Yemen.

The prime minister brushed this off with the usual flick of condescension, lecturing Pienaar that it was better to be onside because that way you could have influence. Prattling hypocrisy may be the phrase you are looking for here.

As for Nigel Farage – always the go-to authority on matters of religion – he was pictured grin-frowning alongside some Easter confectionery saying: “We must defend our Judeo-Christian culture and that means Easter.”

Even an agnostic occasional muncher of Easter eggs can see that Easter has become a muddle. If anything, all those chocolate eggs obscure what should be the true meaning for believers, don’t they? Elevating Easter eggs into a symbol of Christian virility is just daft, as proved by Farage’s eagerness to get in on the act.

MY new passport arrived in the post the other day. It is one of the burgundy European Union passports; good timing for my money, although others would disagree.

The Tory MP Andrew Rosindell – a man of whom I had never heard until just now; but then he assuredly has never heard of me either – considers my new passport to be a source of national “humiliation”. The other day, he told the Press Association: “The restoration of our own British passport is a clear statement to the world that Britain is back.”

He said a lot of other bollocks-shaped things, too, but I shall spare you the full moaning monty. One detail was odd, though: he referred to the European Union passport he hated as being “pink”. No, it is burgundy, the colour of good red wine from France.

Fellow Tory twit-person Michael Fabricant was quoted as saying: “You keep your passport until it expires. If you renew after Brexit, I am hoping we’ll have new navy blue passports.”

I don’t really care what colour my passport is so long as it lets me in to other countries without fuss or bother. But fuss and bother is what these Brexit-loving Tories have for breakfast (memo to self: go and check the hob or you’ll be having burnt blogging porridge for breakfast again).

Nigel Farage, former Ukip leader turned freelance moaner, has often been pictured waving his old British passport while spouting the usual inflammatory nonsense, inflammatory nonsense being what he has for breakfast, dinner and tea.

Of course, Farage needs his passport as he is always flying off to the US to appear on Fox News telling Americans how Britain has gone down the pan. That’s the weird side of the likes of Farage: they express pride in Britain but love to slag Britain off – you know, the modern, real Britain we all live in, rather than the Empire-tinged one of rose-tinted imagination. You see, now that Farage and his ilk no longer have Europe to disparage, that old negativity is turning against Britain, or those parts of modern life they dislike.

As for the passport, the Home Office says the current one is due a redesign anyway – astonishingly, at a cost of £490m – by 2019, although a spokesman wouldn’t be drawn on the colour.

If the blue passport does return, it won’t be like the old one with his sturdy cardboard cover and cut-out showing your number. Passports must conform to international regulations, so any new British passport is likely be exactly like the one we have now, only with a blue cover instead of a burgundy one.

To which the only sensible response is: big deal; although plenty of people will want a new/old British passport, I am happy to be able to proclaim my European credentials for another ten years. And, by the way, isn’t navy blue just about the most boring colour in the world?

Sadly, whether British or otherwise, the photograph is always a horror story.

The colour of our passports is a totemic matter: one that shouldn’t count for anything but does for people with nothing better to worry about. It has been swept up in the Brexit blather. I know the one doesn’t necessarily equate to the other, but we should worry more about the fate of Reker Ahmed, the asylum-seeker, beaten up by a crowd of yobs in Croydon, than we should about the colour of our passport.

Was this assault on a defenceless boy who came to this country seeking our help in some way sanctioned by the toxic suspicion stirred up by Brexit? It’s hard not to worry that might well be the case. That seems a lot more important than the colour of our passports. Tolerance gets a bad name nowadays in the Trump-sphere, Brexit-shaped world, but sometimes we need to remember where intolerance can lead.

DAVID Storey and his brother were said to have been told by their Yorkshire miner father: “I’ve spent half my life making sure none of you went down that pit.”

This story about Storey was included in his obituaries, and it set me thinking. Storey did not follow his father down the pit, but instead became an artist, novelist, playwright and poet, therefore putting himself as far away as possible from the dusty maw of the pit where his father had worked.

For some years, he lived a life that was neither here nor there, studying art at the Slade in London and travelling back to Yorkshire to play rugby league for Leeds, a sporting profession that funded his artistic one. The experience was said to have made him feel an outsider in both locations. As the Daily Telegraph obituary wrote: “His northern rugby team makes regarded him as a ‘poof’ – while his classmates at the Slade thought him an uncultured northern oaf. The only time he felt free was on the train, where he began to write.”

He used his sense of alienation in a series of novels, of which the seventh – the book that made his name – was This Sporting Life.

Although I read this in the obituaries, I knew the story anyway, as it was told to me last year by his daughters.

