Old toppies like me are known for being somewhat querulous about the world around them but really I am beginning to despair of the political classes.

We have the two Tory leadership contenders making ever more extravagant promises which we know they won’t keep and we have the newly emergent Brexit party, for which I had high hopes childishly turning their backs on the European national anthem on their first day as MEPs. The lib-dems on the other hand wore yellow T shirts saying ‘Stop Brexit.

I have always admired Nigel Farage for his almost single-handed fight to leave the European Union, but this is surely the time to continue that fight in Brussels or Strasbourg, not court public ridicule with puerile stunts. I won’t comment on the lib dems and their attire because they really are beneath worrying about. I personally feel that the European Union is an abomination designed to enrich a few people, but it is there and must be fought responsibly by those elected to its ranks.

Please Mr Farage, bring your troops to heel and don’t encourage any more of this lunacy. The public will support you if you fight for Brexit – that ideal that seventeen and a half million of us voted for in what was the largest voting turnout in British history!

Cecil the lion caused an outcry by getting in the way of a hunter’s bullet a few years ago. It was sad but totally legal yet the armchair conservationists made and are still making a great deal of noise about it. Now we have Voortrekker (I have never understood why scientists name wild animals) the elephant gunned down in Namibia. Voortrekker was apparently a large male desert elephant of some fifty years of age, but according to the authorities, he went on the rampage and had to be shot for the protection of villagers.

Unlike most of the people shouting about the incident from their comfortable homes and offices, I have on three separate occasions seen the destruction caused to villages by a rampaging elephant and it is heart-breaking and absolutely terrifying to the villagers involved. I don’t know why this elephant suddenly became aggressive. I suppose he could have been in an extended period of musth or perhaps he had a toothache which drove him wild. Whatever the case, the photographs produced of the damage he caused are pretty horrendous and I feel for those folk who lost so much and might well have been killed themselves.

Part of the outcry would seem to centre on the fact that the Namibian government outsourced the hunt to a professional hunter and some £6000 was paid to kill the elephant. Yes it sounds pretty horrible when expressed so baldly but I wish the so-called ‘conservationists would put themselves in the shoes of the villagers.

To most tribesmen living in the remoter parts of rural Africa, elephants are the enemy and I can’t blame them for their views. The predictable outrage from outsiders merely fuels the hatred the local people feel for all dangerous wild life and will lead to more killings, probably not as cleanly carried out as the death of this elephant.

The problem lies not with the elephants or with the need to kill them, but with the incredible and ever growing increase in human beings. There is no room for people and wild life left I’m afraid and they cannot live together, so one species or the other needs to be culled. I know which I would prefer to see go under the gun, but unfortunately my choice would be illegal!

I have heard and read a great deal about veganism over the years. I have a vegan Grandson and a good friend who is vegan and cycles professionally, but I have never understood it. I enjoy a reasonably balanced diet – without too many vegetables – and I have lived to a ripe old age. People were designed to be omnivores damnit, so cutting anything out doesn’t seem logical.

So where is the leading you might ask? Well I accidentally tasted a vegan chocolate cake the other day and it was truly horrible. It didn’t taste anything like cake and I couldn’t finish my half slice. Is all vegan food like that I wonder?

And I will have to remain wondering as I am not going to try that again. As soon as I finish this little screed I am going to make a good, healthy oxtail stew!

I have been in this world for very nearly three quarters of a century and never have I known as much political chicanery as seems to be taking place in Britain at the moment. Cartoon Cameron started it all by calling for a referendum on Brexit, a referendum that was initially supported by the majority of MPs.

During the weeks leading up to the vote, there was skulduggery on both sides but leave won handsomely so the nastiness tilted over to the remain side. This eventually resulted in the downfall of Theresa Maybe who was/still is probably the most inept prime minister this country has known. I had high hopes for the lady when she was made prime minister, but she proved herself to be as useless as Canaan Banana was in the early days of Zimbabwe.

A number of people on the remain side are still campaigning for the referendum to be held again, but that is surely a complete nonsense. We would probably get the same result and then what? Vote again perhaps and go on voting till the leavers get fed up and go home?

