I give you due warning that in the next few entries I shall be sounding off. So don’t complain: you have been warned

This is is a short posting only because it is one by way of introduction and also so that I can remind myself of one or two things.

Every week, I leave work in London and home west for just over two hours. I then stip off at the Brewers Arms in South Petherton for a break, to have a drink and a smoke and, if there’s any football on - usually Champions League matches - to watch some on Sky or BT Sport on the net. With a bit of luck, bosses letting me go and traffic permitting - both being as predictable as a next year’s weather - I am there by about 9pm and stay till pub shuts at 11pm.

Then it’s further on towards home in North Cornwall, down the A303, through the Blackdown Hills, where the road, the next 14 miles, becomes a winding single carriageway and along which, because I have done the journey more than 10,000 times and I know every stretch of road, I in my modest 1.6 litre 1998 Astra automatic - that is a car which is almost 18 years old - can overtake more timid drivers in their two-year-old 2.5 litre SUVs with impunity. They usually hate it: a bloody T-reg overtaking me in my 5-litre black Porsche/Rover/Nissan SUV? Bastard, I’ll get the cunt!

Yes, if they are also heading for Exeter, they can eventually overtake me on the 14-mile Honiton to Exeter dual carriageway, but they will have had to have been travelling at some lick on the previous few miles to catch me up. It’s what passes for one when you will not see 65 again and pissing takes ten times as long as once it used to be. (If I can be so crude, years ago when I was still a young thing and went out on the piss, then home again for a night’s shagging, the problem was different: then it used to take several minutes to piss because I still had a rock-hard hard-on. Ah, the glory days. Give me a minute. Right.)

Anyway.

The point is that I almost always spend the second half of my journey home, from the Brewers Arms to Higher Lanke, St Breward, rather less sober than I was when I set out from London. Not drunk, you understand, but after two modern 2016 pub large glasses of red wine - I stopped drinking pints of cider because I got fed up having to stop to take a leak - one has drunk the best of three-quarters of a bottle of wine and any pretence to being stone-cold sober is dishonest. I listen to the 10 o’clock news on the radio and much occurs to me. And that, the occurring to me is the point of it. I think ‘well, that might be something I could record in my blog (for which read diary/commonplace book)’, but invariably arriving home at 1pm I usually forget what I wanted to write.

So now, dear friend, I have decided to write this short entry to try to remind myself, at least to remind myself of what occurred to me tonight: There was a report on the new ‘deal’ between the EU and Turkey under which Turkey will lock up as many would-be immigrants to Europe as it can catch and stop them sullying the good lands of Western Europe in return for Turkish citizens being allowed to visit Schengen area countries without a visa. What appalls me is the cynicism of it all and how a once perfectly good idea - the EU - is being comprehensively ruined.

Then there was a piece about the local elections in Britain - today as it happens because the clock has just struck 2am - and specifically about the elections to the Welsh Assembly. More specifically the report was about how a large part of Wales is either uninterested in the elections or, more to the point, even unaware that they are being asked to elect members to their Assembly. Turnout is not just low, but is expected to be pretty much non-existent.

So what’s my beef? It’s this: is many parts of the world folk are living often quite shitty lives in unfree societies and would give their left arm to be able to live in a state where they, for a change, can elect to their government those they would like to see calling the shots. A good example is China - a good example - because it is a bloody huge country rules by a one-party state. Yet we here in the ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ western world who can now do so and have been able to do so widely for the past 70 years just can’t be arsed anymore to exercise our right to self-determination. But I shall first

like to do a bit of looking up on the web on both matters before I choose to add my two ha’porht worth here. Then there is the news that all things being equall one Donald Rutherford Surbiton Trump III has seen off all his Republican rivals and is most probably the chap to stand against one Hillary Rodham Clinton VII for leadership of the free world. And he might well win.

The sole point of this, my most recent, entry is 1) to give you due warning that at some point in the next few days I shall be sounding off; and 2) to remind myself that I am fully prepared to sound off. Now to bed. It is, after all 2am - actually 2.08am - and I am knackered. Not least because I had an extra additional small glass of wine on top of my two large ones. Bon nuit.

No more EU for now (except, of course, to mention ‘no more EU for now’), but the eternal, infrenal itching now has a name - great! - and I plan my next invasion of Europe. Sorry, wan’t going to mention Europe, was I?

