Earlier this week I went to the dentists. Now, in and of itself this is neither interesting nor newsworthy but, with ‘DIY dentistry’ apparently on the rise, it’s something you hear less and less.

Personified by Boris Johnson’s promise to “fix the crisis in social care once and for all”, every government in recent history has stated to do exactly that but all have universally failed. Why?

That is the question to which we shall imminently have the answer. The long wait for High Speed 2, Europe’s largest infrastructure project, is almost at an end but will the project, oft referred to as a Whitehall white elephant, finally be put out of its misery?

I’ll never watch another Stanley Tucci film ever again. And as for his TV series, ‘Searching for Italy’, well, don’t get me started as I enjoyed it so much I even bought and read the book ‘Taste. My Life Through Food’. I was genuinely captivated by this second-generation Italian-American’s telling of tasty tales extolling the virtues of his ancestral homeland. And it now transpires it’s a load of bunkum.

Several of you have commented that I appear to have lost my political mojo of late and, with the tories all at sea, I think I have to agree with you. Recent years have witnessed such incompetence and ineptitude that criticism feels something akin to taking candy from the proverbial baby or kicking a man whilst he’s down. Surely, five different ministerial posts in less than a single year for the political pygmy, Grant Shapps, says it all?

At 2.45am on 6th August 1945, a B-29 bomber, named Enola Gay after the mother of the pilot, left the Mariana Islands. Once airborne it was confirmed that Hiroshima, home to 300,000 residents and a large naval base, would be the target for the codenamed ‘Little Boy’ bomb of 64kg uranium.

One Saturday back in the sixties my dad took me and my brother to our first ever football match: Tom Finney’s testimonial team vs the Coronation Street All-Stars. I would be lying if I were to claim I could remember much about the game, if indeed that particular fixture warrants such a term, but I was undeniably captivated the thronged mass of (largely) male humanity vaguely operating in supportive unison. Working class theatre no less.

It’s a well-known fact that the skin is our largest organ and, since the depletion of the ozone layer, we tend to take much better care of it. By the same token, the earth’s soil represents this planet’s skin but it appears we’re not lavishing the same level of care and attention upon it. Soil is under constant threat and in danger of disappearing right from under our feet.

Several of you questioned the realism, or otherwise, of my blog t’other week where I posited the idea that we didn’t merely need more electric vehicles to get us out of the seemingly inevitable climate catastrophe, but less vehicles of all type, fossil fuel as well as electric.

The piece t’other week on Ultra Processed Foods got me thinking of our most popular of meats and seemingly most ubiquitous of natural foods, the humble chicken, and how it can be right that a whole bird usually costs less than a pint of beer in your local?