With this new debate of rerunning the referendum, Jeremy Corbyn’s and thereby Labour’s stance has been ambivalent. Corbyn obviously doesn’t want a rerun, but he is being sorely pressured. Then a few days ago, we read in The Times that he is ‘too frail’ to be prime minister. Indeed the suggestion was that he is in the early stages of dementia. This a man who is teetotal, vegetarian and runs five kilometres almost every day? I have no time for Corbyn and think he would be even more of a dangerous disaster than Mrs Maybe but I don’t regard him as in any way frail. In fact he seems dangerously healthy.

As he says himself, it should be ‘very concerning to all of us’ that civil servants ‘should be briefing a newspaper against a prospective government. He is demanding an investigation into which senior civil servants are spreading fictitious information to the Press.

Well, that will get us nowhere: good journalists — and Rachel Sylvester who wrote the piece is one such, won’t on any account reveal their sources and I can’t imagine any of those responsible confessing their indiscretion.

To my cynical mind, the story has to be part of yet another Machiavellian plot by Labour politicians who want the party to campaign against Brexit in a second referendum. They quite correctly see Corbyn and his close circle as the chief obstacle to their objective. To me this seems obvious, particularly as Sylvester is a Labour-supporting columnist and she has made her views on the matter clear in the past.

In April The Times published a column by her — under the headline ‘Brexit exposes Corbyn’s double standards’ — vehemently critical of his reluctance to switch the party to an anti-Brexit stance: ‘On Brexit, the most important issue of the day, the leader has repeatedly refused to bow to the will of the vast majority of party members to campaign for another referendum on any deal.’

What makes the nature of the plot all the more apparent is that although Saturday’s front-page story was headlined ‘Corbyn too frail to be PM, fears Civil Service‘, the most damaging allegations of his alleged physical and mental decline came from his so-called colleagues in the Shadow Cabinet.

They are those who want the party to campaign to block any form of Brexit, despite the fact that they were all elected on a manifesto to honour the result of the 2016 referendum. Now one of them (unnamed in the piece) is quoted as saying Jeremy ‘can barely hold his head up’; another that he is ‘old . . . exhausted’; and yet another that ‘he doesn’t seem all there sometimes’. But, actually, it’s not the fact that he has allegedly lost his marbles that most bothers them. It’s the fact that he is (they say) in the grip of a small group who are furiously opposed to the party coming out for a second referendum to overturn the result of the first one.

Surely we have all had more than enough of this now. Even the Queen is quoted today as saying that politicians must listen to the people and if Queenie ventures into public discourse on the matter, we should all listen – and so should our elected MPs.

I wonder if those put forward by Nigel Farage as prospective candidates for his Brexit Party will be any better?

I was talking to an old friend in Darkest Gloucestershire last week and she bemoaned the loss of the nice hot summers she had experienced in her youth – way back in the dark ages I’m afraid as she is even older than I am.

I wonder if she was right though. We all tend to wax nostalgic about the past and it is the pleasant times that stick in the memory. The hot sunny summers of childhood linger on in our minds while the wet grimy ones such as we are experiencing at the moment are forgotten. Nice days too are remembered, but not the grey wet ones because the human mind tries not to dwell on dark memories.

I came back to Dartmoor the night before last after three weeks of house-sitting in the Cotswolds. As always, I experienced that familiar feeling of homecoming when I rattled across the cattle grid at the edge of the Moor. Partly it is relief that a long, dire drive is nearing its end but it is also due to the sudden feeling of space around me and the ability to see far into the distance. Those Cotswold Valleys are incredibly pretty, but it is a chocolate box beauty whereas the Moor is vast, bleak and outwardly inhospitable. At first glance it has little to recommend it, but somehow – some folk maintain it is something to do with the granite – it brings instant peace to restless souls such as mine.

The downside though is the weather. Admittedly Princetown is the highest spot on the Moor – one of the highest in England in fact – but boy, the weather here is different! Having mowed a three-week tangle of grass off our two little lawns last evening, I sat down in fitful sunshine to admire my handiwork over a gentle sundowner. Huh! That was definitely a mistake. Without warning, fog drifted in, the sky and surroundings disappeared, the temperature dropped and I was forced into an ignominious run for shelter and the comfort of a track suit.