I have to say that for some odd reason I have held off posting here for several weeks because my main urge was simply to repeat how insufferable the whole should we/shouldn’t we stick it up the EU/cement the sacred relationship we have with our European cousins? campaign has been. But as I would merely be repeating what I said in an earlier post - a plague on both their houses - it seemed rather pointless.

Were I to do such a post, there would be much to report, for example the fury of the Fuck The EU camp when President Obama warned the U.S. would stop sending tourists to London if Britain left the EU, which naturally roused the Brexiteers to fury even had one Boris Johnson - not my favourite person and something of a nine-bob note - rather gracelessly refer to Obama as ‘half-Kenyan’.

Then there’s the strange alliance of God and Satan who have temporarily come to a truce and jointly come out to warn that if Britain does not vote to remain in the EU, that’s it - Armageddon (to which both, of course, though for their different reasons, are looking forward with some pleasure. (So why aren’t they supporting Brexit? You didn’t think that one throught, did you, Patrick? Ed.) So, for the time being, no more EU in these hallowed pages.

. . .

Well, the itching which has been the bane of my life since last October has got a name: hives, or if you want to use the posh medial term uritcaria. And if you want to use another posh medical term and make as though you know what you are talking about, call it idiopathic urticaria.

We already know what uritcaria means. Idiopathic means - well, in a sense it doesn’t mean anything because doctors use it when they don’t know what is causing a disorder, illness, rash or, in my case, itch. After visiting my GP and being referred to a dermatologist, I have now been prescribed an anti-histamine. I was already taking one, but the new one, fexofenadine hydrochloride, was prescribed by the dermatologist and she said it ‘was better’. Well, better or worse, from folk who adopt posh-sounding pseudo-Latin words such as ‘idiopathic’ to hide the fact they don’t know what’s actually going on, I’ll take it with a pinch of salt.

As you can imagine, I have been scouring the internet for info and can tell you this: for most folk hives come and go in a few hours or a day. For some poor unfortunate schmucks such as me, the

are chronic (where chronic doesn’t mean ‘really bad’ as most people think, but ‘ongoing/long-lasting’). I have to say it isn’t half as bad as it was from last October to the end of February when a perfectly good and respectable weekend in Rome was ruined and consisted mainly of spending the very boring day at Fiumicino airport itching like fuck, waiting for a 10pm flight to Gatwick and wanting to be nowhere else but home. Maybe that’s the antihistamines.

I have also taken to eating a bowl of three chopped up satsumas and half a tub of Greek youghurt for breakfast, and although it hasn’t cured the itching, it has done wonders for the rough, red, dry skin I had on my arms and perhaps on my back, though I could never get around there to take a look. (NB Picture posed by model and for illustration purposes only. I’m a bit older than that.)

The odd thing is that for the past 50 years I thought I didn’t like yoghurt (and I’m talking about the natural, unblemished stuff, not the heavily sweetened and flavoured stuff which has enough e-numbers to form a Yorkshire chorus). Then I tried it and decided I do actually like it. Admittedly, it has an acquired taste, but it is a taste I have since acquired. I must be honest and add that I do sprinkle just a little sugar over it all, but I’m sure - we’re all liberal free-thinkers now, aren’t we? - you’ll find it in your hearts to forgive me. The odd thing is that given that the worst seems to be over - fingers crossed - and I am now reduced to slight tickling and itching all over my arms, scalp and torso, I realise I have been suffering from mild hives for some years, because I have long felt like this, though I didn’t think much of it.

. . .

My next holiday is booked: ten days in some ski resort in Austria which has a spa. It’s called Bad Gastein. I can’t for the life of me remember how I hit upon the place except that it had something to do with looking up possible quite spots in the Appennines for a break and then somehow travelling just a little further north on the map.

Then, using Expedia, and having settled on Bad Gastein, I hunted down some three/four start hotels and a flight and found Pension St Leonhard which isn’t exactly a hotel in that they only do breakfast (which, of course, many other hotels only do, too) and the front desk shuts at 6pm (understandable as it is ‘family-run’. It remains to be seen whether that is an Austrian Addams family - after all, they do have form).

After my experience of wasting a perfectly good weekend because of the bloody itching which ruined that trip to Rome, I had held of booking a proper holiday, as I dind’t want to spend several hundred pounds to fly somewhere far away, then spend ten days holed up in a hotel room, scratching and feeling very sorry for myself. But once the antihistamines began doing their bit and I was once again sleeping through the night (although two nights ago was something of an ordeal) and when I discovered that at work available weeks to be taken off were rapidly diminishing, I there and then got on my computer and booked. And it’s great to have something to look forward to.

