With the US election still more than eighteen months away, both the incumbent Joe Biden and the challenger Donald Trump have now thrown their collective hats in the ring for their respective party’s presidential nomination, and the latest polls predict a dead-heat between them.

Whenever ‘The Donald’ is in the news it seems to me that his own personal seventeen-acre Florida fiefdom, Mar-a-Largo, is never too far away and often racks-up as many media column inches as its ignominious owner. But where did this winter White House, this opulent palace of under-achievement, originate and what dark secrets does its history hide?

In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity “too cheap to meter”. Needless to say, that forecast has aged poorly and a misunderstood, oft-hidden and little-commented upon process, the disposal of nuclear waste, contributes heavily to the overall cost.

I suspect that many, like me, completely forgot that the clocks went forward an hour this weekend and half the day had gone before we casually saw the light of day! This, I have to admit is more often the case and raises the question of why exactly do we do twice-yearly fiddle with the clock and potentially interrupt our natural circadian rhythms?

Mainstream media, on both sides of the pond, has been in ‘free-speech’ hot-water with the powers-that-be during the last week. One dispute is extremely serious, the other merely very serious.

Asked Freddie Mercury back in the mid-80s, five years before he sadly pegged it. With all respect to the deceased Queen crooner, not me, but thanks for asking, and possibly not you either as, according to a recent Ipsos poll, only a third of Britons want to make it to one hundred.

Many of you will have noted that today marks the third anniversary of our self-imposed European exile. The irony of that monumental decision is that Brexit has finally made good Europeans of us all, though not perhaps for the reasons Bojo, Farage, Sunak, Gove and Rees Mogg once envisaged.

Sounding like a Celebrity Pointless answer, 38 is the atomic number on the periodic table for Strontium. Our very own bard, Billy Waggledagger, penned exactly 38 plays. In Norse folklore the number 38 addresses unnatural fortitude. Mummified Egyptian Pharos were frequently covered with 38 sculptures of feline watchmen and their stone caskets were embellished with no less than 38 ankhs.

Strikes. Inflation. Cost of living crisis. War. NHS despair. Brexit. Covid. Political turmoil. Crypto collapse. Global warming. Pele pegging it. Truth be told, I’ve found myself putting-off writing my first post of the new year as I just haven’t found a subject that would help alleviate the depressed, anxious feeling most of us are probably experiencing. That was until this weekend as ‘Early Doors’ is back.

Being the modern-day equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge, I can very easily buy-into everybody’s favourite all-round-good-egg Martin Lewis’s merry manifesto to ban Christmas presents. Thankfully, his targets aren’t the parcels from grandparents that sit under the twinkling trimmed-up tree, it’s the ever-widening circle of present-buying that people feel a need, an obligation almost, to fulfil.