An hour later, the sun was out again but I decided that sundowners in the open air were no longer a viable option.

Princetown weather is certainly different at any time of year. It can be rough and uncomfortable during the best of times and true locals like my nest-door neighbour, Graham tell me that few people last more than a few years here.

All the same, it is good to be back and I am sure that when I reach the age of my Gloucestershire ladyfriend, I will only remember the nice days.

Human beings are surely peculiar animals!

I know this page is entitled My Daily Rant and reading back over my words, I haven’t ranted at all today, but it is Sunday after all. Reading through the newspapers this morning as is my wont, I notice that the Conservative leadership contest is becoming increasingly nasty and it would seem that the majority of our political representatives are behaving more like spiteful kindergarten tots than responsible adults, but all that is for next week.

One paragraph that did catch my eye was in Frederick Forsyth’s column – I do enjoy his scribbling – wherein he wrote as follows:

‘There ought to be an alternative dictionary to translate the world of politics into plain English. For example, “I have published this in order to set the record straight” equals, “I wanted to get my tissue of lies in before that other so-and-so.”‘

You hit the nail on the head there Mr F – you really did!

At the risk of offending a few of you out there, I am no great admirer of British royalty – or any other royalty for that matter. I am a republican at heart and feel that everyone should earn their position in society, not be born into it.

Having said that, people obviously need someone to look up to and while the obvious figurehead for a nation is a powerful leader, the calibre of leadership in this country is not likely to inspire anyone at the moment and looking at our current crop of pratwinkles in Parliament, that is not going to change soon.

In fact, Britain’s greatest asset at the moment is the Queen. Even I – ever cynical though I am – admire that indomitable little lady. She works harder than most people half her age and earns every penny of the huge fortune she was born into. It will be a very sad day for Britain and the Commonwealth when she turns up her toes and heads for the Great Unknown.

The Duke of Edinburgh also does well for the country. Although officially retired, he popped up at a service gathering last week, looking fit and strong for a man who has almost reached his century.

But after those two, the royal family have far too many hangers on, which we the tax payers are forking out for. Princess Ann works hard, but most of them stay at home and take advantage of us.

Now we have the incredible story of Prince Harry and his American actress taking us all for a ride with a two point four million pound refurbishment of their ‘cottage’ in the countryside. Hang on a minute, Your Princeship! Use your own ruddy money damnit! And that double million is only the start of it. Extra security costing a cool six hundred thousand and something a year has had to be laid on and there are bills still coming in for the work being done.

For me this has echoes of Robert Mugabe and Gucci Grace. They spent other peoples’ money as though it was water and between them – and a few of their cronies – they bankrupted a prosperous little country.

I housesit for a senior member of the British aristocracy (his daughter is married to a minor royal) and both he and his countess are scathing on the subject of Harry and his popsy. Admittedly my tame Earl was born into the system and went to Eton (which he hated!) but he is a down to earth fellow, possibly due to many years spent in Africa. It is quite amazing how that continent teaches everyone the true meaning of life.

Why can’t this ginger-headed popinjay of a prince, who really has no useful role to play think occasionally about the people whose money he and his actress are happily using. He tells us that he ‘values his privacy.’ Sorry Chum, you forfeited that through the accident of your birth and you can’t have it both ways. You court the media when you need publicity, but shun it when that suits you.

Start earning your keep and looking after the ordinary folk Harry, stop your wife from flaunting her/yours – no more likely ‘our’ – wealth with her lavish outfits and jewellery and generally behave like the down-to-earth fellow, you claim you want to be.

That is a nice thought but I fear it is not going to come about!

I burbled yesterday about the deterioration in standards nowadays. Now I don’t much like humanity in general – although there are some wonderful folk around – but I can’t help feeling that even the most sensible of folk are losing all sense of perspective.

Take doctors for instance. These are the men and women we all look up to and visit when we are at our most helpless. They must surely be sensible people – or most of us would think so anyway.