As usual I am making no plans. I shall be taking with me two or three books (of which one is Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx if I can find it again) and enought underwear to keep me respectable and that is it: as far as I am concerned the whole point of holiday is to have no duties,

no plans, no schedule, no obligations, just time off to do what the bloody hell you like, and if that means sitting in an Alpine field surrounded by cows with bells doing absolutely fuck all, so be it. My one stipulation when finding a hotel was that it had wifi internet (and not only because I have to carry on doing the puzzles for the Mail while I am away, but also because courtesy of a useful browser extension I shall also be able to watch Sky Sports while abroad).

Apart from that it was just a question of looking at the reviews. I pay particular attention to the one-star reviews if there are any and gauge from what is said and what is complained of whether there is any reason for giving just one star or whether the complainant is just another bad-tempered perpetual whinger who would find fault with the Second Coming (and that would be someone like my wife). And I have to add the Pension St Leonhard, on Tripadvisor, gets 25 excellents and 10 very goods, and no review is below four-star. So I’m rather looking forward to it.

You want humility? Here’s real humility (well, sort of) and the sad tale of how I came to realised I am not the world’s greatest stock picker

Every so often I take a look at ‘the stats’ to see which of my previous posts have been read. There are a few evergreen favourites - the travails of M. Hollande, of 4, Factory Close, Versaille, France, are a perpetual favourite, as is more or less a post on what a bloody little shit T. Blair, of Duncheatin Palace, 1 Moneybags Avenue, George Town, Cayman Islands, is. My musings on Somerset Maugham also prove more popular than other posts, although I can’t suggest why.

Yesterday I noticed that an entry published on December 3, 2009, entitled ‘A share tip from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of ‘a sure thing’ ’ had had two visitors. Intrigued about what I could possibly have to say, I went along and subsequently almost blushed with shame.

The first thing that struck me was how the qualifying ‘from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of a “sure thing” ’ of the post’s title, apparently an innocent and modest disclaimer, is nothing of the kind. And in view of what I am about to tell you, you will realise just how conceited I was to write that entry in the first place.

You can follow the link above and go and skim through the post, but if you can’t be arsed - and I wouldn’t be offended if you can’t - I’ll sum it up: when, in about 2006 when I heard of SIPPs (self-invested pension plans), I decided that the very modest sum I had stashed away with some mickey-mouse company based in Bournemouth and which was growing at the astounding rate of 0pc per annum wouldn’t do any worse in a SIPP. (I had taken out the pension about 18 years earlier with Hill Samuel, but it was then sold on several times - they are actually allowed to do these things, believe it or not - until it ended up with the losers in Bournemouth.)

Most of the sum I transferred was invested in three funds which went on to do rather well - one doubled the amount invested in nine years - but I had a little left over. In 2006, we were still living in an age of ever-greater credit and the stock market was booming. But I suspected, given that we were still living in an age of ever-greater credit, that at some point the music would stop and the party would be over.

That’s exactly what happened a few years later, although I can’t claim any credibility as a soothsayer, because I didn’t know exactly when it would happen. I mean you wouldn’t hand the keys to the Meteorological Office over to some herbert who assured you that as sure as eggs were eggs,

it was bound to rain at some point in the next two months. I just suspected that it would happen, and knowing that when the economy got into the doldrums and people were very much feeling the pinch, shares would undoubtedly be hit, I asked myself what kind of business might be expected to thrive in a recession. Of course: pawnbrokers.

I did ‘a bit of research’, i.e. I googled ‘UK pawnbrokers share price’, and discovered only one was a limited company quoted on the London Stock Exchange, a company called Albemarle & Bond.

If I remember, I bought the shares when they cost about 62p each - and watched in delight as the price rose and rose and rose. By the end of 2009, when I wrote my entry giving my ‘share tip’ and faux-modestly explained that otherwise I knew nothing about picking great shares (but, of course, hinting the exact opposite) the share price had more than doubled. And better than that, it went on to hit £3 - a startling rise.

Well, if I really was that smart an alec and if I really did have the faintest clue as to what I was doing, I should have sold the lot at the point. I don’t know how much I had invested in Albemarle & Bond, but whatever it was would have grown to almost five times the amount. But I didn’t. Patrick, me lad, (I told myself) you are onto a winner! Just hang on in there and Albemarle & Bond shares will grow and grow and grow (and I don’t doubt that privately I reflected on just what a financial genius I was).

