WHAT follows is offered with sincere apologies to the great Michael Rosen…

We’re going on a Brexit hunt.
We’re going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day it will be
We’re not scared (Theresa banned it).

Uh-uh! Sea!
Wet wavy sea.
We could go over it.
We could go under it.

Oh no!
Theresa says we have
To stay this side of the sea
And pulls faces at Europe.

Wishy Washy!
Wishy Washy!
Wishy Washy!

We’re going on a Brexit hunt.
We’re going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
To send the big Europe away.

Uh-uh! A pile of Eurosceptic drivel.
Deep cold Eurosceptic drivel.
We can’t go over.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no! We need to get through it.

Dive in!
Splash splosh!
Splash splosh!
Splash splosh!
We’re up to our neck in it.

We’re going on a Brexit hunt.
We’re going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We’re not scared (Theresa banned it).

Uh-uh! Shit!
Thick oozy Eurosceptic shit.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.

Oh no!
We’re up to our necks in it!

Squelch squelch!
Squelch squelch!
Squelch squelch!

We’re going on a Brexit hunt.
We’re going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We’re not scared (well, half of us are).

Uh-uh! A Farage forest!
A big dark Farage forest.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.

Oh no!
We’ve got to go through with it!

Stumble trip!
Stumble trip!
Stumble trip!

We’re going on a Brexit hunt.
We’re going to catch a big Empire 2.0.
What a beautiful idea!
We’re not scared.

Uh-uh! A shitstorm!
A swirling whirling post-Brexit shitstorm.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.

Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!

Hoooo woooo!
Hoooo woooo!
Hoooo woooo!

We’re going on a Brexit hunt.
We’re going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful future!
We’re not scared.

Uh!-uh! A Farage cave!
A narrow gloomy Farage cave!
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.

Oh no!
We’ve got to go through (with) it!

Tiptoe!
Tiptoe!
Tiptoe!

What’s that?
One shiny wet nose!
Two big furry ears!
Two big googly eyes!
IT’S A BREXIT!!!

Quick!
Back through the cave!
Tiptoe! Tiptoe! Tiptoe!

Back through the shitstorm!

Hoooo woooo!  Hoooo woooo!  Hoooo woooo!

Back through the Farage forest!

Stumble trip! Stumble trip! Stumble trip!

Back through the mud!

Squelch squelch! Squelch squelch! Squelch squelch!

Back through the big pile of Eurosceptic drivel!

Dive in!
Splash splosh!  Splash splosh! Splash splosh!

Back through the pain in the arse!

Swishy swashy!  Swishy swashy!  Swishy swashy!

Down the one-way road.
Get to our front door.
Open the door.
Up the stairs.

Du-du-du-du-du-du-dup.

Oh no!
We forgot to shut the door.
Back downstairs.
Du-du-du-du-du-du-dup.

Shut the door.
Back upstairs.

Du-du-du-du-du-du-dup.

Along the passage.
Into the bedroom.
Into bed.
Under the covers.

We’re not going on a Brexit hunt again.

Although, sadly, it seems that of next Wednesday we are…

WHO hasn’t walked over Westminster Bridge at some time in their life? That span across the River Thames is often so crowded that all you can do is shuffle along, caught in the crowd – and, yesterday, trapped as a madman used his hire car as a lethal weapon.

Watching the BBC news last night, and scanning the newspapers this morning, stirs different reactions. Horror and anger, for sure, at the cowardice of a man who once again used innocent people as a target for whatever Islamist mania addled his brain.

Admiration for the work of the emergency services, and for the efforts of the Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood who helped paramedics to try to save the life of the stabbed policeman, who sadly died; and at the efficiency of the police as they dealt with this outbreak of terror at the heart of Westminster.

It was possible to be impressed, too, by the resourcefulness of the journalists trapped inside Westminster and broadcasting live using their mobile phones. We are used to this by now, but it was still striking to see the likes of Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, reporting on her mobile while she remained uncertain of what was happening outside.