At the time Storey, who has died aged 83, was in a sense bringing his life full circle: he had started out as an artist and, after a life spent writing, was returning to art with an exhibition at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, where he was born and where he attended the local grammar school. Or, rather, his art was returning but he did not.

Storey wasn’t well enough to travel at and the exhibition was launched by his daughters, who came in his place. The Yorkshire Post asked me, as super short notice, if I was free to do the interview. I was and did – and it proved to be a happy experience.

If Storey’s father had wanted to make sure his sons did not follow him down the pit, what happened to that family seems to illustrate how quickly families could rise through the classes when starting in the 1950s and 1960s.

David Storey had a life entirely different to that of his father, even if the hard graft of Storey Snr stayed with him: his father was angry that he went to Wakefield Art College instead of university, and refused to pay the fees. This left Storey with a furious work ethic: “He never got over the guilt he felt as disappointing his father,” again according to the Telegraph. “At the height of his powers as a writer, he would work eight-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year, retaining only a small fraction of his output for publication.”

Two generations on from their miner grandfather, Storey’s daughters have continued the rise: Helen Storey is the fashion designer turned professor of fashion; and Kate Storey is a professor of developmental biology. Both are pin-sharp lovely women and it was a pleasure meeting them.

I wonder what the modern equivalent of the pit might be. Perhaps it is the call centre or something. The trouble with awful modern jobs is that they are likely to be boring, insecure and demeaning; but they are not likely to be as physically awful as working down a pit.

This made me wonder whether the impetus to improve that fired up David Storey’s miner father continues today. Do parents say: “I’m not having you going to that call centre – it’s hell down there.” Probably not but perhaps they should.

Incidentally, growing up ordinary in the unremarkable middle classes is perhaps not much of a social propellant. In fact, I am less well off than my father, who retired as a lecturer 20 odd years ago, although I have recently taken up a spot of lecturing, so there is a sort of family circularity there.

“Sleep loss ‘starts arguments at work’,” according to a story on the BBC website. If that’s true, my colleagues better watch out for me today. After the night I’ve just had, heads could be bitten off; or they could if I went in for such behaviour.

A study – and isn’t there always a new one of those along to keep you awake at night – postulates that erratic and disruptive behaviour at work can be caused “by even a single night’s loss of sleep”.

Now to some of us a single night’s loss of sleep would be a wonderful thing. Just image the bliss of losing sleep for a single night. The truly dedicated sleep dodger puts in years of sheet-wrangling and switching lights on and off, along with reading at all hours and making herbal tea, which is to say not proper tea, at 2am – never mind one night without sufficient shut-eye

Frankly someone who can’t hack work after that must be a yawning wimp. Anyway, this study says that lack of sleep leads to tired workers (a finding in line with a meteorological study concluding that rain leads to wet pavements) and can also cause “unwanted” activity linked to lower levels of self-control. In other words, you’re more likely to go off on one at work if you’ve slept badly.

Now this study is published by the Rotterdam School of Management – not the Rotterdam School of Sleeplessness or the Rotterdam Insomnia Institute (neither of which exists, as far as I know: I was going to check but had a yawn instead). Unsurprisingly, the study maintains that sleep-related disruption can cost billions in lost productivity.

Oh, I see – never mind the poor sufferer of shattered sleep, it’s the lost billions we should worry about. Next time I shall try counting bouncing billions instead of muddy-arsed sheep; not that I have ever found counting things, woolly ruminants or otherwise, to be much help.

Also of little use have been assorted herbal remedies and either drinking or not drinking coffee after a certain time in the day.

Maybe not sleeping, or sleeping badly, is just one of those things from which some people suffer. I have written about this before and it’s all a bit of a bore, but I return because so many people suffer in this way. In the small hours you can feel lonely being awake when you should be asleep, but in fact you are part of a community of red-eyed refugees from a land called sleep. You may be alone in the spare bed or on the sofa, but you are not alone in a wider sense.

This Rotterdam study suggests that poor behaviour in the workplace “often stems from selfish impulses that are not kept in check by self-control”, says research Laura Giurge. This could, she says, be anything from being rude to someone in the office to an increased likelihood of workplace theft. Her study also suggests that lack of sleep can reduce people’s sense of self-control and male them behave in a way they would not do normally, and that this can lead into “a possibly destructive cycle”.

Here are a few thoughts from the top of my headache. Personal anecdotage suggests that I stay calm at work even after not much sleep, whereas a former colleague used to be the one who sometimes ranted and bit off heads; mind you, he didn’t get much sleep either, through being too busy, or that was his excuse anyway.