Well, as I don’t doubt you have already guessed (and wondered when they hell I will not just get on with it!), the fall which inevitably follows unwarranted pride came along in good time. Albemarle & Bond’s share price ended its starospheric rise and began what would eventually be a calamitous fall.

There were several reasons for this, as you can read here. But briefly, it made much of its money buying up the gold of men and women who, in the bad times which followed the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy had sold it all to help make ends meet. For a while the price of gold increased. Then it stopped increasing and fell again by over a quarter of its price. Then there was a second factor putting the break on all the good times and denting my imagined expertise as a stock picker: the competition Albemarle & Bond faced increasingly.

As it had not occurred to me that the price of its shares would not carry on rising for ever and a day, it didn’t seem to have occurrd to Mr Albermarle and Mr Bond that as their pawnbroking business thrived, others would take not of the moolah to be made and also move into pawnbroking to get a piece of the action. Which, of course, other firms did. Albemarle & Bond also made much of their money by giving short-term loans. And again other sharks weren’t slow to spot a winner, and the number of shyster firms also lending money in short-term loans at exorbitant prices exploded.

Finally, thinking they were onto a good thing Albemarle & Bond decided to expand. They announced that they were opening loads more branches throughout Britain and, crucially, borrowed a great deal of money to fund that expansion. Sadly, that was what is universally known as a Bad Move.

As business got a lot tougher, the new branches didn’t thrive, profits suffered and the share price went into reverse. I was - thank the bloody Lord - in the habit of keeping an eye on how the shares and funds in my SIPP were doing, and I noticed the decline in share price. Within months it was dropping from £3 to £2.50 to £2 and further. At first I wasn’t alarmed. ‘These things happen,’ this wise old owl of a financial wizard told himself. ‘Just hang on and it will go up again.’ But it didn’t, and finally realising just how unwise it would be to hang on in there, I sold up when the price hit £1.32.

Now that, admittedly, is not half as good as getting £3 per share, but at least I hadn’t lost the lot - as I would have done if I had hung on much longer in the hope the price would rise again: the share price dropped and dropped and dropped until Albemarle & Bond asked for trading to be suspended when it hit just 6p (£0.06).

Given the smug tone I managed to hit in the title of the original post - ‘A share tip from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of ‘a sure thing’ - which implied that I was, of course, anything but a sucker, I shall admit quite clearly: I was lucky, very, very lucky. I would like to conclude by ‘well, that’s taught me a lesson’, but it hasn’t, of course. I - you, too, if you are honest, shall carry on believing my own bullshit, sadly. But at least I can recognise the odd occasion when Lady Luck as the good grace to suck my dick once in a while.

Things went from bad to worse for Albemarle & Bond without my help and the company is now once again a humble pawnbroker, all its dreams of grandeur and cutting a dash in the pawnbroking world in pieces. Here are two more pieces you can read about how fate caught up with Albemarle & Bond, one from the Guardian and one from its administrators PriceWaterhouseCooper.

Panama papers leaked: the Guardian fingers Putin (though why just him?). Then there’s another few nights at the St Endellion festival and I wonder why I can’t simply settle for being middle-class. But sadly I can’t

I must immediately be honest about this entry and state that it has less to do with what I am writing and posting a blog entry and a little more to do with the fact that I acquired a Bluetooth keyboard a while ago when I bought my iPad Air and have never used it. So now I am using it to write this. I am sitting outside La Pappardella restaurant in London’s Earls Court (or, as some would have it, Earl’s Court - no one know which is correct, so that’s both or neither) where I have been coming for my Sunday supper - I only work a single shift on Sunday’s after getting up at the crack of dawn to drive to London and am thus the other side of fresh - and where I then go outside to enjoy a cigar and another glass of wine or a sambuca.

I was sitting here just now when my son messaged me and asked me whether I had heard of the ‘Panama paper leaks’. I hadn’t, so I looked them up, first on the BBC News website and then on the Guardian website. The saintly Guardian’s story is centred on Vladimir Putin, although the BBC states that many other former and current heads of state and prime minister are involved. Briefly, a law firm in Panama called Mossack Fonseca has been helping various folk fleece their countries and build up fortunes. Putin is, for example, said to be in it for $2 billion dollars.