That’s how we receive news nowadays, the tragedies and the terrors, in mobile snatches and Twitter bursts – and in a crisis, Twitter turns from a frivolous medium into a direct and immediate way to pass on news.

Another feeling, never a good feeling, was that it was ‘our turn’ for something like this to happen. It was a year ago this week that the Islamic state atrocity in Brussels airport killed 32 people, following earlier attacks in Paris, with their massed victims.

It never seems right to compare atrocities, and while far more people died in Brussels and Paris, people in London yesterday went about their day, about their work or their holiday travels, and never returned. That’s why it seems right that we should remember the humanity rather than the inhumanity; we should see the human story of loss, and yet also see the humanity in the efforts to save lives, to put things right, to make society whole again, or at least as whole as possible.

It is natural that we should be angry, that we should seek revenge of some sort, yet it is important to remain calm, and to refrain in our understandable fury from passing round the panic megaphone.

That’s what the terrorists want; they kill innocent people as a way of spreading panic and undermining society. They want our society to fall apart, and we should not grant them that wish.

This point has been made many times before, and is made this morning from different ends of the political spectrum: Simon Jenkins puts the argument powerfully in the Guardian, while the Daily Telegraph cautions against over-reaction, as jihadists want to close down ordinary life, and “we must deny then the disproportionate reaction they seek”.

Instant panic reactions are less welcome, with the Sun saying we need to see more armed police everywhere, and the Daily Mail that greater surveillance of our lives must now occur.

And wouldn’t you know it but there is a Trump mouthing off in all this, too. Not the alarming president but his mini-me son, Donald Trump Jnr.

After the Westminster attack left five dead and 40 people injured, Trump Jnr criticised London mayor Sadiq Khan in a snide tweet. “You have to be kidding me?!” Trump Jnr tweeted, quoting the headline “Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan.”

The reference was to a story six months ago in the Independent in which Khan made the hardly surprising point that a terrorist attack would come at some point. It is not clear if Trump Jnr knew this was an old story and not the mayor’s reaction to the latest tragedy. Whatever the case, he jumped in with both feet – like father, like so; and I don’t like either of them one bit.

Mayor Khan’s actual response was sorrowful but measured, and strong too – “Londoners will never be cowed by terrorism,” he said.

After the Paris attacks in which so many people died, a slogan found popularity. It was based on ‘Je suis Charlie’, words seen everywhere after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine.

The follow-up was less dramatic, less neat – but powerful in its own way, too. It was this: “Je suis en terrasse.” This translated roughly as “I am sitting at a terrace” and the English equivalent might be: “I am down the pub.” It was about the reaffirmation of ordinary life, a refusal to be cowed and the triumph of the ordinary pleasure of having a drink in a cafe. It remains the perfect riposte to terrorists, even if for some this morning thoughts of ordinary life will be a long way off.

AN obituary written by a dead man somehow seems fitting for Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Morse.

Newspapers keep these tributes on the stocks, as shown by the obit in this morning’s Guardian, which is written by Dennis Barker, who died in 2015. The long-serving journalist graced the pages of that newspaper for some 50 years, and two years after his own death, his words on Dexter are published today.

It sounds almost like a set-up from one of Dexter’s dozen or so crime novels, with the dead honouring the dead. Barker’s ‘one he prepared earlier’ is lovely and not too long. Sometimes with obituaries, the honour being paid can rather go on a bit. Baker’s piece is succinct, respectful and captures the spirit of the man.

I never met Dexter, although I was once introduced to the equally great Reginald Hill, not that long before he died in 2012. That was at the Harrogate crime writing festival. Hill was given a lifetime achievement award that night; the same honour later went to Dexter, by coincidence in the year when Hill died. Dexter was already by then quite frail, but he gave a moving speech and brought the audience to its feet.

