ZELLA COMPTON: Why does John Humphrys still have a national platform?

Is that right Nige? Funny isn’t it, just as we were forgetting all about you, just as you’ve got what you wanted and by doing so launched yourself into thankful obscurity, you need to open it all up again, make yourself somehow relevant and newsworthy and to do that, there it is, a great idea to split the country right down the middle again, pull out the stitches which were barely holding and start the process all over.

And while I’m on the subject, and I can’t believe I am going to say this, I almost felt a bit sorry for Henry Bolton, UKIP’s current leader.

Not because his party is a joke, or irrelevant, or because he has to compete with rent-a-mouth Nigel. Nope, I felt almost sorry for him about the fallout from his girlfriend – the one who sent private messages to someone else with racist content specifically about Megan Markle.

That happened, and that’s really vulgar and demonstrates what a small mind she has, but why was Bolton on Radio Four’s Today programme being asked about his marriage, and whether he was dating the racist prior to his marriage split, and what the status of his marriage was, and whether he should really give up the career for a girlfriend of less than a month? What’s has who he was sleeping with, and when, got to do with leading the irrelevancy party?

This was not the first time in which John Humphrys, the interviewer on Radio Four, has cast himself as holier than thou, with his persistently tiring and essentially boring, point scoring.

Why he still has a national platform is beyond me. It’s painful to the ear, and once or twice I would like to hear an answer from someone he’s interviewing without Humphrys feeling the need to goad and poke and jibe to make himself seem cleverer. Which is all quite ironic as he’s the one who’s passed off his own comments about women and equal pay at the BBC a few days earlier as ‘banter’ and not been picked apart for that.

I’m so tired of the braying. The voices which compete to be louder and louder and fight any point to make themselves seem relevant.

IN PRAISE OF THE OLDER WOMAN

Apparently, President Macron of France wrote a steamy novel about an older woman when he was young.

Brilliantly he then married her, his significantly older teacher. Older woman, younger man is rarely seen without a snide aside.

Madonna, Demi Moore and other stars have had younger lovers and hasn’t the media had a wonderful time with that, always with thinly veiled comments about what the women offer other than themselves for the relationship – a step-up, wealth, that sort of thing.

This time, with Macron’s story framed from the male perspective – because he fancied the pants off her – it’s as if we’re being an offered a sneak peak of the fact that older women are interesting, and clever and attractive. Who knew?

CLIFFHANGER MADE ME THINK OF OUR MORTALITY

The pictures of that plane in Turkey, the one hanging on the side of the cliff, filled me with horror.

Before having children I was quite assured of my own immortality, but now I worry about theirs every time in which we board a flight, and mine, and my husband’s.

It’s not as if we fly a lot, but the last few times we have seemed to have been accompanied by another new storm system, and the ups and downs (literally) of international travel.

Thankfully the people on the flight in Turkey all managed to survive the ups and downs (ha) of the parking.

But, yikes. Even though statistics tells me not to worry, how can I not?