Well, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more of that over the coming days and weeks, so I shan’t blather on too much. But one thing I did tell my son was to look at the leak of the Mossack Fonseca documents in the round. By that I mean he should ask himself, as I’m sure are many other people: who was doing the leaking and, more pertinently, why these documents were leaked? The explanation could be anything from downright banal - a disaffected employee taking his chances - to something far more complicated. My bet is on the latter, although what is really going on we - Joe Ordinary like you and me - won’t find out for a long time or, to be honest, ever.

For me the first question was, I suppotes quite oddley: what is it that makes people want ever more money? I really, honestly, don’t understand. Certainly, most of us could do with a little more dosh as and when, and I shall in a few months’ time when I finally call it a day at the Daily Mail and retire. When I do that, my income will more than halve, but the bills will stay the same. But I can honestly say I really don’t want more.

Yes, I want enough to pay my bills and a little more to save for a rainy day as we say in Britain, but an extra $2 billion? What the fuck use is that? Does a nice gin and tonic really taste so much better because you are drinking it on some rich cunt’s yacht off the coast of Sicily? That is a rhetorical question, of course, but if you hadn’t grasped that, the answer - or at least my answer - is ‘of course it doesn’t’.  I have many faults, of course I do, as do you reading this, but in my case greed is really not one of them. But then I am not 20, 30, 40, 50 or even 60. And I am now closer to 70 than 60. Getting back to the Panama papers leak, well, let’s see what comes of it.

NB. This morning I came across these comments which might be of interest to you if you want to know more about the Panama Papers' leak.

. . .

I spent the past two evenings in the company of Michael ’Peter Simple’ Wharton’s widow Susan listening to some very fine music at the 2016 St Endellion Festival. I have written about it before and shall decline my usual imperative to make the same rather snide jokes about how the whole set-up is quite remorselessly English middle-class.

Yes, there were one or two younger folk there, but I bet the average age of attendees is around 50. Susan, who I like a lot and who is very good company, will be 90 next year (and, sadly, feeling it). I know, because she has told me, that their first few years after her husband died were hard and she felt very lonely.

She and Michael Wharton had no children, although he had four (of which two were really his, and two were born to his wife by another man). She was a working artist and art teacher when she was working and has a workshop but she feels (this she hasn’t told me, but I know this to be true because I am gradually feeling something similar myself) on the periphery. It is a young person’s world - think back to when you were young if you are my or even her age - and young people, as a rule, take rather less notice of their older compatriots than is comfortable for their older compatriots. So she knocks about the cottage she lives in in Buckinghamshire, I should think trying to come up with ways of filling and passing the time.

Susan is by no means wealthy but I’m sure she isn’t on her uppers, but loneliness is loneliness even for an emperor. The music we heard was, on the Friday night, Bach’s Mass in B minor, which if you like Bach, you will like very much indeed. I have the piece on my iPhone and was not completely unfamiliar with it, but - well, I like Bach and am continually fascinated at how he just kept writing such sublime music week in, week out.

On the Saturday were a piece by Beethoven for violin, cello, piano and orchestra (I can’t be more specific because I haven’t the programme to hand), a piece by Brahms in which he set a poem by Goethe to music, a piece by a Judith Weir and a James MacMillan and it ended with Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

That last - well, I haven’t heard it for about 40 years, but when I heard it last night, I realised it was one of the six or eight pieces I had on my three or four classical music LPs at college in the late

1960s and which I listened to again and again and again. So there was the odd and very welcome added pleasure of listening to a piece with which you are - in my case last night surprisingly - very familiar.  We were unable to attend any of the other concerts - on Sunday to Wednesday - because I was still up here in London, but I have promised her that by next year’s Easter festival I shall most certainly be retired and she must come for the whole week.

. . .

The odd thing about the St Endellion festival - and you might be able to tell this from my past and present snide remarks - is that, for better or worse - I simply do not and cannot identify with the rest of the gang who attend. For example, walking in we got chatting to one or two folk we - or rather I - was vaguely acquainted with, and without exception they all declared the previous night’s performance of the B minor mass ‘stupendous’ and ‘magnificent’ etc. Really?

Me, I have not heard the piece before performed live and, quite apart from the fact that my appreciation of classical music is merely that of an untutored listener, I have no way of knowing whether last Friday’s performance was good, OK, mediocre, bad, stupendous or awful. Yet it seems to be de rigueur for folk such as go along to such festivals as St Endellion to enthuse in superlatives. But I can’t do it. Sorry, but I can’t even if it is expected of me.