Barker’s obit reminds us that we have the rotten weather in Wales to thank for the creation of Inspector E Morse. The rain during a family holiday kept Dexter indoors. He read the detective fiction in the holiday house and concluded he could do better.

That otherwise unrewarding holiday in Wales led to Last Bus To Woodstock, the first Morse novel, published in 1975. Dexter never thought of himself as much of a writer, which is often the way with writers, great and otherwise.

Dexter, who has died aged 86, said he could revise his “bad starts” into something that worked. “I just started writing and forced myself to keep going. And it’s been the same ever since.”

He made Morse from his own flesh to an extent, giving him a classics background, a love of Wagner and real ale, and crosswords too. In a clip on the BBC news last night, Dexter implied that the success of Morse lay in people liking a grump, and that he himself had always been a “cheerful pessimist”, which sounds like a lovely thing to be.

I have read all the novels at one time or other. They work so well because of character, the idiosyncratic, puzzling, irritable Morse and his long-suffering sidekick Lewis (quite different in the novels than on television). And because of place, with medieval Oxford being one of the main characters. Dexter liked to say that he’d never have been a success if he’d been from Rotherham.

Like many others, I watched all the original Morse dramas on ITV, so striking in their day for running to a slowly mesmerising two hours, and with fewer ad breaks than you get today. After that I watched all the spin-offs, with Lewis stepping into the limelight, good at first, then less so, especially when cut down to an hour. Endeavour picked up the baton in style in 2012, with Shaun Evans so satisfying as the young Morse. That series has a title that answered one of the great Morse puzzles: what did that letter E stand for?

Dexter teased that one out until the end when, as Morse lay dying, he revealed that his parents had been Quakers who named him Endeavour in honour of Captain Cook’s ship, which bore that name. Dexter decreed that no other actor could play Morse after John Thaw died, a stricture for which we should be thankful.

A personal memory. Years ago, we used to go on holiday to my in-laws’ caravan which was parked in a field inland from the Cumbrian coast at a place called Tarn, not far from Aspatria. Morse was being repeated at the time. We would buy cheap, date-dodging chocolate from a shop on the coast and have a night watching television while the kids slept. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds, as the car had to be driven down a steep slope so that we could hook the television to the battery. But then fuzzy Morse and old chocolate were ours. And beer too, of course.

Dexter might not have thought of himself as much of a writer, but perhaps that is easy to say when you become so successful. Crime readers loved his books, as did viewers by the millions around the world. A good legacy to have.

In that obituary by a dead man, Dennis Barker writes a lovely paragraph recalling the way Dexter measured his words. And here, to close, is that paragraph…

“Dexter was often asked whether he wrote for a readership or for himself. His answer was that he wrote for his old English teacher Mr Sharp. He would write a page and then ask himself, “Would Mr Sharp like that?” His aim was to feel that Mr Sharp would give it at least eight out of 10.”

Thank heavens for Mr Sharp…

ARE we nearly there yet? That’s been the cry from the pro-Brexit newspapers for months now. And now Mrs Maybe has turned around from the driver’s seat and said that, yes, we will be there next Wednesday. Or two years after next Wednesday. Or however bloody long it takes after next Wednesday.

Then she turned back and, grimly clinging to the steering wheel, started to look out for those signs saying: “Big cliff this way.”

Nine months after the UK voted by a narrow margin to quit the European Union, Theresa May will on March 29 invoke article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, formally serving notice that we’re off into the great unknown.

To tie in with her announcement, a group of 72 MPs – mostly but not all Tories – have written to the BBC accusing it of being too pessimistic and skewed in its coverage of Brexit. The shorthand of this complaint is simple enough: these MPs are cross that the BBC isn’t flying the Brexit flag and joining in the hunky-dory chorus got up by those on the hard right. Instead, they complain, the BBC is “unfairly representing” Leave voters by focusing on those who regret their decision.

