It is perfectly natural to avoid social media

It is a classic human error and a very common one to assume that everything we do is completely natural and that therefore surely everybody else must do or want to do the same. Last week on BBC Any Questions the Labour MP, Emily Thornberry, answering one on social media asked rhetorically "But which of us can say that we do not spend an hour or so a day on social media?"

To which I replied that I spend no hours a day on social media because I just do not do it. It really is perfectly possible to live without it and I prefer to do so.

For years until my mother came to live with me in her old age, by which time I was myself in my 50s, I did entirely without having a television set and was regularly pursued by the Licensing Authority both in respect of my constituency cottage and my London flat, because they were utterly convinced that the need for a box in the corner was universal.

A much darker example came when I was making a documentary on girl gangs and the women involved just could not believe that I had never carried a knife. To them putting a lethal weapon in their handbags on a night out was as normal as putting in a lipstick or tissue and they were genuinely flabbergasted that I had never done so.

And it goes without saying that I have long since given up trying to convince anybody that I really do prefer to live alone and that the last thing I want is anybody else permanently around the place (OK, I can manage a cat or two).

As for doing without sex, it is as well for the future of the world that most people want it but that doesn't mean that those of us who don't should be considered candidates for the men in white coats.

So, Emily, there really are people who have not the smallest inclination towards social media and who can say with perfect truth that they do not spend a millisecond on it, let alone an hour or so a day.

The audience laughed, but I missed a trick. I should have asked for a quick straw poll because I bet I was not the only one!

I did not stay up all night for the American elections because I had to travel to London the following morning. So I went to bed and got up at 4.30 to see what was happening and the trend was already clear. So much for the science of opinion polls.

I watched the rest on the BBC so I missed the Emily Maitlis meltdown over on Channel Four but in 2029 I shall watch whichever channel she is on because I am sure she will be similarly affected when Nigel Farage storms home with a big win for Reform.

Indeed, one of the great pleasures of the Trump win was the expression on the faces of all those pontificating celebrities who were so sure that it was to be Kamala's night. She seemed sure too.

Normally I am sorry, on a personal if not political level, for the loser of such big contests but I don't feel too sorry for Kamala who relied on her gender and ethnicity for her appeal rather than on serious policy.

Women are just as affected as men by the economy, migration and the rule of law, yet Kamala simply took their votes for granted and I am afraid she deserved to lose.

I hope, nay pray, that in four years' time America will have a better choice than has been provided in the last three elections and that two heavyweight candidates will fight it out.

My best wishes to the Queen for a full recovery and congratulations to the King and Kate for being well enough to attend Remembrance Day after their earlier health scares.

Apparently poor little Princess Charlotte wept when she saw her father's new beard. I am 100 per cent on her side. Shave it off, Sir. It doesn't look good on parade.

My heart goes out to the devastated family of Alexander Rogers, the Oxford student who killed himself after his "friends" deserted him and subjected him to cancel culture.

If only he had called the Samaritans, if only he had stopped to consider the impact on his family, if only he had the sense of perspective to realise that everything passes and now is not forever but when you are 20, intellectually bright but unblooded by the world and its cruelties, it is the present which consumes you.

A failed exam, the end of a love affair, a lost friendship: all can seem to swallow up everything else in a vast dark cloud.

Alexander was the victim of the modern witch-hunt which seeks out transgressors and punishes them without either process or mercy. They are guilty just because somebody else says so. The friends who judged Alexander Rogers were not, if only he had realised it, true friends. They were pompous, self-righteous brutes and one can only hope that the outcome of their actions will have shaken them sufficiently to save anybody else from their cruel clutches.

Indeed, it is even possible to pity them, for as they grow older and wiser they will probably look back in shame and disbelief and be for ever tormented by the knowledge that what they did can never be undone.

A survey has revealed that cleaning the loo is the most hated chore in everyday life, followed by queuing in a supermarket and washing up.

Really? I would more happily face those every day than change my duvet cover once a week. Somehow, I cannot get the knack. I am not tall enough to hold it up and flip the cover as some of my normal-sized relatives do and placing the wretched cover inside out on the duvet results in chaos, so I simply crawl under the cover myself pushing the duvet ahead of me.

Actually, I don't often change it at all as I get the cleaners to do it. The last time I did it myself was when the cat was sick. I still shudder thinking about the first Covid lockdown when cleaning ladies were forbidden to work and I had to struggle with the monster myself. I'd have taken a selfie if I hadn't been upside down within the cover using colourful language. I hated Boris Johnson. By contrast cleaning the loo is a breeze. The brush and the Dettol do all the work.