Newsround.

Noted bits in the news today. Also a cobweb dispersal exercise.

Donald Trump won, which goes to prove that if billions of people say something won’t happen it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t happen. It’s way too late (and very pointless) to riot now so let’s get on. Amongst his first moves he has decided that the ‘total disaster’ Obamacare health reform thing is actually not as bad as he thought it was and so he proceeds on the mammoth task set before him, the task in question being to do one massive U-turn after another on everything he said before to scare the shit out of voters or persuade them that he had good ideas, be they cunningly disguised as blatantly racist or lies.

Police are to launch a probe into Keith Vaz. I can’t be alone in thinking that this is surely the last thing they should do as it’s exactly the kind of thing that Keith would like; since he apparently has a soft spot for anal sex with rent boys. Or was it just for the company?Surely the police should launch an investigation instead and we can all hope that Vaz will be charged with drug offences and disappear off the face of the known world for ever. And ever.

A third of police forces in Britain use hoods to cover the heads of detainees to prevent them spitting and biting. I think this is a good idea. Liberty, the ballet shoed, oven glove wearing civil rights campaign group say it is cruel and degrading. I suppose it’s roughly as cruel and degrading as someone spitting in your face and biting your fingers off when you try to arrest them as part of your job. I guess it’s also as cruel and degrading as arresting anyone aggressive, because let’s face it we could all do with more aggressive people walking the streets. Here’s a spot of logic for Liberty to chew on: if you are arrested by accident you would be an idiot to spit on and bite the nice police person as you would then probably be charged with assaulting a police officer, which would make you more of a criminal than you were before. By the same logic if you kick off upon arrest it’s probably because you’re miffed that you’ve been caught and are generally a rather violent person anyway. As well as a nob. The solution is painfully obvious. All non-hooded arrests, especially those of really violent people, should be made by representatives of the Liberty civil rights campaign group. Job done.

Everyone is suddenly a Leonard Cohen fan. If only he’d known he had so many secret adoring fans he would have sold his records to them, as well as to the ones who liked him during his lifetime, and made a big fat fortune and not had to tour extensively in his later years which, you never know, may or may not have hastened his death. I imagine Jeremy Vine said something adoring about him on his Radio 2 show because Jeremy Vine is a massive fan of any musician who has just died. Anyway, he was a funny and clever and obscenely talented man (Cohen, not Vine) so R.I.P.

While we’re (I’m) on music I see that Robbie Williams has now had more number 1 albums than David Bowie. This makes me more sad than Trump winning. The world must have done something horrific in a previous life to deserve Robbie Williams. He is a talent vacuum. He is to music what John Travolta is to cinema and Barbara Cartland was to literature. If you gave him an enema he would fit in a matchbox and surely we could use the oxygen on something more worthwhile.

G B Hewitt. 12.11.2016