This letter from MPs is essentially wrapped round a brick which they have just lopped at the BBC’s windows, as it warns the director general that the future of the BBC “will be in doubt” if it is not seen as an impartial broker.

The Tory MP Julian Knight, a former BBC journalist who backed Remain, organised the letter because he disagreed with the stance of the coverage. Well, at least he comes at the matter from both sides. Among the other Tory signatories are the never knowingly less than revolting Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa Villiers, about whom I have no easily summoned insult. Duncan Smith endlessly spouts pro-Brexit propaganda, so we expect nothing less of the annoying man.

Joining the 60 grumbling Tories – reports the BBC website – are two Conservative peers, three Labour MPs, eight DUP MP, two DUP peers and UKIP’s only MP, Douglas Carswell – the man who, according to his former leader Nigel Farage, is hellbent on stopping UKIP from being an anti-immigrant party (so he’s not all bad then).

Complaints like this are part of the daily grind for the BBC, which does sometimes trip over its own scuffed brogues while attempting to be impartial. For evidence of this, look no further than the prominence given to climate-change sceptics, whose highly partial views are given equivalence with the scientific consensus that global warming is indeed caused by mankind.

Naturally enough some of the usual suspects are flourishing this anti-BBC letter this morning. The Daily Mail splashes on the story under the customary bellow of a headline: “BBC’S BREXIT BIAS STORM.”

“About 70 MPs are understood to have signed a letter…” fumes the Mail, somehow forgetting to add that most of them were moaning Tories. The similarly Brexit-besotted Daily Telegraph tops the page with: “BBC warned over Brexit ‘bias’.”

And the Daily Express as usual goes for: “Are we nearly there yet?” Or in fact the entirely dreary: “MARCH 29^th 2019 DATE SET FOR OUR EU EXIT.”

An unkind thought occurs, as they sometimes do, but just how many Yes-voting  Express readers will have popped their slippers before we even reach that date? The sense of an older generation getting in a last hurrah and saddling their grandchildren with a long-term problem is hard to shake off. Well, it is for me at least.

As for the BBC being biased over Brexit, that seems like nonsense. Perhaps the BBC occasionally wears a frown over Brexit, but it is surely only biased to those who believe that Brexit is going to be a free-world skip in a post-Europe park where the sun never stops shining.

The BBC defended itself with a routine statement that its job was to “scrutinise and analyse” Brexit issues, and that sounds fair enough to me. Bias is often in the eye of the beholder – and the mouth of the Daily Mail, or whichever newspaper one decides to dislike.

I realise people get their news from many sources nowadays, but those who rely on certain newspapers are being fed a diet rich in fatty pro-Brexit meat. Now that is bias as an art-form.

The BBC can never please everyone, but MPs making dark threats and bullying the Beeb over Brexit bias at the Corporation should remove their heads from Nigel Farage’s bottom, and have a proper look around at the world.

SO, George Osborne is to edit the Evening Standard. Everyone’s a journalist these days. Anyone can write a column and put it online. And now anyone can edit a newspaper, even if their newspaper experience extends little beyond having generated a fair few headlines. Some editors have written a lot of headlines; some, it appears, have had a lot written about them.

I don’t know when he found the time to do his NCTJ exams and fitting in his shorthand must have been a nightmare, what with earning £650,000 a year from US fund manager Black Rock – for one day’s work a week – and trousering £800,000 in nine months for making speeches to bankers and Americans. Oh, and that bit of pocket money he earns as MP for Tatton. I am surprised he even gets out of bed for his MP’s salary of £75,000. Mind you, perhaps he’ll end up not going to bed at all at this rate.

Here is some handy information for George. Headlines are those big words at the top of the page. The ones in the Standard usually support your lot, so you should feel at home – although you may feel tempted to attack Theresa May (nice short surname, fits a headline well).