But no that is not necessarily the case. Doctors are ordinary people and seem to be gripped with the same group madness of the moment as the rest of us hoi polloi. The general council or whatever they call themselves of the BMA (the doctors’ trade union I think) voted this week to stop charging overseas visitors for treatment under the NHS on the grounds that it is ‘racist’ to do so.

What utter codswallop and how short sighted can that be?! The rest of us pay our dues to the NHS throughout our working lives yet now any poxy peasant from elsewhere in the world can breeze in and get treatment for free on the foolishly-revered National Health Service. That same National Health Service that is chronically short of money and closing down much-needed facilities all over the country. What utter politically-correct madness!!

Talking about madness, I see that a Daisy Goodwin who writes for television and obviously backed remain in the referendum of 2016 is now calling for the Dad’s Army programme to be banned. Why you might ask – I did anyway. Because according to Ms Goodwin, the programme caused people to vote for Brexit and encourages them to want to leave the European Union.

What sort of claptrap is that I wonder. Dad’s Army is probably the most popular show the BBC have ever made and I confess I have never heard of Daisy Goodwin and don’t know what she writes. Indeed Dad’s Army celebrates Britishness in hard times but that must surely be a good thing. Obviously not to Daisy Goodwin and her ilk though. They are determined to ignore the referendum result and remain in the European Union even though the majority of the public do not want that.

My last complaint – for today at any rate – about people and lowering standards in general concerns cricket. I was brought up with cricket and played it to a high standard for a goodly chunk of my life. Cricket is a sport that has always embodied sportsmanship and fair play. It is an honourable sport and enjoyed by people the world over. Yes, like any other field of human endeavour, there have been problems and the odd scandal over the years, but in general cricket is a cleaner sport than most.

The headquarters of cricket is Lords, that elegant London stadium in St John’s Wood that is looked on as the home of cricket by everyone who knows the game. I watched cricket at Lords before it became a stadium rather than a cricket ground and I have attended dinners and functions there as a member of the Kenya Kongonis. My closest friend, Bill Higginson (he has been my Best Man twice) used to play for Middlesex and once proudly showed me around that grand old pavilion. What a thrill to walk through the Long Room and see the dressing rooms where so many immortals of the sport have hung their socks.

Yesterday England played Australia at Lords in the cricket World Cup. A momentous occasion, but spoiled for me at any rate by the crowd booing Warner and Smith of Australia. Booing at Lords? The very idea is unthinkable! Yet it happened on numerous occasions. The two Australians did wrong a couple of years ago by tampering with the ball in a Test Match in Cape Town, but they have served their sentence and come back to represent the country they have done so much for once again. Yes they were convicted of cheating, but to my somewhat cynical mind their real ‘crime’ was getting caught cheating very blatantly. Every notable bowler – and others like myself, not so notable – has broken the letter of cricketing law by picking at a seam or applying a bit of illicit moisture from time to time, but they used sandpaper, which was going a wee bit too far!

However they have done their time and are now back to delight cricket followers around the world. Those spectators at Lords yesterday should have been pleased to be entertained by two fine cricketers, rather than lowering themselves and setting a horrible example to youthful spectators by booing.

See what I mean about standards plummeting in everyday life. From political leaders to celebrities to ordinary men and women enjoying a day out, nobody seems to care about the niceties of life any more.

All I can do about it though is rant!

I know I should be grateful to this country for taking me in and giving me a relatively comfortable life. I have often taken advantage of the facilities offered by the medical fraternity and although I don’t claim many of the benefits to which I am entitled, I survive financially which is more than I could do in most places.

And it is a very beautiful country too. At the moment I am house sitting in picturesque Sheepscombe, a small village set deep in a Cotswold valley. The views are magnificent and the tranquillity of the area is soothing. Mind you the whole place is blanketed by fog and heavy rain as I write! On Friday I will go home to different but equally inspiring scenery – the wild open spaces of Dartmoor. The weather will doubtless be foul but one can put up with that in such stunning surroundings.

And then there is the history of Britain, always so apparent in ruins dating back through the ages. I often sit with my back against chiselled and obviously carefully placed rocks on the Moor and wonder who put them there and what they were for. Most of them have been in place for thousands of years and nobody knows much about the good folk who set them up originally.