If this study is true, then we should worry for the world; not for lost billions that have probably never been lost anyway, but because our political leaders often have little time for good sleep, and could well be leading us to whatever precipice awaits after suffering from a string of bad nights. That Theresa May doesn’t look like she gets much kip.

And to close, here’s how last night went: read on and off up in our attic bedroom; went down at 1am to read in spare bedroom number two, hoping not to disturb our Airbnb guest in spare bedroom number one. Read for a while, fell asleep only to wake up at 4am needing a wee; had to read again for a while, before falling asleep, this time to be woken by the alarm at 6.45am to get up and make breakfast. Upstairs in the bed where I should have been sleeping, my wife had been awake since 5am.

DAVID Cameron is telling people that he was right to hold the EU referendum, but that man always did think he was breezily right about everything (best Brexit quote around, the historian Anthony Barnett: “Brexit is government of the old, by the old, for the old.”)

But let’s not today go down that dismal corridor with its closed doors and closed minds. All that xenophobic chanting can bring a person down.

Pausing only to look at those photographs in this morning’s newspapers of Nigel Farage in his Union Flag socks while holding a pint and displaying a grin last seen on a sickly shark – breakfast might have to wait after that – let’s instead turn to another man who, like Cameron, believes he is right about everything.

Of all the alarming things about Donald Trump, and what a long list that is, longer than that ridiculous wall he wants to build, his refusal to believe in climate change is surely the most alarming.

Trump was shown surrounded by cheering coalminers as he signed a sweeping executive order that promises to dismantle steps taken by the Obama administration to cut emissions under the Paris agreement of 2015. The US had agreed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2025.

Trump has long disparaged the science surrounding global warming, insisting that it’s a con got up by the Chinese to harm the US – a claim as extravagant as the golden trappings in the lobby of his famous tower.

Here, garnered from my morning skim of the headlines, are some thoughts (apart from the one about Trump having a cheese-burger for a brain: I discovered that one all by myself).

The Chinese state media has laid into Trump’s plans, with a state-run tabloid saying that: “No matter how hard Beijing tries, it won’t be able to on all the responsibilities that Washington refuses to take.”

A highly critical leader in the Global Times says: “Western opinion should continue to pressure the Trump administration on climate change. Washington’s political selfishness must be discouraged. China will remain the world’s biggest developing country for a long time. How can it be expected to sacrifice its own development space for those developed western powerhouses?”

China may burn more coal than any other country, but it was prepared to follow the American lead – a precarious act of mutual dependency that could be unbalanced by Trump’s climate thuggery.

In the US, many of the more than 300 companies which backed Obama’s climate efforts are lining up to say that Trump is wrong to roll back efforts on climate change.

On the BBC website, you will find an interesting backgrounder on this latest spurt of Trumpery. BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath raises an important point: undoing Obama’s Clean Power Plan will not be straightforward, and could end up as a job-creation scheme for lawyers as the Trump administration is dragged through the courts.

Also, Matt McGrath points out that in 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide was a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that CO2 and other gases were contributing to climate change which was a threat to public health and the welfare of current and future generations.

In other words, the existence of climate change, as wilfully disparaged by Trump, is written into US law. Something called an “endangerment finding” compels the federal government to regulate emissions. So that might just scupper Trump’s stupid plans.

BREXIT is the biggest crap game Britain has seen; and what a crap game it’s been so far.

That sound you can hear this morning, as Theresa May puts down her pen, is the clatter of falling dice. They are bouncing on country cobbles and on urban Tarmac; they are hitting Westminster and Winchester; they are raining down on the disaffected Scots and the squabbling folk of Northern Ireland; those falling dice are rolling everywhere, from the Lake District to the White Cliffs of Dover (just watch them tumble into the sea).

Is the triggering of Article 50 today the first step towards freedom or do we prefer the view of last Sunday’s Observer: “Hard Brexit is an epic act of self-harm – only reinforcing rancour and division”?

This is a time of monumental uncertainty as Britain takes the biggest gamble in modern political history. Some – what you might call the “reverse Empire fantasists” – believe Britain will forge ahead (by returning to a past that never was) to a bright new future (that may never be), and that Brexit will “make Britain great again” as a woman from Sunderland said on the BBC Today programme just a moment again, borrowing that tawdry slogan from a trampled-on Donald Trump banner.

Others – the Remains and the Remoaners – fear that Theresa May is rushing towards a Hard Brexit for which she has no mandate, and that instead of using the referendum result to reform our relationship with the EU, she has been pushed by her own right-wing, and by the bellowing chorus from the Daily Mail and others, to jump into the misty unknown.

I am with the worrying Remainers on that score, but we are where we are. And here’s where we are: shuffling in a queue towards a precipice, led there by what the Observer calls “the most irresponsible, least trustworthy government in living memory”. That sounds about right to this observer too, but others proclaim this as ‘Freedom Day’.