When a story is spiked it is dropped, and this refers to real spikes that used to sit in newsrooms, often in a tin filled with lead. Assorted bits of paper would be stored on these spikes. Sometimes they were bent; sometimes they went straight up. I once wrote a novel in which an editor was murdered by one of those spikes, so be careful.

Intros are the words at the beginning of a story; a crosshead is a word that breaks up a column of type (although a crosshead may also refer to the incredulous journalists who can’t believe that you are now their boss).

Leading is the space between lines of type; and lead piping is something you might want to watch out for if you go to visit Theresa May (that’s if she’ll let you through the door).

The more I think about it, the more I can only conclude that George Osborne’s qualification for the job is down to having been in the news a lot. Perhaps that’s all it takes nowadays, and it is part of a strange bit of job-shunting. The editor of the Standard, Sarah Sands, is a very experienced journalist with virtually no broadcasting experience; so naturally she is off to edit the BBC Today programme. And her job is being passed on to a Tory politician with no newspaper experience.

Then again, the US is being run by a man with zero experience of politics; and less than zero common humanity, so there you go.

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband mocked Osborne by joking that he was going to be made editor of Heat magazine. That was quite amusing, unlike Jeremy Corbyn muntering on in the background about this being “yet another example of the establishment revolving door, a closely knit clique who are holding back the British people…” Yes, Jeremy, you have a point but dear me you are determined to bore everyone to death with it. Why didn’t you just say: “Well, I’m off to edit the Beano then” or something vaguely witty?

A few serious points…

Should George Osborne still be an MP with all this extra work? Being an editor is a difficult and demanding job, not something to be quickly fitted in with everything else. Being an MP is a difficult and demanding job. Doing both while also having to cram all that money into your wallet just doesn’t seem right and proper. If nothing else, Osborne ought to step away from Parliament – and from Knutsford with its nice kitchen shops and flashy cars (it’s south of Manchester, George, in case you have forgotten, not far from the airport)

Is a Tory MP, and one known for his devious politicking, the right person to edit a newspaper and won’t he just display total bias towards his party? There are two answers to that: one, yes probably, but the Standard is pretty much a Tory-sheet anyway; two: isn’t Osborne more likely to use the paper to push himself and to settle scores with Theresa May?

Downing Street was said to be “very surprised” by the announcement of George’s new job. You and the rest of us, Mrs Maybe.

This new job is being shaped for George in that he will only edit the paper four days a week, and will still have time to pop to Parliament later in the day, apparently. Presumably his deputy will do most of the real work, you know, all that newspaper stuff. As Osborne told his staff: “I may have run the country but I’ve never run a paper.”

Oh, I bet that had them rolling in the aisles. And wondering if anyone had kept any of those old spikes.

POOR Sean Spicer. It’s no wonder he turned up for work wearing odd shoes, one black and the other brown. Being press spokesman to Donald Trump must be like having to plug your mouth into a mad person’s brain. Getting dressed in the usual order must be the last thing on your mind in the morning.

Whatever crazy things your boss says, it is your job to justify or interpret them for the world. Of the many barmy notions that Trump has rattled out on Twitter in the small hours, his belief that former president Barack Obama wiretapped him during the election campaign is the most persistent.

On March 4, Trump tweeted: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

Spicer has offered various interpretations of his boss’s mad mutterings, including telling the press that it was all their fault for taking the president’s tweets at face value. And that Trump put quotation marks around the word ‘wiretapped’ – “to mean broadly surveillance and other activities”.

The nuances of punctuation are not what normally pops into the mind when reading Trump’s tweets. Instead it is possible to worry that the most powerful man in the world either has a hinge missing; or that he is playing with smoke and mirrors in his own mad scheme to disparage everyone and everything ‘non-Donald’. By carrying on in this way, he reduces the world to his own mad logic and gives self-credence to his bizarre version of events.

This wiretapping allegation from the dusty corners of the Trump brain has so far been denied by everyone, from Obama’s spokesman to the Republication and Democrat intelligence chiefs of in the Senate.

