IT appears to be winter. Unless you are a fan, you have little choice but to suck it up (being a parent of school age kids, you can’t just jump on a one way flight to a deserted beach hut and stay there, living on coconuts and novels, until spring – the kids would have nobody to check their homework, and would probably get scurvy from all the takeaway pizza).

MOBILE phones are a wonderful thing. A digital umbilical cord, they allow your kids to roam freely, getting up to unsupervised god knows what, but still smart enough to send the odd reassuring text telling you are alive and well, whilst forewarning you of their next demands for food, cash, a lift, or all three.

Sometimes having a press card can be very handy, and not just for waving in officers’ faces when you’re about to get arrested.

YESTERDAY I got to see a proof of the forthcoming paperback edition of (shameless plug alert) my book The Liberty Tree, all fantastic graphics and fantastic review quotes (end of shameless plug), and it made me feel so glad that (a) my book exists and (b) all books exist.

WHOSE idea was it to hold the 2022 World Cup in a little place the size of Connecticut with temperatures hotter than inside your oven? Whose idea was it to hold the world’s biggest football event, synonymous with lager, lager, lager, in a place that doesn’t do alcohol?

So scientists are 95% certain that it is indeed we humans who are causing climate change.

THE readers of consumer magazine Which? recently voted a budget airline — which for legal reasons I shall henceforth refer to as Cryin Air, on account of how its passengers have been seen weeping as they try to board its airlines – as the worst of 100 major consumer brands serving Britain and Ireland. That’s 100th out of 100. Epic fail.

YOU know when you try to cancel your gym membership and they make you wait six months before you’re freed from your contract because you didn’t read the small print? There is only one feasible response to that. Go to the gym every single day.

THE other day, at a motorway service station somewhere forgettable, I nipped into the loo before paying three times over the odds for a substandard espresso to get me through the last hundred miles of traffic-choked hell.

I MISSED the whole Slane Girl thing when I was away, because of a three week self-imposed media blackout and digital detox – no phone, no internet, no newspapers, no telly. Of all the news stories I missed – apart from Syria, obviously – Slane Girl is the one that most made my jaw drop.