I had mused about ranting over the situation in Afghanistan today but where would I begin? With ordinary people facing a hideous fate at the hands of the Taliban, Al Qaeda or Isis K or with the organisational cock up that has been this supposed withdrawal.

So I will rant on gentler matters and leave the bumbling incompetence of western political leaders to the experts.

I do find myself shaking my head in despair at times though as I observe the world around me. It seems to be getting barmier by the day. In Britain it seems there is a warning appearing online ‑ the marketplace of the crazies ‑ to warn theatregoers that scenes of violence and death, such as the death throes at the end of Romeo And Juliet are only make believe and the actors do not really die.

This it seems is to reassure gullible audience members that the blood is not real and the actors only pretend to stab and poison each other. The expressed fear of the writers is that the poor fools in the stalls might be distressed to the point of sustaining a ‘mental health issue’ if they believe that what they see is actually true.

I would have thought the Archbishop of Canterbury might have an ‘issue’ if a genuinely dead actor got up and took a curtain call. Is not Resurrection supposed to be confined to a certain leading light in the New Testament?

But on a more serious note, are we taxpayers really paying for ‘woke’ idiots to dream up this horse manure under the guise of being concerned with mental health? Personally I would cheerfully offer the authors of these idiotic warnings a mental health issue to worry about ‑ their own unemployment.

Some headlines are irresistible and I was drawn in by this one in the Daily Mail last Friday: ‘How each hot dog chomps thirty six minutes from your life.’

It was based on a report by the University of Michigan, which purported to have enumerated the impact of specific foods on our prospects for a long and healthy life – or not so long as the case may be. Of the various foods analysed, the study determined that the most inadvisable, in terms of ‘healthy life years lost,’ was the hot dog – the staple diet for so many Americans.

Apparently, each hot dog consumed would set the average Yank’s healthy life expectancy back by thirty six point three minutes.

I rarely eat hot dogs but if I apply this equation to myself, I calculate that if I had consumed one hot dog per week ever since I became an adult, I would by now have chopped nearly twenty two months off my ‘healthy life expectancy.’

If I was particularly partial to hot dogs, I would regard that as a pretty good deal though, especially if the ‘lost’ months would otherwise have been spent slurping healthy gruel in an old folks’ care home.

On the other side of the gastronomic table, the Michigan analysts also listed dishes they claimed would add ‘healthy life years.’ The most beneficial was believe it or not, a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Allegedly, one of those would add twenty eight point six minutes to one’s allotted healthy span.

So the trick would be to accompany your hot dog with a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Scoffing those two together would leave you less than eight minutes down on healthy life expectancy. If only I believed this rubbish, I might put aside my life long aversion to mixing peanut butter and jam.

But the best news of all in this so called study is that chips are a net plus to the extent of an extra minute and a half per portion. So if I consumed twenty four portions of chips with every hot dog, my healthy life expectancy would be completely unaffected.

Isn’t science wonderful and do these people really get paid for their learned – I use the word advisedly – observations?

Perhaps I should have stuck to Afghanistan and left dodgy science alone.