Monday

A wonderful weekend away with friends who live just outside Hay on the Welsh border. It was the first time we’d been out of London this year and everything was almost perfect. Great company, top food, long walks, plenty of laughs and perfect – if you can allow yourself not to worry about global warming – weather. We had lunch outdoors on both Saturday and Sunday, something I’ve never done before in February. Not for the first time I wondered why the clocks couldn’t go forward now, rather than in four weeks time. It’s now light well before 7am so there’s no problem with children going to school in the dark, and an extra hour’s daylight to 6.30 in the evening would give me and many others a significant lift. Instead, March feels like a punishment beating. As does Brexit. The one downer of the weekend was the way Brexit anxiety managed to infiltrate its way into almost every conversation. The uncertainty isn’t just affecting financial and business decisions, it’s having a serious effect on people’s mental wellbeing. I don’t remember seeing “Brexit will make you lose sleep and leave you with a permanent sense of anxiety and impotent fury” on the side of the Vote Leave bus, but that’s what it’s doing to me and others I know. Then maybe having mental health issues is just a symptom of being a snowflake remoaner.

Tuesday

The return of Alan Partridge was every bit as brilliantly funny and totally excruciating as his previous outings. Comedy to watch from behind the sofa. Most of the plaudits understandably went to Steve Coogan, but much credit is also due to Susannah Fielding for her portrayal of his co-host, Jennie Gresham, on the daytime TV show This Time. Fielding appeared as a near dead ringer for Good Morning Britain’s Susannah Reid. Not just in her appearance, but in her body language and her professionalism in maintaining a veneer of onscreen chemistry while making it obvious she finds her co-presenter an embarrassment. Which opens up a whole new depth to Partridge as Piers Morgan. No longer is Partridge the somewhat one dimensional delusional broadcaster, whose every move, every word, is destined to end in misunderstanding and failure. There is now more of an edge. He still fluffs his lines and misreads situations with only the faintest glimmer of his own limitations, but there is also the possibility of success. Morgan is our vision of what a Partridge who got lucky would look like. A man who deep down suspects he’s a fraud, but whose fawning sycophancy, inability to grasp important details, and limitless narcissism – only the other week Morgan was writing how he liked to mark celebrity deaths by remembering how lucky they were to have known him – has not prevented him from becoming a household name. Imagine an Alan Partridge meets Piers Morgan show. Box office gold.

Wednesday

Earlier in the week, having hijacked the first-ever meeting of EU and Arab leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh to make everyone talk about Brexit, Theresa May gave a press conference in which she ruled out any extension to article 50. “Delay means delay” she insisted. So it was something of a surprise to find her giving a Commons statement on her return in which she promised parliament the right to vote on an extension if her deal that had already been rejected twice – once even by herself – was rejected again. With so much Brexit madness on offer, some of the other governmental mishaps rather got missed. Something I will endeavour to put right. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has been much touted – principally by himself – as the next prime minister, but his chances took a nosedive when he appeared before the home affairs select committee. First he declared he couldn’t possibly mention the Shamima Begum case despite having written an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph about it, and then he appeared totally unaware that the prime minister had ruled out the government supporting Tory MP Alberto Costa’s amendment on EU citizens’ rights. Things quickly lapsed into the absurd when Costa resigned from the government only to find the prime minister had changed her mind and that the government would be adopting his amendment after all. To complete the day, Chris Grayling had to be stopped from wandering into the wrong lobby and voting with Labour. A transport secretary who can’t control his own movements. Failing Grayling never lets you down.

Play Video 0:47 Sajid Javid unaware of government position on Costa amendment in bizarre exchange – video

Thursday

Research from the German Institute for Economic Research, Warwick University and West Virginia University has produced the not altogether surprising finding that having a baby affects parents’ sleep for six years. Rather more unexpected was just how little, with mothers losing an average of 41 minutes and fathers a mere 14 minutes a night. Imagine being able to hear your child crying, get out of bed, change its nappy, feed it, calm it down, get it back to sleep and then get back to sleep yourself while worrying if you’re going to have to repeat the whole process again in a few hours, in well under 45 minutes if you’re a woman and in less than a quarter of an hour if you’re a man. That’s Marie Kondo parenting of the highest order. I’d also like to meet those parents who find their sleep patterns have returned to normal. My children are now 26 and 23 and I am still waiting. I was never the best of sleepers anyway, at least not at night, but things definitely took a turn for the worse after I became a parent as my general anxiety cranked up a few levels. As well as having to worry about my own death, I was now worrying about theirs too. A toddler coming in to tell you she’s had a nightmare at three in the morning is nothing compared to waiting for a teenager to come home at the same time. Then there’s a whole lot of other stuff that keeps me awake. Work. Brexit. And, of course, Spurs. Having lulled me into a false sense of hope, Tottenham have gone full Spursy. The manager called for a reaction to the team’s dismal defeat to Burnley last week and the team duly obliged by turning in an even worse performance against Chelsea. A game I had the misfortune to go to. Still, at least Kieran Trippier’s own goal was finishing of the highest order.

Friday

In 1936, roughly 200 men marched from Jarrow to London in protest against unemployment and poverty in the north-east. Today, Nigel Farage and the Leave Means Leave campaign have announced they are organising their own march from Sunderland to London, starting on 16 March, to demand a proper, full-English Brexit. Given that the kind of no-deal Brexit many of the hardline Eurosceptics of the European Research Group want is predicted to cause a 9% fall in GDP, this will be the first time in history that anyone has organised a protest march demanding the right to be put out of work and to go hungry. Conclusive proof of history first as tragedy, then as farce. Unlike the Jarrow marchers who took more than seven months to complete their protest, Leave Means Leave plans to do the 283-mile trek in just 14 days. Which seems a tad optimistic given the likely age profile of the marchers. It’s also not yet clear just how much of the journey Farage intends to complete himself – he can hardly be described as being in top physical condition – and on past performance if he did take part, he would undoubtedly be making several stops a day to go to the pub. Maybe Boris Johnson could walk the sections that Farage plans to sit out. All those who do want to take part are asked to pay a fee of £50 for which they will get a plastic bottle, a rain hood and overnight accommodation in some place as yet unspecified. A ditch perhaps. To add to the theatre of the absurd, the website for the march contains a video of a young woman with a cut-glass accent wearing a tweed waistcoat and a pearl necklace explaining how the establishment has hijacked Brexit.

Digested week digested: Under a month and still no clue

Facebook Twitter Pinterest May: ‘I’m really going to miss all this.’ Merkel: ‘Me neither.’ Photograph: Olivier Wieken/AP



