Home to York, where I grew up (well, older). There, the Minster stood grandly as places that cost £8 to enter should. At the ancient marketplace, men called Gaz sold multipacks of pegs to women called Denise and the fishmonger told people to cheer up as it might never happen. I walked through the Farmers’ Market, picking up a burly offal-faced dairy specialist named Colin for £107.50 as I passed, pressed on via Whipmawhopmagate (take that, spellchecker you halfwit!) and settled for a pint in The Blue Bell.

The Blue Bell is a pub of magnificence. In room one, men that have known each other since Roman times sip and fail to speak. Their faces are so rigorously Yorkshire that if you look hard enough in their wrinkles you can see tiny Geoffrey Boycotts pushing Wensleydale cheese downhill in a steel bathtub. In room two, baffled tourists, sent there by their Rough Guides, wonder if you really do have to order your poison through a hatch. Of course you do. This is Yorkshire. Full frontal service is frowned upon.

“All was well…then a man wearing a cravat walked in.” ...

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I settled by the front bar and tried to look like my choice of real ale was informed by wisdom and not the shiny picture of a dragon on the hand pump. Accompanying the pint with Scampi Fries beside an open fire that threatened to melt one side of my face, all was well in the world. Then a man wearing a cravat walked in.

Behind a thin beard, I could pick out a chap in his early 50s. His tweed jacket smelt slightly of fetid dog, his conversation of dormant fascism. “Yes,” he would say to anyone who wasn’t listening, “I’ve just been to a civilised country where they actually let you smoke in bars.” Wearily going through the motions like a cruise ship comedian 32 years into the same routine, the barwoman was the unlucky person obliged to reply. “Oh yeah? Where was that then?” “Belgium. That’s a proper country. None of this PC nonsense.” Because, of course, it’s Politically Correct not to want lung cancer via passive smoking, I didn’t say; the Scampi Fries were all gone and it was time to get Colin the farmer home.

Jug faced Cameron
As baby-faced Toby Jug David Cameron hones in on society’s most vulnerable, I’ve been wondering just how far he can go. Each week, there’s a fresh policy to terrorise a new group weaker than the last. Realistically, this can only go on until he levies a stealth tax on pigeons for relying on the food crumbs of hard-working families. There is every chance this is all actually a reality TV show where ‘the government’ push things as far as they possibly can. Expect the impoverished blind to burn their sticks for warmth, the disabled to smelt their wheelchairs to sell for scrap and the obese to sell parts of their flubber for cat food before it gets any better. Then, and only then, can Davina McCall reveal the truth in an altogether shouty manner.

Red Flag for Refs
Given their strike the other week, it’s comforting to imagine what a picket line of Scottish referees would look like. Firstly, they’d all be in garish full kit, occasionally stopping to jokingly book one another for knocking over the stack of foam teacups. Officials would be scrawling tiny slogans into their books, causing cars to drive dangerously close as they strained to read the words ‘Honk if you support our claim to not get shouted at in the face by Neil Lennon as defined by the Human Rights Act 1998’. Around a barrel of fire, Dougie McDonald and Willie Collum would stand rubbing their hands together and occasionally blowing for imaginary free-kicks or sending bypassing pram-pushing mothers to the stands.

I am concerned about the impact on tonight’s Stramash book launch, of course. I’ve already had a number of call-offs and am hoping the SFA have plans to send in a group of mystery foreign guests. But would that make me a scab? Nothing is certain any more. Pass me the fingerless gloves, Dougie.

Madness of lunch at 12
As the deadline for this humble rag lapsed before the recent snow deluge, I can’t really write about it. I can’t write about how, despite nauseatingly in-depth coverage, the world’s media missed the real story: that of my working from home routine being disturbed by the snow-bound presence of Mrs Pen Portraits. I can’t write how she singularly failed to realise that I have my newspaper and banana break at 10.30am and scattered her real-job detritus all over my regular resting perch. Nor can I mention how much her failure to see the genius of Homes Under the Hammer perturbed me. As for the madness of having lunch at 12pm? Bring on the melting, I’d say, if I could. Dan Gray

Info: Stramash, £9.99 etc.