IT’S hard to draw your eyes from the US. Such long drama, such giddy hope. All that and Donald Trump throwing a mega-tantrum, a three-year-old trapped in the curiously bequiffed head of an angry old man.

Until we know for sure, I’m going to leave him to it, content instead to savour something Philadelphia’s mayor Jim Kenney said yesterday…

“What the president needs to do, frankly, is put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge that he lost. And he needs to congratulate the winner.”

Isn’t that just perfect?

For now, I want to wind back to something Boris Johnson said as long ago as the week before last, an aeon in today’s Trump-trashed, corona-chaos-propelled world, I know.

In a message about public health, Johnson said: “It’s like sailing between Scylla and Charybdis.”

This caused Geri Scott, Westminster Correspondent for the Yorkshire Post, to tweet: “Maybe I’m exposing my own clearly inferior education but surely normal people have no idea what he’s going on about when he says this stuff, right?”

You are quite right, Geri. Normal people don’t know this stuff at all. Having studied English literature two-and-half aeons ago, I know a smidgen, so count as half-normal. Reading Ulysses by James Joyce is to blame for that. Joyce’s Dublin retelling of Homer’s epic features Scylla and Charybdis somewhere. As too, incidentally, does the Cohen Brothers’ film Brother Where Are Thou?

The short version is that in Homer, Odysseus and his crew have to sail between Scylla, a monster who lives on rocks, and Charybdis, a ship-sinking whirlpool. An updated stand-in might be “between a rock and a hard place”, a modern American expression with a bit of old biblical ink splashed over.

Fittingly enough, Johnson later announced that he would be making a speech from the Downing Street rock. The expectant crowd gathered and waited. And waited even longer. Eventually, Johnson clambered up that rock and announced the lockdown, by which time everyone was cold and even more disenchanted than before.

As for the hard place, for my money that’s the Home Office, where Priti Patel climbs up high to shout abuse at migrants.

So don’t worry, Geri. Boris Johnson’s supposedly superior education doesn’t seem to have equipped him well for the practicalities of life. And he should stop scattering Latin and Greek myths all over the place.

Yet I do have sympathy. For inside my Eng-Lit skull are to be found old literary fragments. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” from Shakespeare’s Richard II. “Water, water everywhere; Nor any drop to drink” from Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner (and please note that nor any).

TS Eliot in The Waste Land referring to April as “the cruellest month” (my wife disagrees, her birthday falls then). Or Eliot again, with Prufrock wearing the bottoms of his trousers rolled.

Or Andrew Marvell worrying that at his back he hears “time’s winged chariot hurrying near”. Oh, and that lovely Gerard Manley Hopkins line: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin…”

All this and more rests in the mental dust.

So, yes, many of us have fragments of this and that in the attic, but mostly we leave them up there. As for dragging poor old Scylla and Charybdis into a public health announcement, that suggests a man who should book his head in for a serious Eton declutter.