Oh yes, Britain has a great deal going for it and is a place that suits me as my dotage approaches. What I do not understand is the people. Oh there are undoubtedly many lovely folk, but taken en masse, they seem querulous, mean-spirited and unwilling to espouse any views that go contrary to their own. Take the Brexit debacle for instance. We are told that this is a democracy, but the leave side in the 2016 referendum won by over a million votes. That is a pretty substantial majority, but three years later, Britain is still part of Europe and now a big chunk of the political class are threatening to bring the current government down if Boris Johnson is elected leader and tries to get out of Europe without a ‘deal.’

What is this ‘deal’ business all about anyway? When one resigns from a club or any other organisation, one doesn’t make a deal with the management – particularly when that management is unelected in the first place. The referendum vote said nothing about deals damnit! The ballot paper merely differentiated between leave and remain. Mrs Maybe dithered and filly-faddled around without having the moral strength to go with her convictions and give Britain her independence. How often did we hear her say ‘no deal is better than a bad deal?’ How often did we hear her pledge to take us out of Europe by 29th March? Time and time again I am afraid, then she pitifully tried to get her mish-mash of a bad deal through Parliament three times, despite getting a figurative bloody nose on all three occasions.

Now we have Johnson pledging to get us out with or without a deal by the end of October and already the knives are out. Admittedly, having a flaming row with your popsy in a block of flats at the dead of night was a bit daft, but even worse was the neighbour Tom Penn recording the shouting and sending the recording to that most left wing of newspapers, The Guardian who gleefully brought it out into the open. Wasn’t it The Guardian who campaigned against journalists bugging telephones, not so long ago? They obviously apply different standards to bugging of private rows.

Ah well… I know from personal experience the moral hypocrisy of the Media.

Anyway, I feel that the current uproar over Johnson and his private life will ultimately go in his favour although a newspaper piece from that excellent scribbler, Max Hastings gave me cause for concern this morning. Hastings used to be Johnson’s boss – on the Spectator I think – and he feels that although he is a likeable buffoon, Johnson would not be good for the country.

Who would among the current crop of failures and misfits masquerading as our political leaders I wonder. Not one of them seems to care a fig for the people whose views they are supposed to be representing.

Oh Britain, Britain – how great thou aren’t any more. Your spine has been crushed by greed and personal ambition shared out among political pygmies.

I will stay here a bit longer though! Viewed from the side, the current turmoil is quite interesting. Will they all kill each other off or will they allow a smirking Jeremy Corbyn to sneak into No 10 via the side door. If that happens I don’t think I will be the only one who abandons ship.

At the end of this year I should reach the ripe old age of seventy-five. After three quarters of a century, I don’t have much to show for my life but I was looking forward to one little bit of recognition. I would be entitled to a free television licence.

Huh! In their wisdom, the politically correct morons who run the BBC have decided that they can no longer afford the cost of supplying free licences to the elderly.

Now I rarely watch what I call ‘the idiot box’ but I know that for many people it is a lifeline. They live alone and the television gives them the illusion of company. One of my oldest – in both senses of the word – friends has her set on all the time and whenever I visit, she seems to be watching Western films. Good luck to her. It keeps her going and after a long life, she surely deserves it.

And many of the people affected by this crassly insensitive decision to stop one of their few perks are war veterans – those very same men and women who the BBC spent lavish amounts of money and time in praising only a couple of weeks ago when they covered the seventy-fifth anniversary of the D Day landings. How will those men and women feel? Have any of those overpaid BBC pen pushers thought about the hypocrisy of their action. Did those men and women fight and die so that modern BBC pratwinkles could cut off what little they do to thank them?

No commercial organisation on earth could possibly get away with operating like the BBC, and there are many examples of their profligacy in other fields to support this contention. Quite apart from the mind-boggling amounts they pay to a few preening individuals like Gary Lineker and the Winkleman woman, there is the one billion pound refurbishment of their London HQ, which was censured by the national spending watchdog and was more than £100million over budget. There is £34million spent on taxis and the £949,000 pay-off to say farewell to just ONE outgoing boss. There is another £17.8billion of internal pay rises as well yet they get away with it all. The unaccountabilty of this bloated absurdity is sickening. And I’ve not even touched on the 2,700 BBC staff who have been given pay rises of more than 10 per cent last year or the £87million for a new EastEnders set, which is little more than a vanity project. How can a ruddy SET cost that much damnit? Behind the facade, it will be little more than scaffold poles and all this for a show that has seen a near 70 percent drop in viewing figures from its peak in the 1980s.