Now this mad tale has taken another twist, after Andrew Napolitano, a judicial analyst on Fox News, claimed that three intelligence sources confirmed to him that the Obama administration used Britain’s GCHQ to spy on Trump so that there would be “no American fingerprints on this”.

The normally Trappist GCHQ broke its customary silence and dusted off a spokesman to say: “Recent allegations made by media commentator judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

How tempting it is to take that further and say that Trump is himself utterly ridiculous and should be ignored – or, at the very least, his tweets should be. His ‘wiretapping’ tweets included calling Obama a “bad (or sick) guy”. US officials said his allegations were ‘groundless’.

As Trump is so madly inventive in his tweets, I think we should all join in his game by making up Trump tweets. Here is my suggestion to get things rolling: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my brain tapped shortly before the greatest victory. Ever. Nothing found. Just a soggy piece of stilton cheese.”

As for Sean Spicer’s footwear, you know you’re losing it when you turn up for work in mismatched shoes. Socks I can understand, but shoes? Having to be the spokesman for Trump’s stilton brain must be taking its toll on the poor man.

BACK in the days when the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn were more vocal than they seem to be now, you would often find complaints on social media that the media – and particularly the BBC ­­– was choosing to ignore the election funding scandal facing the Tories.

Such whinges were in part explained by the hard time the lovers of Corbyn felt their man was getting at the hands of the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg.

Now that story, which started with an investigation on Channel 4 News, is being widely reported this morning as the Conservative Party has been fined a record £70,000 and its former treasurer has been reported to police after an investigation by the Electoral Commission discovered “significant failures” by the party to report its campaign spending.

Yesterday, it was revealed that a dozen police forces had passed files to the Crown Prosecution Service over allegations that up 20 Tory MPs broke local spending limits at the last general election.

The row mostly centres on the use of an election battle-bus plastered in red, white and blue – and bearing the slogan: “A better future for you, your family and Britain” and finished off with David Cameron’s signature (the name rings a distant bell).

Presumably the slogan: “A ****ed up future for you, your family and Britain – and I’m off to earn tons of money talking about the Great Brexit Balls-Up” was ruled out for being too long. And too accurate.

The Tories generally have more money to spend at election time, so perhaps they just got carried away with themselves, throwing £20 notes around with abandon. The technical bit – rather than the satirical slight – is that the cost of the bus wasn’t charged to local candidates, but was passed off as a general national expense.

In the Guardian, a Conservative party spokesman said the party had complied fully with the Electoral Commission’s investigation, although the commission said Conservative campaign headquarters “did not cooperate fully” with its inquiries and “hindered and caused delay to the investigation”.

Ah, one of those quotes – “complied fully” being shorthand for “was as awkward and arrogant as you would expect under the circumstances”.

Labour and the Lib-Dems have in the past faced similar charges, although the scale seems larger in this case. As, too, is the desire among some of us for a quantity of shit to hit Mrs May’s fan.

Coming at the same time as Chancellor Philip Hammond’s screeching U-turn on increasing National Insurance contributions for some self-employed workers, this marks the lowest point yet for Theresa May’s Tories. And about time, too – especially as they seem able to carry on doing whatever they want without much in the way of obstruction from the Labour Party.

The U-turn was flagged up before Prime Minister’s Questions this week, giving Jeremy Corbyn an open goal. And you know what he always does with those. Takes a run at it, slips and misses. Sadly, Jeremy isn’t very nimble on his political feet, and prefers to stick with whatever is written in his script. If it doesn’t say “open goal”, he fluffs it.

Still, the shaming of Hammond is a cheering moment, especially when you recall the gruesome sight of his smug prancing on budget day, as he reeled off jokes like an undertaker who’d been at the sherry.

I have been asked to talk to English and journalism students about being a journalist. Only about half the expected number have turned up, but they seem keen enough, so here goes.