I suspect that is where I am more German than English. Ask a German his or her opinion and, as a rule, they will give you and honest answer, one which might even come across as blunt. Ask a middle-middle-middle type of English man or woman (though I’m sure the same applies to their Welsh, Irish and Scottish peers) and they seem obliged to enthuse beyond all reason.

Me, I enjoyed the performance because of the music. Certainly that music could and can be performed well or badly but, as I’ve pointed out, I am really in no position to judge. I suspect I would have enjoyed it had the performance been bad. Who knows? 

Like a bore at a party ‘Brexit’ is the bane of our lives. Roll on June 23 after which we will know whether it’ll be terminal cancer or a debilitating stroke

It’s fair to say we’ve all met a boring person or, indeed, several. I always recall one in particular, a reporter on the Birmingham Evening Mail called Barry P, a Brummie, who was responsible for property stories. He was immensely dull, but the trouble I had was that he was a nice guy and I always felt hellishly guilty when speaking to him of actively trying to find some way of ending the conversation a lot sooner than later. A quote I came across years ago, by one Samuel Foote, originally of Bodmin - yes - but who went to London and made his name in the theatre: ‘He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others’. Many a time I’ve escaped a conversation with Barry (who was our National Union of Journalists rep for while) after realising with horror that I was beginning sound equally dull.

That is not, of course, to say that Brummies are necessarily boring, despite the jokes about their accent. They’re not. I should imagine that if such an exercise were possible you would find the proportion of Brummies who are boring identical to the proportion of Yorkshiremen, Scots, Devonians, Muslims, men who sell and repair bicycles, journalists and gays. None of these, and none of every other category you might care to come up with (except, of course, the category of boring people) is intrinsically more or less boring than anyone else. In fact, I’m prepared to go out on a limb and suggest that you might well, if your luck’s in, come across some quite interesting - as in not-at-all boring - trainspotters, country and western fans and passionate environmentalists.

You might yourself be on the boring side, although you would, of course, pretty much be the last to know it. If you really want to know, finally to establish the truth of whether or not you actually are quite boring – and my advice is to let well alone and on your head be it - have a word with friends and ask them directly: ‘Am I boring?’. If the honest ones take more than even a millisecond to respond with a thoroughly convincing ‘you, boring? Of course, not, old chap, whatever gives you that idea?’ and if there’s even the slightest hesitation, you know the honest answer they would like to give but most certainly dare not is ‘well, er, you know, er, sometimes, er, you can, er, rattle on a bit. But you know, I’m pretty sure I’m boring too, well, possibly sometimes, so don’t feel too bad about it.’

. . .

What of all this talk of ‘boring folk’? Why bring it up? Simple: just as you will at some point most certainly been cornered by someone who assumes you are just as fascinated as they are in the long and laborious process of selling their house which a surveyor has just confirmed is threatened by subsidence, along come the various Brexit campaigners trumpeting at every opportunity why it would be a tragic folly to leave/remain in the EU. Every day now some jackanapes with some kind of alleged expertise in some field or other joins the fray of bores warning us that to leave/remain in the EU is unthinkable.

Most recently it was one Sir Richard Dearlove who for five years was head of MI6 (in newspaper speak ‘Britain’t top spy’). He announced a few days ago in a magazine called Prospect that leaving the EU would mean Britain would be safer from terrorism. Perhaps, perhaps not. He should know, you might think, he’s ‘Britain’s top spy’, and, you know, spies sort of, you know, know that kind of thing, like they have information the rest of us don’t ’cos their spies and we’re not, if you see what I mean’. Well, in Sir Richard’s case, perhaps not.

A year and a half ago he also had something to say about how safe we are from terrorism: jihadists, he said, were more concerned with affairs in the Middle East and the threat they posed to the West was overstated. (The media were making monsters of ‘misguided young men, rather pathetic figures’ who were getting coverage ‘more than their wildest dreams’, said Dearlove, adding: ‘It is surely better to ignore them.’) That was in July 2014. Sixteen months later just under 100 people were massacred by jihadists in Paris, and three days ago around 30 died in Brussels.