The graphic artists have been working hard on this morning’s newspapers, and top marks to whoever came up with the Guardian’s image of a jigsaw puzzle of Europe in which Britain has been removed and put to one side; in the space left sits the headline: “Brexit: Today Britain steps into the unknown.”

In similar vein, the i-newspaper goes for a satellite picture of Europe, with a pair of scissors snipping round Britain.

The Sun, oddly, represents this day with a photograph of those White Cliffs on to which the words “Dover and out” have been superimposed as a message to Europe. On the front of the Daily Telegraph, Mrs Maybe is shown with her pen above the headline “Unite behind Brexit, says May” and next to a robust quote: “It is my fierce determination to get the right deal for every single person in this country.”

Mrs May is good at coming up with stirring words that in the end count for nothing. When she was elected – sorry, my mistake; when she mugged her way into Downing Street – she spoke of uniting the country, and instead she is doing the exact opposite. I think that by ‘uniting’ what she means is for everyone to shut up and do as she says. Or as the Daily Mail tells her she should say.

There is a theory banded about that Mrs Maybe lives in fear of the Daily Mail, and look where that extreme caution got her yesterday, on the front page of that newspaper having her legs compared to Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish pins.

This morning the never knowingly repentant Mail runs the same picture again, only this time the legs have been covered up by a red splash bearing the words: “Censored by the left.” I do think that whoever started another one of those petitions over this was foolishly playing into the Mail’s hands, and encouraging the paper to tick its critics off by having columnist Sarah Vine say: “Oh, DO get a life” next to the picture. I haven’t read what Vine says inside because the life I do have is too short.

The ‘left’ in this context seems to be a sort of angry amorphous cloud, or a convenient grouping to make the Mail feel even smugger than usual. I suspect people were just disappointed to see something so pathetic on the front of a newspaper. You don’t have to be left-wing to think that reducing female politicians to the shapeliness of their legs is just too dismal for words.

But we shouldn’t give into Daily Mail Stress Disorder, as it’s a complaint which only wastes energy and sometimes makes the sufferer appear foolish. And I say this as someone who has suffered a few nasty Paul Dacre rashes in my time, but in the end, it’s only a newspaper. Sadly, puzzlingly, a very popular one, but that’s life for you. Other newspapers are available, a thought to remember as those Brexit dice start rolling for this two-year quickie divorce from Europe that could still descend into a decade long row from hell.

CLIVE James reckons that Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are “the funniest couple since Laurel and Hardy”. He’s not wrong.

Their pairing in The Trip is a delightful turn. It is, you must admit, an unlikely formula for success. Two comedians bicker, do impersonations and eat in restaurants while pretending to be critics. Sometimes they discuss the state of modern masculinity. Coogan and Brydon play exaggerated versions of themselves, bad-tempered flesh-and blood cartoons if you like. And the food looks lovely.

The Trip is one of my favourite programmes. When I saw that this pair were being interviewed in the Observer Food Monthly – another thing to treasure – all my Sundays had crashed into each other. And then I read the fourth paragraph. After that the feature was thrown aside.

This reaction was not the fault of the writer, Laura Barton. She does a nice job for those first few paragraphs. What did it was when she wrote that The Trip – as nurtured by BBC2 – was jumping channels to Sky Atlantic. Oh God – don’t you just hate it when that happens? This programme poaching has been going on for ages, ever since Sky pinched 24 and Madmen, but it still irritates. As Brydon says at the point when I cast the feature aside – “That’s Bake Off, The Voice, The Trip…”

Apparently, the decision was taken by Michael Winterbottom, the film director who creates The Trip, and the stars confessed to being puzzled by the move. Them and me, too. Well done to Winterbottom for providing further evidence that modern life is rubbish sometimes. There is little point complaining because modern life just goes on being rubbish and you put yourself in a bad mood. Never have yet watched those final two series of Madmen.

Clive James wrote about The Trip in his column at the back of Weekend in the Guardian. Reports Of My Death is one the best reads around as James just writes so well, even as he lies dying. He’s been lying there dying for a while now, ever since he wrote a poem a few years ago about how he would never again see the blossom on a favourite tree.

His body is in a poor way, but his mind still sparkles. You could say that James invented the art of TV criticism in newspapers with the column he wrote for the Observer. The other day I told my magazine students that they should read his column in Weekend, but whether they did or not is another matter.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Clive James TV column – a brilliant piece of work always – is said to have added up to 10,000 copies a week to sales of the Observer. That’s remarkable. Then again, I have it on good authority that my long-running Thursday column at the Press added up to ten extra copies a week.