I tell them that my first job on a newspaper was when I was still in the sixth-form at my grammar school. I worked on the Daily Mirror at the weekends, going off to the centre of Manchester in my Honda 50 moped. I was a copyboy. I put messages in vacuum bottles that shot to different parts of the building; I attached page designs to wires and saw them trundle to another part of the office.

One of the editors took a kindly interest in me. He’s a ghost now, hardly more than a shape in my mind, and probably a real ghost, too.

Perhaps that’s where it all began, as if by inky osmosis, or so I tell myself.

I don’t tell the students that my younger brother had the same Saturday job and ended up a professor. Maybe that old story is a bit of smudged romanticism, echoed by the Saturday sub-editing job I had ten years later at the Observer.

I do tell them about that job, although I miss out the part about working alongside a man called Michael Jacobson, who had a wild white beard and was nick-named Captain Birdseye by the printers. Me they called Captain Birdseye’s Son.

We worked an awkward shift when it came to having a lunch break, so Mike arranged for us to join the senior staff in the boardroom, where there was cheese and wine. I don’t remember many of the names, but Robert Harris was one. He was the political editor all that time ago, before turning himself into a bestselling author.

I am not in touch with the Observer, other than as a reader, but it’s a fair assumption to make that wine and cheese are no longer served on a Saturday lunchtime. That had all stopped by the time I left one summer’s day in 1988.

I tell the students about my other jobs, on the weekly newspaper in south-east London, then on the Press in York for all those years of editing and writing. I tell them about the freelance feature writing; and I tell them about working on editing stories for an Irish Sunday newspaper here in Yorkshire for two days a week.

I tell them that if they want to be journalists they need to be persistent, to keep at the job. You have to keep pushing at things – politely, nicely – but you mustn’t give up.

Wearing the hat of optimism, I tell them that newspapers may be struggling but that they will exist in some form or other for a while yet. And that after that there will still be journalists working on websites and so on.

I tell them all this and I believe it to be true. Or at least I hope that it is true, which isn’t the same thing. I don’t tell them that they’d be mad to want to be a journalist nowadays. I don’t tell them to go and be teachers instead, even if it might be good advice.

I don’t tell them those negative things because I hate it when one generation tells another that they missed the boat. And that nothing will ever be good again. And that life has gone to shit.

Instead I tell them positive things and send them away with good thoughts.

‘Was that helpful?’ I ask the keenest seeming student as she leaves. “Yes, it was,” she says. And hopefully she isn’t just being polite.

I don’t tell the students about Newsquest and Newport. It wouldn’t interest them. The other day the Press Gazette reported that the Welsh government gave Newsquest a grant of £246,000 to help it set up the subbing hub in Newport. The subbing hub that cost jobs around the country. And the subbing hub that is now being shut down, causing another layer of jobs misery.

What on earth was the Welsh government doing giving grants to in effect destroy the jobs of English journalists? And as Newsquest is now abandoning Newport, will the administration ask for its money back?

But I don’t share any of this with the students, not wishing to appear bitter or anything. Even if some days I still am.

Working with students is enjoyable, and the best part is watching them grow as writers. Some are much better than others. But that’s life for you. And with luck the good ones will find a way through.

OH, goodie – another referendum. They always go so well. Admittedly, most people reading this won’t get to vote, but Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second independence referendum for Scotland is set to dominate politics for the next two years – just as the chaos from the Europe referendum comes to a slow boil.

Theresa May slapped down the first minister’s call for another referendum, summoning up that sense of chilled, contained fury that she does so well. As a vicar’s daughter, May should know all about motes and beams from the parable. Or at the very least, perhaps she is due at the opticians to squint at the chart (“B-R-E-X-I-T…”).

It is easy to see why May was so cross to have been ambushed by Sturgeon just as the Brexit vote was passed in the House of Commons, but her response was still telling.