Prospect makes a point of not being ideological and has also published a piece which claims the opposite of Sir Richard’s view, that leaving the EU would make it more difficult for Britain to fight terrorism. So there you have it: you pays your money and you makes your choice. You want Britain to leave the EU, then here, from the mouth of Britain’s top spy (‘Look, he’s got to know what he’s talking about, of course he does and it would be silly to pretend otherwise’) is the proof that ‘Britain would be safer out of the EU’. If you want Britain to remain a member, then here David Anderson’s piece in Prospect supplies your proof that it would be sheer folly from the point of view of Britain’s security to leave the EU. David Anderson is billed as an ‘independent QC [i.e a barrister] tasked with reviewing the UK’s anti-terrorism laws’. It seems that he was appointed by the government, but don’t get too cynical about that - it’s often useful in important matters to point out where you are going wrong. Well, the ‘we must remain in the EU at all costs’ folk will say ‘Look, he’s got to know what he’s talking about, of course he does and it would be silly to pretend otherwise’.

So what’s the upshot? Simple: we are up shit creek, but not yet a lot further.

. . .

Being the chopsy sort who is not afraid to talk to strangers (about my only one gift which made me suitable to work as a reporter all those years ago) I conducted an ad-hoc vox pop the other night. For reasons which are far to dull - that word again - to go into, last week and for the next two weeks I shall not be driving to work in London, but taking the train. And that means that rather than stopping off at the Brewer’s Arms in South Petherton, I stopped off at the Tor Valley Inn, in Sticklepath, Devon, on my way home last Wednesday. And as I was chatting to a couple of guys, I asked one what he thought about ‘Brexit’.

His name was Paul, he was about mid-forties and had a wife and two teenage children. He said he was sitting on the fence on the matter, but thought when push came to shove (it will do in the voting booth on June 23) he will vote to stay, mainly because he feels it would be safer. Not much of a ringing endorsement, you’ll have to admit. He went on to say that he felt overall the majority of those casting their vote in the referendum would feel the same way.

Then there was Keith (pictured). Originally from West London, he moved to Sticklepath many years ago and eventually started a drainage business. He recently sold this to a firm in Wales (who, according to Keith, haven’t a clue) and plans to retire next year when he will be 70. I don’t know

how he sees himself politically, but I should imagine he’s a Tory, though like most Brits, whether nominally Tory or Labour, thinks ‘the government’ is pretty much ‘fucking it up’, whatever ‘it’ might be. I have been friendly with Keith and his wife, who are more or less permanent fixtures at the Tor Valley Inn, since I started dropping in several years ago. I asked him how he intended to vote: he is pretty unequivocably for getting out.

So was Roger, another punter that night who was there for the darts (the pub has thriving darts team, and more often than not when I drop in of a Wednesday a match is on against some team from another pub, for which the landlord, another Keith, always lays on sandwiches, crisps and nuts. Very friendly pub is the Tor Valley Inn). I don’t know how old Roger is, but should guess in his early seventies. He has a very florid face and a boozer’s now, not just florid but lined with thin purple veins. Before he retired, he did something in technology and travelled throughout Europe quite a bit, so I shouldn’t mark him down as some kind of little Englander.

Unsurprisingly, when I asked him whether he was for Leave or Remain, he unequivocally said get the hell out of Europe and, like Keith, cited the fact that ‘we can control our own borders again. Surprisingly, both Roger and Keith’s views are most certainly not rigid: when I gently put the opposite case for the sake of argument, they agreed that there might also be good reasons for staying. So the Lord knows what they will eventually vote.

None of the three was or is boring, though Keith’s rather robust somewhat blokeish humour wouldn’t go down to well among bien pensant folk. And I don’t say that the question of whether or not we should leave the EU or remain is necessarily dull. But I do, however, object to is the sheer zealotry of both sides and how in the media they take you by the lapels and shake you, shake you, shake you until you see sense!

And my attitude? Well, I’ve said before that as far as I am concerned we are on a hiding to nothing whether we leave or remain. Whatever the leave goons say, economically it could get very rough indeed for several years as Britain has to go about the very laborious business of negotiating new trade agreements.

On the other hand to me it seems pretty obvious that unless major reform takes place and the EU draws in its horns on several fronts, not least its obsession with ‘ever closer union’, it will pretty much collapse in on itself under the weight of its contradictions, not the least of which is its paper-thin claim to unity among members.

As for the future of Britain whether in or out of the EU: well, can anyone reading this care to tell me what the weather will be like on the weekend of, say, October 15/16? No? Didn’t think so.

. . .

A couple of snaps which I took last May in Mallorca, just for the craic.