In these times of division, the BBC has achieved the impossible. From the elderly who will be directly affected to the Netflix-viewing generation who will see this as an unjustified assault on their grandparents, a nation should come together to be outraged at this cash grab on the aged, which in a few months time will include myself damnit!

Years ago, the BBC enjoyed the nickname of Auntie, courtesy of its supposed family values and moderate tone. Now, it resembles a greedy relative trying to bump off Grandpa.

As a grandparent myself, I am definitely a wee bit peeved!

I was interested to read about the current political furore regarding the Conservative junior Minister Mark Field. This worthy was at a black tie dinner in London when the event was ‘invaded’ by a bunch of Greenpeace activists. One young lady hurried up to the top table where Field grabbed her and hustled her out of the room.

That was the inevitable cue for mass outrage among the twitterati. Why? In the light of recent terrorist attacks in London, Field acted with commendable courage. That woman might have been armed, might have been prepared to blow herself and the rest of the top table to smithereens. Like it or not, it happens and I feel that Field did well to get her out of that room as quickly as was possible. If she was manhandled, well she surely brought that upon herself. As for the predictable cries of outrage from the feminists, they want to be seen as entirely equal to men so they surely cannot complain when one of their number is subject to firm handling.

Of course, it was manna from heaven for the Labour, Lib Dem and Green parties, all of whom had voluble and pretentiously idiotic commentators sounding forth about brutality and the beastly Tories.

Needless to say though, the weak-kneed bunch of snowflakes that make up the Conservative party have suspended Field, while the lady in question – I can’t remember her name and am not really interested in it – bravely tells the media that she doesn’t want to prosecute the man.

‘I only wanted dialogue, not violence,’ she says, cuddling a rabbit to her bosom.

But you were the one promoting violence by gate-crashing the gathering, Ma’am.

And where oh where were the security people? I am sure responsibility for security of the event must have been outsourced to a private company, but Philip Hammond, our worthy Chancellor was speaking at the dinner and he would surely have had police bodyguards on hand?!How could these people have been allowed to get in?

I always used to be proud of the seven years that I spent as a British Bobby, but now I would rather say I was a bus conductor or window cleaner. In general – and there are of course exceptions – the modern police in Britain couldn’t catch a ruddy cold and are far too keen on racist or hate crimes to worry about ordinary villainy.

That I find rather sad.

While on the subject of politicians and policing, I couldn’t help shaking my head at the headline in most papers today. Would you believe that the front runner to become Prime Minister of the land, which would enable him to hob nob with what few great leaders there are left in this world- and don’t ask me to name them please! – had his neighbours call the police at around midnight the other night. Apparently he and his popsy – her name is Carrie Something – were having a stand up row and disturbing the neighbourhood. Glass or crockery was being smashed and the language quoted was that of kids from the gutter rather than someone who wants to lead Britain into Independence from Europe.

I was nice about Boris Johnson yesterday, but perhaps – only perhaps mind you – I was wrong. Mine is probably an old fashioned view but this sort of puerile squabbling bodes ill for the future – not of Johnson himself but of the country.

Mind you, the alternative is hardly inspiring!

It has been a strange week for me. It was my second week of a house sitting stint at lovely Sheepscombe, but broken on Tuesday when I had to rush down to Plymouth for a very successful elephant talk, then rush back again at crack of dawn on Wednesday. Needless to say, I didn’t get any work done on Wednesday and yesterday wasn’t much better. I must try and churn out a few words today damnit.

Pootling along the M5 motorway, I was struck by the ever increasing number of superfluous signs that have appeared since I first began using that road in earnest eighteen months ago. I would have thought drivers had more than enough to concentrate on while guiding their car along amidst many tons of hurtling metal, but no – the army of pen pushers working for this government seem determined that they must advise the motorist on everything and anything.