“The tunnel vision that the SNP has shown today is deeply regrettable,” she said. May should know all about peering down tunnels, as her eyes sport panda-ring from too close attention to the one marked ‘Hard Brexit’.

“It sets Scotland on a course for more uncertainty and division, creating huge uncertainty,” she added – quite missing those motes and beams. Has there ever been a time when we have been more uncertain and divided – caused by a close referendum vote which has been hijacked as the “will of the people”?

The very accusation May levels at Sturgeon could so easily be laid at her own kitten-heeled feet.

The prime minister finished with a firm bit of knuckle-rapping – accusing Sturgeon of “playing politics” with the future of the country. “Politics is not a game,” she said with grim finality.

Oh, but it is, Theresa. And it’s one whose rules you know intimately; all the way down to the pretence that it’s not a game, that somehow you are above a game you played so adroitly you saw off all opponents in your own party and became prime minister in a blink and without any votes being involved.

So, refrigerated lectures from Theresa May should be taken for what they are – a bloody cheek. That said, I see her difficulty and personally wish we’d never got into this unfortunate habit of holding referendums.

The Europe one saw, what, 17 million vote ‘yes’ and 16 million vote ‘no’ – and now we have years of chaos and uncertainty without a clue if we are doing the right thing. Unless you are the Daily Express, which offers a ‘Hooray’ in its headline today marking MPs voting to trigger Brexit. That newspaper is so certain that everything is going swimmingly that it has already been forced by the Independent Press Standards Organisation to publish two corrections for pro-Brexit stories that were, to use the technical term, complete bollocks.

Over at the Daily Mail, another ringleader of the Brexit contingent, the headline is a putdown to Sturgeon: “Hands off our Brexit, Nicola.”

Dear God, we’ve got two more years of such depressing farago to come.

WE are taking our daughter to the airport but the road is closed. It was open yesterday but today there is a sign and a man. The man watches us as we slow down. His expression says: “Road closed.” As does the sign.

We go five miles in the wrong direction. “I should have tried the other way,” I say. The ‘other way’ is a route known to my mother and her partner. “I wouldn’t go on the motorway to the airport,” Tim said earlier. My mother pointed out that she drove me back that way from the airport last summer. This is true, but there you go. I have used my natural-born right as an idiot to choose the wrong route.

Warrington looms into view, or at least a sign saying “Warrington.” The place itself doesn’t materialise, although the motorway does. After a bit of lane-juggling at the roundabout, we are heading in the right direction again. Ten minutes or so later, we are back where we started. Ten minutes after that we are circling upwards in the short-stay multi-storey.

Our daughter is off to Australia for a year. She is 23 and in need of an adventure. She is leaving us to continue the adventure of no longer being 23.

We park up and head across to Terminal 2. Our girl is trailing a suitcase that’s about half as big as she is. As she queues at check-in, my wife takes a photograph on her phone, and is told off – “No photographs,” a woman says.

So much has been invested in this moment, so many plans, so many farewells, and her she is. In the end, we don’t hang around as she still has more than two hours before boarding. We exchange hugs and I try to offer some fatherly wisdom – “Be safe, have fun, enjoy yourself” – while feeling particularly unwise. Then she disappears up the escalator and we go back to the car.

Years ago, I had an Australian adventure of my own, a long holiday rather than a year away. A girl in the house watered my spider-plants while I was away. By way of thanks, I bought her a clip-on koala bear. She still has it, clamped to a lamp in our house. The house where we rented rooms was owned by a couple who now live in Perth in Australia. With luck, we will visit them later this year when we interrupt our girl’s Australian adventure.

Half an hour later in the car, our girl texts my wife to say that she is having a gin and tonic in the bar. Hours later, another text tells us that she is changing planes in Doha. At the time of writing, she is still in the air. It seems a long time, but all those years ago, it took me 36 hours to get to Sydney.