Yes I suppose it is vaguely interesting to note that there is to be an Air display somewhere in late July and there might be holdups, but half way through June it is hardly something the average driver needs to know. Then there was a bank of very obvious cameras trained on the motorway itself. Fair enough, they might cause a few reckless souls to slow down momentarily but not these cameras. Below them was yet another sign proclaiming that the cameras were not in use. For God’s sake! Do we need to know that? Why must I take my eyes off the road ahead to read such petty nonsense?!

Then of course there are the motorists themselves. Why is it that when sane and sensible people get behind the wheel of a car, they seem to lose all sense of reality. I have lost track of the number of drivers I have shaken my head at in wonderment as they nip into the slow lane despite there being a queue of lumbering lorries up ahead. Of course it means that seconds later, they have to swerve back into the centre lane causing upcoming vehicles to slow, sometimes alarmingly.

Oh well, I suppose we can all tell stories of lunacy on the roads, so I will leave that – until my next trip at any rate.

At last we are down to two candidates for the vexed but important position of Britain’s prime minister. On the one hand, we have England’s attempt to mirror Donald Trump in Boris Johnson and on the other, the epitome of a somewhat lack lustre English gentleman in Jeremy Hunt. Of the two I think I prefer Johnson. At least he seems human even if he is a buffoon in appearance and manner. And let’s face it, like him or loathe him – there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground – Trump is doing pretty well for America.

What does rather worry me about the British set up is that one or the other of these two pratwinkles will be elected, not by the general public, but by Conservative party members – a steadily diminishing group of people that are a miniscule minority of the population. That surely cannot be right. We are all affected by who leads the country, not just a few people who enjoy getting together for cheap beer and chat in Conservative clubs around the country.

My first week here in Sheepscombe was very wet but for the moment, the rain seems to have moved on. At this time of year, I take the dogs deep into the woods at five in the morning. With sunshine dribbling through the trees and birds a-singing, it is quiet and quite blissful, but for all the soothing beauty of this little valley, I miss the harsh landscape and lousy weather of Dartmoor. The Cotswolds have a sort of chocolate-box prettiness when the sun shines, but the Moor is truly magnificent whatever the weather.

Oh well, I will soon be back there.

As is usually the case, my morning trawl through the newspapers was a depressing exercise. One item did catch my eye though.

It seems that the deputy leader of China is on a visit to Britain at the moment and there was our lugubrious Chancellor of the Exchequer (he rather reminds me of Eyore in Winnie the Pooh but is not so cheery!) hotly demanding that economic ties with China should be strengthened. In another piece there were pictures of that overweight and pompous pratwinkle the Duke of York entertaining the Chinaman at his royal residency.

Why the fawning over this deputy to one of the world’s worst and most destructive dictators? With all the fuss about global warming, carbon footprints and associated nonsense, does nobody blame China for most of the world’s ailments? I certainly do. Rhinos, elephants, lions, tigers and pangolins are all on the verge of extinction and the products associated with their slaughter are ending up in China or neighbouring states. Timber is being harvested in vast amounts wherever forests remain and again, it ends up in China. There is a sudden demand for donkey pelts in China so African donkeys are being slaughtered indiscriminately and nobody says a ruddy word.

Markets throughout Africa are flooded with cheap Chinese imports, putting local manufacturers out of business and putting more families on the breadline. African governments are granted concessions by China and in return are forced to hand over chunks of their own assets to the Chinese. There is even talk at the moment of building golf courses in some of Zimbabwe’s beautiful national parks so that Chinese businessmen can play in wild surroundings. Let’s hope that idea doesn’t come to fruition although I fear it probably will. Let one Chinaman hacking his way around such a course be eaten by lions and you can bet your life there will be a wholesale culling of the big cats.

If just one – surely that is not too much to ask – British politician would suggest standing up to China, he or she would have my instant and whole-hearted support, but not one of them will.

So the fawning will go on, wildlife and rural people will continue to suffer and I will be kept in a permanent state of apoplectic frustration.

Was it the American Comedian of long ago, Shelley Berman who said at the end of his monologue, ‘Life gets tasteless, don’t it?’

I wonder what he would have made of this lot.